I don’t think anybody except conservatives believes to quote my friend Paul Smith in reference to the new law about guns on campus in Texas “thousands of binge-drinking party animal college students will be emboldened to carry a firearm on campus.” I will speak only for myself: What concerns me is not binge-drinking students, although I guarantee there will be incidents. People will die. Wherever there are guns, gun death goes up. What concerns me is the person who most people think quite ordinary and unremarkable who legally owns guns, and who one day just goes out and kills half a dozen people. And I write this right after the less than a week apart massacres in Kalamazoo, Michigan and Hesston, Kansas.
In our current culture authorizing and encouraging the carrying of weapons onto campuses, is an appallingly bad idea. Colleges are locations where young people explore their place in the world, and disputation and debate are a cherished processes, and faculty are by ancient scholarly tradition admonished to be honest. Weapons and that environment do not mix. From the Greek academies onward weapons have not been permitted on campuses except in certain very constrained ways, like fencing clubs, or shooting clubs. Why? Because everyone until the present day has known that the mix of weapons and students is not a good idea.
I do not think the issue is guns per se, however. Other countries have guns. Lots of gun. Yet there is no other developed nation in the world that has the kind of citizen-to-citizen or police-to-citizen gun deaths we see in the U.S. It’s not guns, I think the issue is the culture.
When I was a boy I owned guns, lots of boys I knew owned guns. I got a .22 rifle when I was 11 and took the NRA gun safety class And there were tens of thousands more boys I didn’t know, who also owned guns. We fired them regularly. Most of these were long guns, single shot, or up to 11 cartridges, rifles or shotguns. A much smaller percentage were handguns. Other than sworn officers nobody went around carrying a gun. It would have marked one as a pariah or a criminal should it become known. And coming into your dorm or fraternity or church and shooting it up just wasn’t done. I mean it just wasn’t done. It didn’t happen.
All of that has changed, not because of guns but because of culture; it is the culture which has changed. It has become dominated by the fears and bravado of the Theocratic Right. I think this has happened for two reasons:
First, because by making the military entirely an all-volunteer force — and I had a hand in that — we did not anticipate that what would evolve was a military made up of only 0.4 per cent of the population. Only 2.2 per cent fought in the Gulf Wars. This is a radically different world than the one in which I grew up.
When I was a boy almost every family I knew had fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, and more than a few aunts, sisters, mothers, and cousins who had served in World War I, II, or the Korean War. My great aunt Winnifred was in the first group of nurses to go to France in World War I. My father was a World War II vet, all his brothers were vets, all my mother’s brothers were vets. And that was pretty typical. Almost every family had lost someone, or someone had been wounded. Guns and what they did was part of everyone’s direct and personal experience. Guns were part of American tradition, yes, but they were not political weapons. And they were not something people wanted in their day-to-day lives.
Second, the Second Amendment has been so severely distorted it would be unrecognizable to the Founders. The diaries, correspondence, accounts, records and the documents themselves show that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had something very different in mind.
The Second Amendment was written in the context of an 18th century frontier nation in which Kentucky was uncharted wilderness. A period of time when the standard weapon was the black powder smooth bore single shot musket, a firearm with an effective range of about 10-150 yards that often misfired or didn’t fire at all when the moisture in the air got too high, or it rained. The British army standard called for a fully trained soldier to be able to shoot one round every 15 seconds, and continue for four minutes. The goal was often not the reality. Civilians could take as long as a minute per shot.
Muskets were so inaccurate that the military tactics of the time called for massing bunches of men into blocs firing simultaneously, volleying, in hopes of hitting something — a kind of mass human shotgun. Significantly, the musket was essentially the same weapon whether you were a solider or a frontier farmer.
By British dictate American arms were of a smaller calibre than those of the British army, so less effective, but they were essentially the same. The Musket era single shot black powder pistol that was the other weapon available to citizens. was so inaccurate that people stood still and let other people shoot at them in duels, and thought they might survive.
There were also rifles but they were much rarer and much more expensive. It is the musket the 2nd Amendment is talking about.
The Founders understood that if their new country was to expand, and many of them were deeply involved financially with that expansion, frontier farmers needed to be armed because they were part of a Caucasian invasion forcing the aboriginal people who had been there for thousands of years off their territorial lands. Conflict was frequent, and the Native Americans often had muskets as well.
And finally the Founders knew from personal experience that guns were expensive. A musket cost between $700 and $1200 in modern values, at a time when the non-slave mean income in 1774 was $406. Only the rich owned more than one musket, and maybe a pistol. There were no people in the early American Republic with 50-100-200 weapons in their homes.
The Founders also knew they did not want a standing army. The word army only appears one time in the whole document, and that is the Section 2 sentence about the President being commander-in-chief. Few seem to realize that although the Constitution calls for the Congress to provide and maintain a standing Navy, there is no mention of its Army counterpart. Why? Because their conception of their defense against invasion was what they had just done. Citizen militias that had bought time until an army could be assembled.
Standing armies to the Founders meant families being forced to house them. Many well to do Colonial families provided, or were forced to provide, quarters in their homes for British officers and sometimes enlisted. and then there were the drunken British soldiers in tavern fights, and the molested or, worse, pregnant daughters. Being Occupied did not leave fond memories. But a Navy to protect your trade you had to have. So people had to bear arms because militias were the first line of defense against invasion.
Does one really need to point out that this world bears no resemblance to the modern world of large magazine semi-automatic weapons purchased for a few hundred dollars? Or the $553 billion a year standing armed services on duty around the clock.
Can you imagine Benjamin Franklin being o.k. with 92 people killed by gun fire either by their own hand, or that of another every day. It’s 644 a week, 33,000 a year. Do you think Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Washington, or Madison would find that acceptable?
We are a nation in crisis.
