We should push for a repeal of the 2nd amendment, a total national ban on firearms, and mandatory buy-back.
The Parkland students organizing the “March for Our Lives” humbled me. They’re pressing for decisive action to protect children from gun violence. My Church, Calvary, will be working along with many other congregations, and our parent body, the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, to offer visiting students logistical support.
I’m grateful for these children’s leadership. I’m ashamed that children must lead the way while adults have procrastinated. I’m hopeful that there’s energy to compel decisive action.
The question is: what sort of action?
A repeal of the 2nd amendment, a total national ban on firearms, and mandatory buy-back.
Other proposed measures: background checks, bans on various weapon types and accessories, gun free zones, police and security screenings on campuses, all seem ill advised and problematic. This is how it looks to me:
Limitations on various types of weapons and accessories will fail to keep pace with the ingenuity of manufacturers. Laws that ban guns of particular specifications will encourage the design of guns with slightly different specifications to circumvent these statutes.
Accessories like extended magazines and bump stocks are easily built or modified from legal components by at-home-enthusiasts with a modicum of skill and an internet connection.
Gun free zones, and individual jurisdictions with strong gun laws, hit up against the hard reality that we have no customs enforcement at state, county, city or neighborhood boundaries. Weapons from jurisdictions with looser statutes flow easily across invisible borders.
Banning particular groups from owning guns tends inevitably toward reinforcing prejudice against these groups, and we usually misjudge those who present real danger. In our current discourse, the mentally ill are targets for gun bans; implicitly reinforcing the stigma that mentally ill individuals are dangerous. In fact, mentally ill individuals do not perpetrate mass shooting in disproportionate numbers. White men perpetrate mass shootings in disproportionate numbers. And while a gun ban targeting white men might be a moral reckoning for the nation, it seems doomed to legislative failure (to say nothing of 14th amendment challenges.)
As many have noted, arming teachers, adding campus police and instituting security checks at schools has the effect of turning classrooms into prisons. The carcel state already pulls children out of their homes. But we plan to expand it where they live now. Given our nation’s history, it is difficult to imagine such actions will not fall with special weight on children of color.
Schemes to reduce the sale of guns fail to contend with one harrowing fact: there is one gun for every woman, man and child in this nation. Internationally, levels of gun ownership correlate with levels of gun deaths. Stopping the flow will not drain this reservoir of potential violence.
What would help?
A repeal of the 2nd amendment, a total ban on firearms, and mandatory buy-back.
It is an extreme measure. But then, the annual shooting deaths of more than 30,000 U.S. residents represent an extreme situation.
Certainly, the right of U.S. citizens to own guns is a sticking point. But it’s worth noting that even as the total numbers of guns owned has increased over the years, the rate of gun ownership continues to drop. According to a recent pew survey, only about a third of all U.S. households own a gun. Within that group, about 5% of the population owns nearly half of all guns. We are sacrificing the lives of many children to protect the right of a very small group to own a very large number of weapons.
Despite what the hagiographers of our founding fathers imply, God did not ordain our Constitution. It is a human contract, and one we have renegotiated in the past. It is, in fact, designed for such renegotiations. Slavery, restricted suffrage and legal second class citizenship were all negotiated away. This seems a moment to return to the table.
We must reckon with the massive volume of weapons available in this country. None of the propositions I see contend with this reality. What would?
A repeal of the 2nd amendment, a total ban on firearms, and mandatory buy-back.
Once we end the flow of weapons by domestic production and import, and begin depleting the existing reservoir of guns, we could use customs controls at our borders and shipping ports to keep them out. Certainly, a black market trade in guns would develop. But then, one exists already. And, if analogies between other legal and black markets hold, this new traffic would pale compared with the current industry.
The cost of executing such a massive buy back is, admittedly, staggering. With roughly 300,000,000 firearms in the U.S., assuming an average buy-back value of $1,000, we could expect to spend 300 billion dollars. We would weigh this against the fact that each year 70,000 U.S. residents survive gunshot wounds, and another 30,000 die from them. The toll in human life and suffering is horrific.
Even in strictly economic terms, the medical costs associated with gunshot survivors total $700 million a year, and funeral preparations for the fallen come to another $300 million. That totals one billion a year, every year. Which is to say nothing the lost economic potential. The average age of those killed by gun deaths is about 30. They have many working years ahead of them. Figuring the individual average median income slightly over $30,000, we see an additional lost economic potential of roughly one billion dollars per year, per year. We would make back the cost of our investment in under two decades. Along the way, we would save six hundred thousand lives.
I believe many of us would support such action. Yet we deem it unreasonable. The current cultural meme of “common sense regulations,” implies the idea of broader, nonsensical regulations. This proposal would certainly fall into that category. But our nation has a long, proud history of good ideas overcoming a label of unreasonableness. We could add this one to the history books:
A repeal of the 2nd amendment, a total ban on firearms, and mandatory buy-back.
The hundred plus year history of Abolition in this country was defined by a debate between those who could broadly be termed moderates and those called radicals. Moderates favored a variety of schemes to promote the gradual decline and dissolution of slavery. Radicals favored immediate manumission. Publicly moderates were deemed “reasonable” while radicals were deemed “unreasonable,” characterizations which continued even after the passage of the 13th amendment.
History, I think, has rendered a verdict in favor of the radicals.
To be clear, I am not advocating for a rejection of half measures. Many of the radical abolitionists (Douglas, Truth, Garrison and even Tubman and Brown) embraced partial victories along the way, for strategic reasons. But they did not compromise in the statement of their goal: immediate abolition. We should do the same:
A repeal of the 2nd amendment, a total ban on firearms, and mandatory buy-back.
I am a terrible negotiator. But it happens my mother-in-law and best friend are exceptional at it. If I’ve learned one thing from them, it’s that you must ask for what you want ideally, if you hope to receive what you can live with.
The repeal of the 2nd amendment may be a fool’s errand. But, if we limit discussion to the narrow realm of “common sense,” regulations, we are unlikely to get anything at all. The Gun lobby in this country has made it clear they will oppose all regulations of any sort. If we attempt to negotiate with a partner who will not budge by meeting them halfway, we will find ourselves creeping by degrees toward nothing.
On March 24th, I will do what I can to make sure students marching on the capitol have a place to sleep, and a meal for the journey. I will walk with them. I intend to follow their lead. I will support their tactics, and applaud any victory they achieve, no matter how partial.
But, should anyone ask me what I want, I will tell them:
A repeal of the 2nd amendment, a total ban on firearms, and mandatory buy-back.
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