Gun Violence and Gun Control IV

 

7.  If we are going to place the onus in reducing gun violence or the occurrence of mass shooting incidents on addressing mental illness, then we have to have a clear conception of WHAT MENTAL ILLNESS IS and FROM WHOM WE ARE TRYING TO IMPEDE ACCESS TO FIREARMS.

The Roberts Court opens the door with Heller by making the critical exception, in its reading of an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, regarding regulation of firearms possession by the mentally ill and felons.  Leaving felons aside for the purposes of my argument as a relatively sensible exception (provided we believe that prison systems nominally established with the purpose of rehabilitating criminals will always, invariably, fail to transform, presumably, ingrained predispositions toward criminality in the minds of convicts), the idea that legislatures should be empowered to inhibit access to firearms by the mentally ill deserves some scrutiny.  Specifically, who exactly are we going to be preventing from using guns?  Is our definition of mental illness too broad or too narrow to achieve the goals that we have in mind in prohibiting access?  Just what is it that defines mental illness?

            There seem to be some obvious symptomatic candidates here arising from the genetic inheritance of bio-chemically-induced cognitive abnormalities.  Such instances might include schizophrenics and other individuals relying on the continuous and permanent use of anti-psychotic medications.  It probably makes good sense to prevent the legal purchase or possession of firearms by such individuals if only because their possession of the capacity to inflict lethal physical violence might generate highly unpredictable patterns of use, endangering others and themselves.  Nationally, approximately 2.2 million individuals suffer from clinically diagnosed schizophrenia (see “Schizophrenia Facts and Statistics” at: http://www.schizophrenia.com/szfacts.htm).  Notwithstanding apparent difficulties in diagnosing such conditions, relative to other anxiety-driven mental/emotional conditions, this scale of illness appears susceptible to effective regulatory control, at least with respect to the purchase of firearms.  On the other hand, there are clearly diagnostic issues in the identification of a disease like schizophrenia, relative to chronic depression, bipolar disorder, and other conditions.  Moreover, I simply do not understand the capabilities and social limitations of schizophrenics and individuals with similar mental/emotional conditions in such a way that I could definitively argue that they merit legal restriction from firearm use.  Sadly, I am not a psychiatrist – just a deli clerk and a Marxist political-economist/urbanist.  With my own limitations in mind, permit me to contribute some intellectual speculation on mental illness based on what I think I do understand about bio-chemical signatures/correlations, behavioral symptoms, and socio-environmental inducements that might complicate the discussion if we are contemplating what individuals should be allowed access to firearms and who should not be. 

            Bio-chemically speaking, one thing that interests me a lot is cortisol.  Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, regulating levels of glucose within the bloodstream.  When a “normal” individual begins to experience stress, the adrenal gland increases cortisol production.  The increase both elevates the level of glucose within the bloodstream and reduces the immuno-suppressive capacity of the body, enabling the body to devote an increased quantity of energy to relieve the socio-environmental sources of the stress.  For this reason, cortisol is frequently referred to as the “fight or flight hormone.”  Pleading some degree of ignorance on the chemistry of cortisol, its activation pathways, and its particular effects on organic systems, I am interested in some of the research done within various academic and clinical settings linking cortisol production to stress, particular psychological conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and connections between cortisol levels and levels of other bodily hormones, like testosterone, as bio-chemical precursors to socially aggressive behaviors.                   

            Summarizing the very small subset of studies on cortisol (mostly literature reviews) that I have examined, certain patterns are evident.  First, baseline (basal) cortisol levels in the blood stream and stress-reactive cortisol secretions appear to correlate positively to pro-social, empathetic behavior (see Shirtcliff et al. (2009)).  Conversely, anti-social, callous behavior patterns appear to correlate with lower basal levels of cortisol and lower reactive secretions.  Relating such behavioral patterns to environmental contexts, cortisol secretions, arising from reactivity to stressors, appear to respond both to stressors impacting the individual and to stressors impacting others in close association to the individual (i.e. friends, loved ones – Shirtcliff et al. (2009) cite Sethre-Hofstad et al. (2002), who note enhanced cortisol responses by mothers watching their young children undergo stressful situations).  Additionally, basal cortisol levels and reactive secretions appear to respond over time to extreme/traumatic stress and to chronically stressful conditions in ways that tend to readjust adrenal cortisol production (see Miller et al. (2007)).  As a result, individuals experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, within at least certain studies, display lower levels of basal cortisol and a higher reactive threshold for reactive cortisol secretions.  Finally, some relationship appears to exist between basal cortisol levels and testosterone in the prevalence of aggressive behaviors (see Popma et al. (2007)).  In particular, higher levels of basal cortisol appear to moderate aggressive behaviors linked to high testosterone production. 

            Acknowledging that anyone interpreting my conclusions should exercise a high degree of caution given my lack of any formal education in psychiatry or bio-chemistry, the evidence that I have read seems to suggest that individuals who have experienced either traumatic or chronic stress, resulting in lower basal cortisol levels and higher reactive thresholds for cortisol secretion, with simultaneous high levels of testosterone production, will be both more prone to aggressive and anti-social behavior and significantly less apt to experience empathy (and, thus, remorse for their actions).  Supplementing these insights, normal production of testosterone, measured in nanograms per deciliter in the bloodstream, by post-pubescent males exceeds post-pubescent female production, on average, by at least a factor of ten, and male testosterone levels tend to reach a maximum between ages 16 and 30.  Thus, males, between the ages of 16 and 30, emerging from one or multiple episodes of chronic or traumatic stress, will be likely to combine high levels of testosterone production with lower levels of basal cortisol and an elevated threshold for reactive cortisol secretion.  In fact, evaluating homicide statistics in the U.S. from 1980 to 2008, males constitute 89.5 percent of all offenders and individuals between the ages of 14 and 34 constitute 78.1 percent of all offenders (see Cooper and Smith (2011), at: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf).  Implicitly, without actually breaking out Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) homicide victimization and offender series and performing regression analysis, there would seem to be some statistically significant correlation between gender-specific average patterns in the level of testosterone concentration in the bloodstream and the gender and age-specific prevalence of lethal violence, but the role of cortisol does not emerge here.  If cortisol mediates the socio-behavioral effects of high testosterone production, then the presence of incidents or circumstances that result in the diminution of basal cortisol and the elevation of thresholds for cortisol secretion, specifically in males between the ages of 16 and 30, should send out a red flag for potential danger in granting access to firearms!  So, what sorts of stressful incidents or circumstances might impact cortisol production?

            This is the point where I want to transition from the bio-chemical realm of cortisol and testosterone to territory that I feel at least a little bit more comfortable dealing with as a social scientist: social contexts that might place individuals in a state of emotional duress or inflict long-term/chronic personal anxiety.  For some reason, the mainstream media and various political constituencies, particularly right-wing conservative ones supportive of gun rights and otherwise looking for a good scapegoat, have centered their attention on video games.  The logic here is that playing one of the current generation of violent, bloody video games will generate a traumatizing effect on young minds, stressing and subsequently realigning cortisol production in ways that will diminish the mediating capacity of cortisol in developing minds.  As reasonable as this argument seems, the actual evidence for effects from video games is mixed.  An Iranian research team has recently confronted the question of effects from violent video games on cortisol production in males head-on and concluded that violent games do, in fact, elevate levels of cortisol for an extended period of time, relative to cortisol levels from playing non-violent video games (see Hossini et al. (2011)).  On the other side, a Swedish team performed a research experiment under similar conditions, with a slightly younger (12-15 years rather than 17-19 in the Iranian sampling) and smaller (21 rather than 50) male population sampling for a longer period (2 hours rather than 30 minutes) with comparably designed sampling frequencies for retrieval of salivary cortisol samples and found no significant statistical difference between the effects of violent and non-violent video games on cortisol production (see Ivarsson (2009)).  Given the mixed nature of evidence on the effects of violent video games on cortisol, it seems more likely that the attention that has been given to video games as a “smoking gun” in the social inducement of violent male behavior, in general, and gun violence, in particular, has been a “red herring” – in political rhetoric, it is always more satisfying to find a logically convincing scapegoat for a significant public policy problem than to admit that the problem is much more complex and nuanced to ever be adequately addressed with available statutory tools. 

            Socially speaking, my big concern is not with the effects of video games on young minds.  That is not to say that exposing young men to violent images from video games or movies does not produce potential traumatic stress.  Rather, I am convinced that there are many other social processes, present intermittently but with imposing effects that, in combinations, will expose individuals at various ages to overwhelming levels of stress.  Lets start with a range of processes with which I am much more familiar – those involving the functioning of regional macroeconomies in the present era of economic globalization.  In this respect, I am talking about variability in rates of economic growth, employment, measurements of income inequality (e.g. Gini coefficients), reflecting impacts on individual workers of the increasing openness of regional economies with the rest of the global economy.  How does the turbulence of economic growth, employment, and income in American metropolitan regional economies impose personal stresses on males between the ages of 16 and 30, and how are these stresses negotiated?  Evidence does exist for higher basal cortisol levels among long-term unemployed individuals relative to individuals in stable employment (see Detteborn (2010)), but, to my knowledge, neuroendocrinology researchers have never broached this question in reference to target groups of unemployed young men.  What about chronically unemployed young men in urban communities characterized by significantly below average income levels and higher than average community unemployment rates?  What about young, male college graduates, continuously unemployed or under-employed (relative to average compensation rates for college graduates in their field) for at least one year following graduation, with over, say, $25,000 in educational debt?  The burden of fundamental uncertainty may hover over the heads of hedge fund managers, but it must also, invariably, rest on the minds and provoke unmanageable stress for young men in chronically socially disadvantaged communities and, even, for young men in labor markets that have not offered immediate returns on the promise of higher education. 

            In evaluating the possibilities for social inducement of chronic and traumatic stress on young men, I would be amiss if I did not venture into the realm of love and sexuality.  How does the variability of sexual relations in the lives of young men impact cortisol production?  In particular, how do variations in the frequency and quality of sexual relations (e.g. dating, monogamous long-term sexual relationships with and without fathering, polygamous relations) constitute a source of chronic or traumatic stress for young men?  If, in this regard, testosterone production correlates positively to both the intensity of sexual desire and propensities toward aggressive behavior in males, then sexuality, sexual behavior, and multifarious sexuality-derived sources of stress must constitute a significant part of the equation in considering the regulation of cortisol and its mediating role relative to aggression.  Returning briefly to BJS statistics on homicide from 1980 to 2008, intimates (i.e. spouses, ex-spouses, or boyfriends/girlfriends) are involved in 41.5 percent of homicides in which the victim is female, compared to 16.7 percent of female homicides accountable to other family members, 29.9 percent accountable to other acquaintances, and 11.9 percent to strangers.  At issue here are the bio-chemical effects of jealous, possessive behavior by males and their manifestations in domestic violence against partners (presumably both heterosexual and homosexual). 

            It is not my intention in this section to lay the psychological onus of gun violence entirely on the bio-chemical relationship between cortisol and testosterone.  Rather, my point is that, if we want to emphasize the role of mental illness in incidents like Newtown, Aurora, Virginia Tech, or Columbine and utilize mental illness as a parameter in determining who should and should not have access to firearms, then we need to ask, more broadly, what mental illness is and how social conditions might contribute to the manifestation of mental illnesses through the functioning of physiologically known bio-chemical mechanisms in order to determine who might be at risk for committing violent behavior and, thus, whose access to firearms should be restricted.  If, in this regard, we are not going to just scapegoat schizophrenics or individuals taking anti-psychotic medications (and, further, ask what sort of individuals might benefit from psychiatric treatment but have never actually sought treatment), then we need to seriously look at a much broader range of socio-environmental risk factors (e.g. economic, sexual, cultural, familial) contributing to unmanageable stress, specifically in young males.  Such evaluations, if seriously pursued, would be likely to vastly expand the range of individuals under suspicion for the potential to utilize firearms in the performance of both impulsive and premeditated violent criminal acts. 

            Having made the argument here that our psychiatric/pharmacological definition of mental illness is far too narrow to impact the prevalence of gun violence by restricting access by mentally ill individuals, I am equally confident that, in constitutionally evaluating restrictions on access to firearms by the mentally ill, the Roberts Court and, by recourse to precedent, the federal judiciary, in general, will apply the much more strict psychiatric definition of mental illness that I am rejecting here as too narrow.  As with the scapegoating of video game designers, it is much easier and more satisfying for both conservative politicians and jurists to accept a clinically clear boundary between sane, rational people and the mentally ill, who have to take medications and undergo therapy.  If regulation of firearms access under psychiatric/pharmacological standards is apt to accomplish anything, it may, thus, be expected to reinforce social stigmas associated with emotional disorders and dissuade individuals who might otherwise benefit from anti-depressants or therapy from seeking help.  Therefore, the idea of saving the lives of potential victims in mass shooting incidents, to say nothing of saving the lives of women involved in domestic abuse and murdered by their partners with a gun, by preventing mentally ill individuals from accessing guns seems entirely ludicrous within the present political and constitutional context.                  

             

           

             

                                  

Gun Control and Gun Violence III

6.  Gun violence is a single SPECIES in the larger GENUS of violence that must be situated. 

The considerations in this section of my rant on guns should, also, be pretty basic to a discussion of the problem of guns in the U.S.  The problem prompting legislatures at the state and federal level to waste many hours in discussion of bills that have little prospect of becoming laws or standing up to Constitutional muster is not merely the production, sale, distribution, and possession of firearms, nor is it the mere utilization of firearms against human beings (police officers are sometimes forced to discharge their weapons in their own defense or in defense of the peace, but legislators are not concerned about this use of firearms).  It is a particular species of the use of firearms – the use of firearms by private individuals against other human beings in order to achieve effects that would be construed as illegal.  This variety of gun violence needs to be situated against other types of violence where, in an abstract philosophical sense, I would define violence as any human action intended to either disrupt (offensive/transformative) or reinforce (defensive/reactive) a social status quo.  What I am implying here is that we can construct a taxonomy of violence, where gun violence of different types could be situated in relation to other forms of violence. 

In this regard, there are multiple dimensions to what I characterize as violence.  The first, implied above, involves the relationship of a violent act to the social status quo – whether the act is intended to disrupt the status quo or to defend it (i.e. reacting to disruptive/offensive/transformative violence).  A second dimension involves the physical or non-physical nature of the violence – whether the violence is waged against persons or property or whether it is waged against non-physical institutions.  A third dimension involves the scale – both whether the violence is waged by individuals or by collective bodies/organizations and the geographic dimensions of the violence being performed (i.e. geographical continuity or dispersion, overall geographic size of affected spaces, pathways for transmission of effects).  A fourth dimension involves degrees of intentionality and contemplation – whether a violent act is premeditated and subject to extensive consideration and planning or an impetuous act undertaken within a state of emotional duress, if not a complete accident.  These four dimensions, considered as continua/continuous ranges relative to each dimension, might be enough to consider in theorizing what violence is, but I would go a little further to add that most violent acts are not singular processes, but assemblages/networks, where, when I am talking about a network I mean a collection/complex of processes or agents (human and non-human) that gets assembled together and described as if it was a whole even though it is just a collection of linked up parts.

The way I have conceptualized violence here sets it up as a fundamental philosophical issue that could be theorized over hundreds or thousands of pages as an inescapable part of the human condition – every change in the lives of individuals and the societies in which they live would be violence.  If I went too far with this it would completely overwhelm the rest of my rant on guns!  I want to play with it just a little more, however, because I think that the theme of violence is extremely important as a matter of political change (i.e. political violence/revolution) and, maybe a little bit, because it reveals a little bit more about me, my politics, and what I think about violence.

Reasoning through my dimensions and networks, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq involves a highly complex network of offensive/transformative lethal physical acts against human life and property, deliberately planned on a strategic level but subject to infinitely impetuous/subconscious variation on the most microscopically tactical level (e.g. the actions of a single U.S. Army infantryman or Marine, trained and armed to inflict deadly violence with minimal contemplation, confronting a single armed Mahdi militiaman while his squad tries to clear houses of opposing forces in Sadr City in the aftermath of the initial invasion).  It implicates whole organizations of agents (i.e. the Baath-party regime of Hussein in Iraq with its armed forces and militias against the military forces of a U.S.-led “alliance of the willing”) and is conceived with an offensive/transformative end goal, transforming a political status quo (i.e. “regime change”).  The geography of the invasion and the slew of network pathways involved in it, including not only the space of Iraq, but the space of U.S. and U.K. military bases and command facilities, bases in countries like Kuwait and Bahrain, and all the pathways (air, sea, and virtual/electronic) in between, underscore just the massive scalar dimensions of this assemblage of violence.  

If this constitutes one obvious species of what I regard as violence, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56 constitutes another, less obvious one.  This event constituted a deliberate, planned and executed assemblage of offensive/transformative, non-physical violent acts against property (i.e. the Montgomery city bus system) by a loosely configured collective within the Black community of Montgomery, organized through the Montgomery Improvement Association led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and supported, financially and otherwise, by a wider network of Black communities and other supporters of civil rights across the U.S.  In this regard, any commodity boycott constitutes a violent act because the organization of consumers to avoid purchasing a good or service undermines the capacity of the producer to profit from the sale of the commodity.  Whatever the strategic objectives of a boycott are, the tactical and operational motive is to (violently) damage/destroy the ability of a business to sell its goods and services and, thus, to prevent a business owner and his/her employers from earning a living!  The same could certainly be said about the boycott of imported Lancashire cotton textiles, called by the All-India Congress, under the moral leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, in 1921.  The strategic intent of this action was to revive indigenous Indian production of textiles (e.g. home spun materials), ultimately as a prelude to the demand for Indian independence from British rule, but the operational functioning of the boycott operated as an act of violence against British cotton textile manufacturers and their workers, many of whom ended up unemployed as a result of the boycott. 

Gandhi’s “non-violent” non-cooperation (Satyagraha) inspired Dr. King’s leadership of the Montgomery boycott, but, in both circumstances, I contest the notion this is actually “non-violence.”  They are intentional, planned, collectively executed offensive/transformative violent acts conducted with economic weapons rather than with firearms or bombs.  There are, obviously, many other economic weapons available to organizations seeking to undertake transformative violence.  The sanctions the U.S. and the E.U. have issued against Iran to force it to renounce nuclear development involve the violent use of an economic weapon – violence that might be evident to Iranian civilians trying to obtain particular scarce imported consumption necessities under circumstances in which the country maintains a diminished capacity to earn foreign currency for their purchase through trade.  The imposition of taxes may also be a kind of economic violence.  Thus, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall recognized that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy” (McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819)).  Cigarette taxes, beyond the immediate goals of raising revenue and, hopefully, dissuading nicotine addicts from buying another carton, are, ultimately, oriented toward the goal of destroying an entire industrial supply chain, from tobacco cultivation, through processing and marketing of a legally-sanctioned good.  The legal or effective establishment of a monopoly might, likewise, be seen as an economic weapon in transformative violence.  The British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, which established a legal exemption from export duties for tea sold by the British East India Company in North America, involves just such an act of offensive violence, intended to undercut North American merchants and shippers not exempted from paying taxes on tea to establish a monopoly.  This action provoked the very defensive/reactive violence that has so captivated the contemporary American political right, the Boston Tea Party, and set in train a number of events culminating in the overthrow of British rule in the North American colonies.

Organized labor has always recognized the power of its own range of economic weapons in transformative violence.  Individual strikes as acts of violence against the property of an employer (i.e. depriving him/her of the immediate ability to produce goods or services with existing supplies of labor) regardless of whether there happens to be any defensive/reactive violence against strikers (e.g. bringing in scab workers; arresting strike leaders) and regardless of whether strikers physically damage the property of the employer – the UAW sit-down strikers at the General Motors Fisher Body Plant #1 in Flint, Michigan in 1936-37 actually performed necessary maintenance on the machines that they had forcibly idled while they occupied the facility.  On a more broad level, the idea of general strike has played very heavily on the minds of European leftists for over century.  The French theorist Georges Sorel made the idea of the general strike, embracing all sectors of an economy, the centerpiece of his larger theory of the formative value of transformative violence, arguing that the symbolic value of the general strike (or its mythological appeal) resided in its ability to shake the “working classes” out the embrace of the morally decadent spectacle of bourgeois consumerism – that taking the power at their disposal into their hands to bring the economy to its knees would revive the faith of workers in their own capacity to re-craft society in their image. 

            Violence is basic and fundamental to the human condition – the alternative is the permanent stasis of humanity as a species against a changing environment, implying certain eventual extinction.  Our lives, as individuals and collectively as individual societies and as a species, are continuously changing by our hands.  Every change in the life of an individual or of the society around him/her brought about by human hands is, by definition, an act of violence (good or bad).  If, in this sense, the violent acts that I’ve evaluated here are big, broadly experienced events, violence on a small scale between individuals is still violence, and all violence is subject to the dual rationalities of subjectively-defined moral consequences and instrumental efficiency.  I have already considered, in a previous entry, the instrumentality of firearms.  There are appropriate contexts to use firearms to commit violent acts and there are places where firearms are just not efficient for the acts we are trying to commit.  The same thing can be said for killing technologies in general.  If, for example, we desire “regime change” in, say, Iran, are there more efficient ways to achieve this than utilizing the tools of war?  What about using economic weapons like sanctions to cripple the Ayatollahs?  What about other kinds of economic weapons that confer benefits on the country, rather than exacting costs, in order to transform their behavior and make the regime act in ways that conform to our interests?  What weapons are most likely to get the job that we want done accomplished?

            Then there is the separate question of moral consequences, which is not really a separate question – the perception of moral implications always shapes our conception of what is necessary and/or sufficient to achieve the changes that we are trying to effect.  We are always simultaneously asking whether the ends justify the means while we evaluate what means are best suited to getting the job done.  Context, again, is everything and there are no absolutes, enforceable under every possible context.  Most importantly, every set of moral evaluations on violent acts is subjectively formed from the limited perspectives of the perpetrators, the beneficiaries, the victims, and the relatively impartial observers.            

With all this in mind, as someone who is committed to changing the world in particular ways, where do guns fit in when the ends supported by transformative violent acts happen to be ends that I agree with?  For example, can I categorically rule out the tactics employed by groups like the Weathermen/Weather Underground as morally inconsistent with the sort of transformative vision that I have in mind?  Maybe the bombings and other tactics employed by these radicals were simply instrumentally unsuited/inefficient given the possibilities for radical change available in the 1970s (a vision of revolutionary change too Blanquist – configured on small conspiratorial groups – to conform to my own preferences for democracy).  Under other circumstances, the situation might be different.  Guns and other killing technologies are always only instruments that can be put to use by human beings to commit (good and bad) violent acts.  Satyagraha is also a tool, however, and, under some circumstances, a useful and efficient tool for violent change – it did, after all, help in securing the independence of the world’s second largest country from imperial rule and its American variation helped to secure civil rights for African-Americans in the U.S. South (and, finally, given the numbers of people it requires to work, it can be very democratic)!  Ultimately, I cannot answer the question of where guns fit in a portrait of revolutionary/transformative violence because I cannot identify all of the possible contexts in which guns might be efficient to the ends I am seeking.  That said, could it ever really make sense to take guns completely off the table as a means to achieve change?                

 

                          

Gun Violence and Gun Control II

 

4.  There is NO SUCH THING as a right to bear arms, in the same sense that there is NO SUCH THING as an inalienable right, more generally.                   

This argument addresses an extraordinarily basic issue in political theory, going back in modern times to the likes of Hobbes, Locke, and the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century conflicts formative to the Anglo-American developments of constitutional democracy.  In so many words, I interpret the notion of rights in absolute terms.  At least abstractly, so did Jefferson, if we take the Declaration of Independence at face value.  To suggest that any right is inalienable implies ontologically (i.e. as a matter of universal necessity) that the claimant to such a right can never, under any circumstances or conditions, be denied its exercise, and that any material circumstance that could conceivably vitiate the right at one moment would permanently compromise its status as a right.  If I claim to have an inalienable right to bear arms, then no circumstance, not even my own lack of possession or ownership of a firearm, should prohibit me from claiming my right, even if it means that someone should be legally compelled, at a moment’s notice, to produce a firearm for me to bear in the absence of my ability to purchase one (in the same way that under the Sixth Amendment the public must provide a defendant with legal counsel in cases involving imprisonment if the defendant cannot afford counsel).  This is clearly not what the “right” to bear arms in Second Amendment means, any more than it describes the “right” to free speech in the First Amendment.  In my sense, there is no right to bear arms in the U.S. Constitution, any more than there is a right to free speech, a right to assemble and petition the government, a right to worship the faith of one’s choice, a right to trial by jury of one’s peers, a right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures of one’s person and property by the police, a right to be provided counsel as a defendant in a criminal case, a right to privacy in reproductive decisions, or a right to life for the born or unborn.  Further, neither the U.S. Constitution nor any other pieces of paper constituting the existence of a government of any kind through the collective consent, explicit or implied, of a polity can confer inalienable rights that do not already exist as a matter of absolute and universal necessity.  If we have rights, then it is because we’ve ALWAYS had rights, with or without the existence of a government supposedly put in place to protect them (hint: if they need government protection, then they’re not rights!).

            Contemporary American society is replete with persons and groups demanding the recognition of rights (animal rights, hunters’ rights, rights to clean air, rights to pollute by burning fossil fuels, etc.)  In most cases, such demands are probably deserving of attention as serious matters of public concern for deliberation by democratically elected governments.  On the other hand, we need to place such demands in a perspective divorced from the moral and rhetorical tools associated with their affirmation.  Rights are absolutes in a world where there can be no absolutes.  They demand the certainty that they can always be exercised, but, as numerous contemporary disciples of J.M. Keynes have suggested (see Davidson, 1991), we live in a world of fundamental uncertainty.

            Dispensing with the notion that there could ever be a “right” to bear arms, what exactly is the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution all about and, for that matter, in general, what is the purpose of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights (in my opinion mislabeled!)?  Like any other constitution on earth, the U.S. Constitution of 1789 establishes a government under the particular conditions outlined in its provisions, no more, no less.  It tells the federal government, and especially the Congress, what it can do and what it cannot do (or should not do).  The latter purposes make up the focus of the Bill of Rights (i.e. the first ten amendments).  When the First Amendment says that there will be no law “abridging the freedom of speech,” it places a boundary on the authority of Congress, saying that Congress should never pass laws that obstruct the ability citizens to speak their minds on whatever issue they find pertinent to social life in a free country by whatever means they deem essential to their expression.  When the Second Amendment says that the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” it, likewise, means that Congress should never pass laws to obstruct the possession of firearms.  The Constitution, also, incidentally but purposefully, establishes a set of relationships between the federal government, state governments (e.g. through the Fourteenth Amendment), and citizens. 

The context here is key.  Whether or not the drafters of the Second Amendment called it a right to bear arms, it exists, in its constitutional context, as a liberty/permission to bear arms free of Congressional interference.  These are promises, supported by the (historically usurped!) authority of the federal judiciary in review of statutory law, that Congress will respect the liberty/permission of citizens to undertake certain acts without the interference of the federal government. 

Being promises, they are not absolutes – promises do sometimes get broken when necessity sets in.  During the high tide of McCarthyism in the 1950s, the federal judiciary, under the pressure of public opinion, concluded, in deference to Congress, that freedom of assembly under the First Amendment did not extend to membership in the Communist Party of the United States (see Dennis v. U.S., 341 U.S. 494 (1951)), a conclusion it recanted in 1967 (see U.S. v. Robel, 389 U.S. 258 (1967)).  If, in doing so, the U.S. Supreme Court initially did an injustice to the promise that Congress would not abridge the right of citizens to peaceably assemble in order to redress grievances to their government (and that they would not allow Congress to do so), the same indictment could be leveled against Congress for passing laws like the Smith Act (officially the Alien Registration Act of 1940) in the first place, which set criminal penalties for merely advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.  Founders like Jefferson, who played a very active role in the violent overthrow of the government under whose authority he was born, probably would have seen this as a violation of the very promise that he had put his life on the line to defend!  Lest we think otherwise, we have Jefferson’s comments to William Stephens Smith on Shay’s Rebellion (“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure” (1787)).  

All this said, in theory, no obvious reason exists why Congress, supported by its constitutional authority under its Article I enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce, could not craft legislation barring the sale in interstate commerce of an expansive range of automatic rifles, handguns, and other firearms under a selective set of circumstances of Congress’ determination, such that Congress’ exercise of regulatory authority might not be construed by the federal judiciary as excessively broad.  In actuality, the currently dysfunctional character of Congress (addressed in the previous entry) and the present preference for a liberal interpretation of the Second Amendment by the Roberts Court prevents such a set of circumstances from happening.   

5. The Second Amendment is CURRENTLY subject to a liberal judicial interpretation and applicable, through selective incorporation, against state regulation. 

Approaching the issue of constitutional protection from the opposite direction as the previous point, contemporary Second Amendment jurisprudence favors gun “rights” against interference by both the federal and state governments.  Readings on constitutional provisions like the Second Amendment revolve around judicial precedence, and, in this regard, there is a long history of divergent readings on what the Second Amendment protection of the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” actually means.  For much of U.S. Constitutional history, judges and justices placed an emphasis on the open phrase of the amendment “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” to argue that the amendment specifically resides in the Bill of Rights as a practical feature to enable members of the militia to hone their marksmanship skills during times of peace.  There are good reasons why this might have been the Founders’ intent, given that militias in the American colonies had served as civil defense forces on the frontier from at least the time of the Pequot War in New England (1637-38).  The Supreme Court defended this reading of the Second Amendment in U.S. v. Miller (307 U.S. 174 (1939)), where it declared that ownership or possession of sawed-off shotguns, not being standard military weapons usable by a militia, was not protected under the Second Amendment. 

            If it was the Founders’ intent that the Second Amendment be strictly understood as applying to the regulation of militia (i.e. to the National Guard), then it absolutely makes sense to restrict the application of the Second Amendment to, say, National Guardsmen and Reservists who might be called upon to defend the country.  The problem is that we cannot know exactly what the intent of the Founders’ was, even from what they wrote (to say nothing about differences of opinion between the “Founders”), and even if we could, there are a lot of realities that we live with today that the Founders could never have faced or even understood.  Interpreting and defining what the Constitution says is not a matter of determining what the Founders would have wanted but what is pertinent to the functioning of the federal government (and the state governments) today.  Even if the courts operate on the basis of precedence, moreover, there is no precedence that cannot be overthrown under the right circumstances.  The Constitution is not made of stone – it is a plastic document subject to change. 

            The Roberts Court has been extremely open to changing received meanings of the Second Amendment.  In District of Columbia v. Heller (554 U.S. 570 (2008)), it invalidated a ban on handguns established by Congress for the federal enclave of the District of Columbia on the principle that the Second Amendment includes the right of individuals to keep and bear arms in order to protect their lives and property.  It does make room for laws prohibiting the mentally ill or felons from owning firearms and allows certain conditions concerning, say, concealed weapons.  However, this reading is broad enough to extend the privilege of handgun ownership against almost any legislative challenge at the federal level. 

State laws have always been another matter.  In and of itself, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights does not apply to state governments and never has.  However, the Fourteenth Amendment specifically does apply to the actions of state governments and, as a matter of judicial interpretation, the federal judiciary has selectively incorporated certain protections applicable against the federal government through the Bill of Rights against actions by state governments through the due process clause and other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.  In U.S. v. Cruikshank (92 U.S. 542 (1876)), the Supreme Court ruled that the protections of the Second Amendment did not subsequently apply to the states, through the Fourteenth Amendment.  In the aftermath of Heller, the Roberts Court has thrown out this precedence through McDonald v. Chicago (561 U.S. ___ (2010)), when it ruled that the Second Amendment protections extended to individuals against federal gun control initiatives by Heller were incorporated against state initiatives through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Again, this ruling is sufficiently broad to overthrow just about any gun control initiative by any state or municipality in the U.S.  It opens up an important door for the NRA and any other organization that wants to pick apart the patchwork of gun regulation in the U.S. by appealing convictions under gun laws that will presumably be found unconstitutional if they find their way before either a state or federal appeals court – this is a real bonanza for lawyers on both sides of the gun control debate!  On the other hand, it reinforces a general theme of this extended rant – the legislative road to control gun violence is, if only at the present time, closed to both state legislatures and Congress.  All talk about assault weapons bans, regulations of magazine size, required gun-locks, and requirements of gun-ownership insurance policies is, in all likelihood, a complete waste of time because any or all of these provisions is unlikely to pass Constitutional muster with the Roberts Court.   

 

                                

Gun Violence and Gun Control I

This entry and those that will immediately follow it seek to approach the very current problem of gun violence in a meaningful way.  The whole idea of starting this blog was to develop a site in which I could develop some of my ideas on politics, culture, and (oddly enough as an economist) economics in an open space for the world (or whoever really wanted to take the time to come online and interrogate my thoughts on important subjects).  It should come as little surprise that the horror of the Newtown shooting in December should have brought gun control back onto the national political agenda.  The incident raises a lot of important questions in my mind about the health of the federal system in the U.S., the nature of Constitutional rights, the structural role of firearms in violent acts, the definition of mental illness, and the relevance of community in this era of economic globalization.  Being long-winded, it’s going to take a few entries here to play this out, but if you are willing to read on, then maybe it will be worth it!  As much as this line of thought will probably amount to an extended, and well thought out, political rant, I am going to try to structure all of my points as specific conclusions about the larger issues of gun violence and gun control.

1.  There will be NO legislation supporting gun control passed by this Congress.

This point should be very basic in reference to the current debate over gun violence in the U.S.  Irrespective of particular political issues like gun control, the political process of consensus building and compromise in the federal government is currently, though almost certainly not permanently, BROKEN, in the same way that this process was largely broken from the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction to the turn of the Twentieth Century.  If the American public currently maintains an abysmally low opinion of Congress (averaging 15% approval (!) in 2012 according to Gallup, see Kumar (2013) in the Christian Post: http://www.christianpost.com/news/congress-had-lowest-ever-approval-rating-in-2012-gallup-says-88222/), supported at least to some extent by the inability of Congress to effectively address the federal government’s fiscal problems and aid the recovery of the U.S. economy, no meaningful road to compromise between entrenched Democratic and Republican positions on current issues of importance appears to be forthcoming in this Congress.  Part of the problem here is that, notwithstanding the obvious impact of campaign financing, the composition of Congress paints a relatively faithful representation of regional constituencies.  We are a big, diverse country, made up of people with a lot of different, but geographically concentrated, opinions on how to deal with issues like deficit spending, the role of government in health care, and gun violence, supported and accentuated by recourse to divergent politically sensitive media outlets on TV and the Internet that tell us the news that we want to hear the way that we want to hear it.  If two houses of Congress cannot come to definitive agreements to resolve the nation’s problems in any meaningful way, it is probably because, as a national society, we have no consensus on how to solve those problems and, regionally speaking, we are moving farther away from each other in our conclusions about what is to be done to move the country forward.  If, at other moments in our history, we, as a national society, were somewhat more willing to accept compromises on our partisan positions in the “general interest,” the current political culture, shaped by the media, favors dogmatism.  This topic is too big for the little space that I am consigning to it in this larger rant on guns, but the point is that we will not see any national level legislation addressing gun violence, in large part, because citizens living in Idaho or Kansas tend to have fundamentally different perspectives on what needs to be done to address the recent prevalence of mass shooting incidents from citizens living in Massachusetts or New Jersey, and we elect Congressmen and Senators who reflect the dysfunctional, regionally divergent political landscape of the American polity.  At some point, federal politics will need to arrive at a winner take all scenario, with one party holding both houses of Congress, the White House, and a favorable balance of jurists within the upper levels of the federal judiciary if the country is to move in an uncompromising way in one direction, dragging lots of disempowered partisan losers kicking and screaming along amid threats of secession (and, maybe, finally, a nasty or not-so-nasty national breakup)!  Until then, the alternative will be to muddle along in an unsatisfying political mediocrity, reflected in every Gallup poll that tells us how much less we like Congressmen than either used car salesmen or cockroaches.       

            And then there is the issue of money and the role of lobby groups, principally the National Rifle Association (NRA).  According to the Center for Responsive Politics (http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000082), in 2012, the NRA contributed $1,345,301 between direct campaign contributions and contributions to political action committees, $2,205,000 in lobbying efforts directed at members of Congress, and $19,289,775 in outside spending through Super PACs and other sources of indirect political advocacy.  All this money buys a lot of political support against gun control across both major political parties, even if Republican candidates get the lion’s share of NRA support ($5,712,894 spent in support of Republican candidates compared to $35,076 spent in support of Democratic candidates in 2012).  More generally, considered against the regional background of a highly divided American public, NRA contributions to the political process have intensified the partisan divide, not necessarily between Democrats and Republicans as much as between regions where gun rights enjoy broad public support and regions where gun violence, particularly in cities, generates support for restricted access to firearms.  One ponders what demographic shifts within the American public (i.e. the continued movement of populations from rural environments to metropolitan regions) will mean over the course of the Twenty-First century for the constituencies funding the NRA.  For the time being, the NRA is simply contributing to the overall dysfunctional character of political debate at the federal level.  The organization’s categorical opposition to any measure of gun control legislation and its willingness to enforce this opposition through generous expenditures against candidates with the gall to support even modest measures like an assault weapons’ ban or a waiting period on gun purchases ensures, especially with the current tenuous balance of partisan power in the Senate, that there will be NO gun control measures passed by the 113^th Congress. 

2.  There is NO NEED for MORE gun control legislation anyway. 

This argument has been part and parcel of the case made by the NRA and most Republican politicians at the federal level.  Outside of the Gun Control Act of 1968 and its subsequent amendments and regulations, regulating the sale of firearms by licensed dealers, the structure of federal statutory laws regulating firearms is fairly limited.  It is so limited, in large part, because, outside of sensible regulation on the sale and transportation of firearms across state lines under Congress’ interstate commerce power, the federal government lacks the same constitutional leeway to regulate firearms that individual states possess.  On the other hand, a Byzantine array of legal restrictions on the possession and use of firearms exists on the state and local (municipal/county) levels (see the National directory of state gun laws at http://www.gunlaws.com/links/).  In regard to my state, Massachusetts already possesses an assault weapons’ ban.  Most other states lack such a ban.  Some states license individuals to carry concealed firearms while others do not.  Some cities restrict the use or possession of certain firearms while the suburban municipalities encircling them allow the possession and use of such weapons.  The American political landscape is a patchwork of gun regulations. 

            Recognizing the claims of gun control advocates and, in particular, big city mayors like Michael Bloomberg (New York), Thomas Menino (Boston), and Rahm Emmanuel (Chicago) that a lax federal structure of gun regulation ties the hands of local law enforcement against the capacity of criminal organizations to traffic guns into volatile urban environments from areas with more liberal gun laws, any effort to transform federal gun regulation to secure the needs of local law enforcement would require both a critical engagement with the limits of the Congressional commerce power and a vigorous expansion of federal gun regulatory bureaucracy (e.g. BATF, FBI) in order to develop a more aggressive local regulatory presence by the federal government.  In effect, the arguments advanced by pro-gun control mayors seek to get federal agencies to serve as adjuncts to local police departments in the effort to combat, in particular, drug violence.  If drug trafficking and the associated accumulation of firearms to protect organizational turf against rival organizations and law enforcement authorities are the problems here, then local police clearly need and deserve more support from their states and from the federal government to assist in enforcing existing laws.  In this sense, local governments would be better served by the federal government if the latter coughed up more fiscal resources to update local armories with better weapons and to train specialized police units to directly address drug enforcement and organizational/gang-related issues.  These matters only secondarily relate to federal regulation of firearms and trafficking of weapons across state lines and municipal boundaries. 

            Beyond these concerns, the larger question of the need for new federal regulation of firearms must take into account the relationship between currently proposed regulations and the realities of gun violence in the U.S.  The current initiatives in Congress, supported by the Obama administration through Vice President Biden’s steering, confront the ready availability of “assault weapons” and the number of rounds contained within magazines.  While both of these issues are clearly pertinent in dealing with at least some mass shooting incidents, they do not address the availability of semi-automatic handguns as the predominant means of gun-related fatalities in the U.S.  From 2007 to 2011, FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics consistently indicate that firearm-related murders attributable to handguns constitute around 70 percent of all firearm-related murders (see online UCR “Expanded Homicide Data Table 8 at: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8).  In the end, we have to ask what tangible impact such new laws will have if they do not address the main mechanisms of gun-related deaths.  Notwithstanding the Obama administration’s reasonable contention that the passage of new federal gun control laws would be justified if they contributed to the prevention of even one gun-related fatality, it seems unlikely that measures against assault weapons and expanded magazines would have much tangible impact on gun-related deaths even as they add to the clutter of gun laws nationally and in individual states.   

3.  Fatalities resulting from the Use of Firearms are NOT fatalities arising from other violent means. 

Having acknowledged the basic validity of one frequent argument by the NRA and gun rights supporters in my last conclusion, I want to next address what I consider to be one of the most inane, absurd rhetorical arguments in the cause of gun rights.  Specifically, I am talking about the sometimes knee-jerk reaction and sometimes intellectually developed claim that if the perpetrators of mass shooting incidents had not used a firearm to inflict death on their victims because guns were legally more difficult to obtain, then they would have achieved the same ends with some other instrument of death.  Thus, if the Newtown shooter had not utilized his mother’s legally purchased weapons, then he could have achieved the same murderous results by dousing Sandy Hook Elementary School with gasoline and setting it on fire.  If the Aurora shooter, James Holmes, did not have access to firearms, he could have slaughtered his movie house victims by rigging up a fertilizer bomb, Oklahoma City-style.  Other aspiring mass killers might do their dirty deeds with butcher knives or, perhaps, by crashing airplanes into buildings housing their erstwhile victims. 

            Two criticisms (one general, one particular) need to be addressed here.  First, in general, counterfactuals constitute an obvious and frequently effective rhetorical tool.  I have been educated in a profession (economics) that uses counterfactuals quite effectively in a lot of different circumstances.  For example, using historical data on workers’ compensation, food costs, and the sale price for human chattel, econometric (“cliometric”) analysis can advance counterfactual evidence to argue, definitively, that, contrary to the arguments of early Twentieth-century Southern Confederate apologists, antebellum cotton production with slave labor was not only efficient but extraordinarily profitable for plantation owners and in no danger of going away in the absence of its violent termination (see Fogel and Engerman (1974)).  In certain arguments, the deployment of counterfactual claims very clearly makes good sense and can be highly persuasive.  On the other hand, we need to be very clear that a counterfactual is always a counterfactual.  We can estimate how much it would have cost antebellum slave owners to hire wageworkers to plant and harvest cotton, but in reality the cotton was planted and harvested with slave labor.  In the same way, the Newtown teachers, administrators, and kindergarteners were not killed in an act of arson – they were mowed down with bullets from legally purchased semi-automatic handguns.  The Aurora victims were not blown up with a fertilizer bomb – a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle gunned them down.  Ultimately, the coroner’s reports for all of these mass-shooting incidents must archive the fact that the cause of death to each victim was the result of a gunshot wound. 

            In a more particular sense, our recent history as a species has shown that divergent means are more practical to achieve the murder of other human beings in certain circumstances than others.  Context here is everything.  It matters who (individually or organizationally) is doing the killing and who is being killed.  Numbers are clearly important.  How many people are going to be killed and in what timeframe?  What technologies are available and practical?  Is collateral damage an issue?  There are certain instances when a firearm is ideal.  There are other circumstances when firearms are vastly inefficient.  When confronted with the need to slaughter millions of geographically dispersed Jews during World War II, the German Nazi leadership faced this conundrum and decided that the most efficient means suited to their needs involved the construction of industrial facilities for mass murder.  When faced in 1945 with the uncertain prospect of tens of thousands of Allied deaths from the invasion of Japan, U.S. leadership decided that the nuclear annihilation of two cities would serve to achieve the goal of bringing an enemy nation to sue for peace without conditions.  The issue here concerns instrumental rationality rather than evaluation of moral implications.   

             Interrogating the mass shooting incidents that are now prompting a reconsideration of gun control, we have to ask the same sorts of questions.  What sorts of killing technologies were available to the murderers in these incidents?  Which ones were the most efficient (i.e. readily available, least costly, most effective) to their needs?  Having fired numerous firearms in military service, I am not unfamiliar with the capabilities inherent in semi-automatic rifles and handguns, particularly in the hands of individuals who have been trained to use them.  At army basic training in the 1990s, I was able to utilize an M-16 to engage pop-up “Ivan” targets effectively at 300 yards.  A semi-automatic 9mm pistol is less effective at these longer ranges and better suited to defend close quarters up to, say, 50 yards.  Having worked for over 23 years with butcher knives, I cannot honestly make the claim that I could kill someone with a knife at 25 yards, let alone 300.  On the other hand, knives have their appropriate place as lethal weapons in close quarter combat for people who are comfortable using them as weapons.  There are clear limitations on the use of any killing technology.  These questions are intensely practical and, in their own way, might be subjected to the same sorts of analyses that mainstream Neoclassical economists deploy in talking about any other production process (e.g. the marginal costs of obtaining additional rounds, the long term capital expenditures necessary to transition between different technical compositions of production factors/weaponry along a growth path in order to secure economies of scale – talk about putting a price on people’s lives!). 

            The point here is not to intentionally venture into macabre territory for the joy of speculating into the possible applications of theoretic tools, but to emphasize the absurdity of arguments in support of gun rights that speculate on the potential to substitute some other killing technology in mass shooting incidents.  When gun owners and the NRA seek to divert attention from the obvious circumstance that a gun has been used as a weapon of mass murder, they invariably open a door to instrumental reasoning on the technical means of killing.  This might be forgiven as the knee-jerk reaction of a gun owner when confronted on the issue of gun control.  When gun rights organizations thoughtfully advance claims in public on the availability of alternative means, they deserve to be ridiculed for taking painfully serious events completely out of their proper context.