I was just listening to a dialogue on our local NPR station involving experts from “both sides” of the “gun debate”. This was, of course, in response to the President’s speech outlining his latest push to decrease gun violence in America.
The participants were Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor from the UCLA School of Law and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, and Roger Pilon, vice president for Legal Affairs & Director of the Center for Constitutional Law at the Cato Institute. I’ll leave the reader to assess their respective street cred and level of partisanship.
Late in the discussion, Mr. Pilon took exception to the idea that persons with restraining orders or domestic abuse charges levied against them should be denied gun ownership. His point was that restraining orders are too easy to get and therefore people are sucked into the criminal justice system who do not, perhaps, deserve to be. This is the same argument that has been used against the movement to deny persons on terrorist “no-fly” lists access to guns. (Oddly, the answer does not seem to be to fix these two apparently broken systems, but that’s a different issue.)
Mr. Winkler thanked Mr. Pilon for raising the point and noted that domestic partners are responsible for a great many gun homicides in the US, which of course means that the sort of measures the POTUS is proposing could directly affect the number of shootings by domestic partners. Winkler also made the point that the reverse of Pilon’s claim about restraining orders is true; there are also cases in which a richly deserved restraining order has been denied. In many of these, the domestic abuser has succeeded in killing his estranged SO. I read about another of these just two days ago, in fact.
Pilon’s reply was stunning, in part because it fell so neatly into the sort of stereotypical response that he had, up until that point, avoided. It was true, he said, that restraining orders were both too inclusive and too exclusive; they penalized too many innocent people and let off too many guilty ones. Therefore, restraining orders should not be included as a litmus test for gun ownership.
I had not intended to splodey-splode so early in the morning—before I had even prayed, meditated or finished my coffee. But this made me mad. It made me mad not because I’m a Baha’i, or a liberal, or a member of Mothers Demand Action. It made me mad because, as part of my stint as a project manager for a software firm, I have had years of risk analysis experience, which apparently Mr. Pilon and others who make similar arguments have not.
This is simple and it has nothing to do with gun-loving or gun-grabbing, or our duties to each other as human beings, or our religious obligations to each other as set forth in any scripture you care to name, or our political parties or persuasions. It requires only that we look at the risk scenarios and calculate their effects.
CASE 1: Let us assume that a restraining order precludes gun ownership. Under this circumstance, if a person whose behavior has not risen to the level of stalking or abuse is wrongly issued a restraining order, what is the significant outcome? They will be denied the right to keep and bear arms.
Worst case scenario: any guns they own currently will be removed from their possession.
Result: inconvenience to the gun owner, the loss of certain possessions (guns), and temporary forfeiture of their 2nd Amendment rights.
CASE 2: Let us assume that a restraining order does not preclude gun ownership. Under this circumstance, if a person whose behavior is legitimately stalking and abusive is allowed to keep and bear arms, what is the significant outcome? They will continue to harass the victim.
Worst case scenario: they will eventually kill their victim. Domestic abuse statistics show that this scenario plays out far too often and that it is most likely to be accomplished with a gun.
Result: For the gun owner, loss of freedom, along with all possessions, and forfeiture of most constitutional rights, including the 2nd one. For the victim, loss of life.
You do the math.
When the show’s host posed a final question about whether we had the capacity (his word) to have a rational, meaningful conversation about guns and constitutional rights in this country, he passed the baton first to Mr. Pilon who said “no” and launched into an impassioned argument that “what we really need are more guns”. (He literally said those very words.)
He asked listeners to imagine any of the most recent shootings and cited the “fact” that if only one person had had a gun, the death toll would have been much lower. (I have imagined that scenario, by the way, and it’s easy to see ways it could actually result in more deaths, not fewer. For one thing, if you pull a pistol on someone with an AR-15, and they see you’re armed, you are going to be their first target.) Pilon used San Bernardino in his imaginary scenario, omitting the fact (an actual fact, rather than an opinion) that the shooters were both wearing body armor. Even if a “good guy or gal” with a gun had hit them, the likelihood of felling them would have been slim. Indeed, these people sprayed the place with gunfire—chances are being armed would have made no difference.
More to the point, in recent instances in which a good guy with a gun (a GGWAG?) was present, they did NOT use their gun for a variety of reasons: they realized almost too late that the person they were going to shoot was a victim who had just disarmed the shooter (Tucson—and the victim who did that was unarmed), they realized that the physical circumstances made it likely they would strike innocent people (Aurora), or they recognized that the law enforcement officers arriving on the scene had no way to distinguish them from the shooter (Umpqua).
This impassioned call for more guns left Mr. Winkler with no time to offer much of a response, but he raised the hope that we might have the conversation, but first we must deal with what Mr. Pilon had just illustrated: gun rights activists and gun violence activists have conflicting world views. In one world more guns will lead to fewer gun deaths, in the other fewer guns will lead to fewer gun deaths.
Sounds as if more math must be done.
