Freedom from Guns

    Some months ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop downtown when a gentleman entered in a rather excitable state.  It turned out that his property had been burglarized and, even as he seemed to almost admire the thief’s brazenness, he complained with understandable bitterness about the rising level of crime.  After mentioning his military service in the Middle East, he demonstrated his advocacy for carrying guns by directing attention to the automatic on his hip, but he was surprised by the cool reception his comments received.  Another customer spoke up and said that, although she agreed with him, many people in town still regarded the possession of firearms in public with some disapproval. The gentleman expressed dismay at this critical attitude and encouraged everyone to arm themselves because he was certain that the plague of violence is “headed this way”.

    Since that day, I have regretted my failure to engage in that conversation.  The fact that a call to arms was the final word still troubles me. I wish that I had said that I was glad that there are still people who disapprove of the profusion of weapons because such disapproval indicates that they recognize, at some level, that the currently dominant attitude towards guns actually constitutes a moral failure.  I would have admitted, of course, that I could not reasonably claim that the turmoil in our communities had not made gun ownership seem necessary to some degree. My point would have been, instead, that such defensive measures should be regretted to the extent that they are necessary because they represent a loss of freedom, and specifically a loss of freedom from guns.

    Now, I expect that this assertion might have been considered outrageous by that gentleman and some of the others in the room, but it is not a matter of mere provocation.  The “loss of freedom from guns”, with the emphasis on the the word “loss”, refers to something important that we once possessed, but no longer have. Therefore, this lost freedom clearly does not correspond to anything like a ban on guns - we’ve never had such a thing.  Instead, my point of reference is the sense of responsibility regarding guns that prevailed when I was a youngster, when we could go to school, church, work, the store and the coffee shop without feeling compelled to “get strapped”.

    I remember sitting on my neighbor’s porch as he showed me the M1 carbine that he carried in France and Germany during World War II.  In that conversation, he passed onto me an understanding of the terrible harm that such weapons are designed to inflict, which clearly troubled him forty years after his service.   He taught me that, even if necessary, the use of deadly force must be regretted and that such regret is a component of the moral commitment that restrains our propensity for violence.  And that lesson applies today. The degree to which we have no choice but to carry weapons for self-defense is actually a measure of the extent to which we, as a people, have allowed our sense of responsibility to one another, along with our concept of freedom, to degrade.

    In other words, the obligation to be armed at practically all times is, like any form of compulsion, a loss of freedom.  And this constraint on liberty is largely due to the break down of the sense of responsibility regarding guns that my neighbor imparted to me.  He was in possession of the means to do harm, but rather than reveling in that capacity and using it to intimidate or worse, he used that weapon, in that moment, on that porch, to give expression to the ethical obligation that he felt toward me and the others in our community.  Precious few adults seem to be giving this kind of guidance directly to today’s youth, let alone acknowledging its importance in their political speech. But if people in general sincerely adopted and expressed this attitude, both publicly and privately, the violence that has us in its grip would be significantly reduced, our freedom to move, study, work and live without fear would be largely secured, and even the pressure to ban firearms altogether would be considerably alleviated.

    These days, however, we focus almost exclusively on the aspect of effectiveness which, in the case of guns, implicitly tends to make the taking of life into a necessity.  Again, I cannot and do not deny the reality of threats which justify the use of deadly force. But the passive acceptance of a threat level that makes the violence that we are experiencing into the “new normal”, which justifies the call for more and more weapons, and which fuels the vulgar fascination with rates of fire and other merely technical factors, constitutes a moral surrender.  This resignation denies the choices we do have by replacing our duty to cultivate trust with a purely external problem that can presumably be managed with measures that simply increase effectiveness. Thus, some are led to not only carry weapons but actually keep them cocked and ready to draw, in spite of the dangers inherent in doing so, in order to minimize the time needed to bring their personal deadliness to bear.  In this way, the expression of moral responsibility, which is ultimately the only thing that can actually prevent the outrages that we are witnessing, is reduced to the aim of getting the drop on the other guy. If the current state of our world is held to be “just the way things are”, if we decide that there is no possibility of intended and collective change, then, already, there is no freedom and there is no hope.

    I feel that I contributed to this loss of freedom with my silence on that day in the coffee shop.  At the very least, I should have apologized to that gentleman because, unlike my neighbor, he has been denied the opportunity to live a life free of threat and fear since returning from his military service.  But, instead, I allowed this defeatist attitude, which leaves us with no option but an ever increasing reliance on the means to kill, to stand unquestioned, unopposed and with the power to transform the meaning of his homecoming into something like a move from one combat zone to another.