Like most Americans, I awoke on Monday, October 2nd to the sickening news out of Las Vegas, Nevada. One word that immediately came to mind was shocking, but upon further reflection, I realized that that is not the right word at all because it connotes a sense of surprise. Unfortunately, cold-blooded massacres such as those in Las Vegas, or in Aurora, or in Newtown, or in Columbine are not shocking at all. In today’s America, mass shootings have become tragically mundane. Rather, it would be shocking to go a month, or even a week, without waking up to a mass shooting in America . Take a look at this comprehensive Mass Shooting Tracker, which reveals that for at least the last five years, not a month has gone by without several mass shootings, which are defined as single shooting events that injure or kill three or more individuals. In a “normal” month in today’s America, dozens of people are killed and, on average, one hundred are injured in mass shootings.
A more appropriate word to describe this feeling is insecure, as in unsafe from imminent physical harm. It’s a word that many Americans — those insulated from domestic violence, gang activity, and police brutality — only truly feel after a mass shooting. In many other aspects of daily life, Americans have, been readily willing to relinquish freedoms in order to preserve our basic security. This tradeoff between liberty and safety is a fundamental component of our democracy, yet, it still doesn’t resonate with the large share of Americans who remain diametrically opposed to stricter gun control. After yet another mass shooting, Americans have once again failed to seriously address this tradeoff with regard to the Second Amendment. Are we willing to curtail some our liberties (namely, those to bear arms) in order ensure a higher level of security for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our countrymen?
The simple answer, outside the gun debate, is a resounding affirmative. Benjamin Franklin famously opined that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Nearly any honest American must admit that they disagree with Franklin, unless they oppose airport security, restaurant health codes, and traffic laws. In short, the rivalry between security and liberty is too lopsided to be called a rivalry at all; security consistently wipes the floor with liberty, especially in the face of existential threats. In fact, gun violence is far more serious than oft-cited “existential threats” for which we willingly sacrifice our supposedly precious liberties.
According to the most recent Center for Disease Control statistics, the leading cause of death by injury (meaning non-health related) among 15-44 year-olds is “unintentional injury,” of which the leading cause is motor-vehicle accidents. Immediately following are suicides and homicides, categories dominated by gun violence. On the former threat, the government uses a number of intrusive restrictions to enhance safety: strict permitting and licensing requirements, constantly evolving safety regulations, and myriad traffic laws. Americans readily accept these restrictions on liberty because they acknowledge that they are the most effective way to protect their lives and the lives of others. The quandary is that this line of thinking — if something poses imminent bodily harm to myself and those around me, it’s use should be heavily regulated — has failed to translate to gun violence. About half of the nation still chooses liberty over security — Pew Research found this year that 47 percent of Americans believe it is more important to protect the rights of Americans to own guns than control gun ownership.
The liberty argument is usually grounded in the second amendment — that notorious sentence written in 1789 that has been debated in court (both judicial and public opinion) for decades. The second half of the sentence, inscribed on the NRA headquarters, is the ultimate trump card for gun advocates: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” This clause has come to represent a rigid dogma: the right to gun ownership is so fundamental, so utterly essential, that any restriction is an untenable assault on our basic freedoms as Americans. This is a damaging and misleading dogma; our rights have always been subject to regulation, and gun policy is no different. The government is constantly in the business of, and in fact exists precisely to, restrict our cherished liberties to preserve our shared security. This is why the right to free speech, written much more clearly into the Bill of Rights than the right to gun ownership, is curtailed to disallow speech inciting chaos and violence. The same is true for privacy, press, property, and nearly all of our most cherished rights. The recent epidemic of mass shootings proves that many high-powered firearms provide their owners with an unacceptable capability for destruction. Even second amendment defending legal experts, led by UCLA Professor Eugene Volokh, have argued that the principle of “strict scrutiny” applies to enumerated rights, meaning that they can only be restricted by the least intrusive method to produce a desired result. If the desired result is a reduction in devastating gun violence, then current methods are undoubtedly not intrusive enough.
Of course, intrusive restrictions are only justified if there is a reasonable expectation that they will enhance our security. For stricter gun laws, the data is crystal clear: yes they do. First is the issue of whether stricter gun control decreases gun violence overall. Here’s what we know: higher gun ownership is directly correlated with increased gun violence, and stricter gun control laws are directly correlated with decreased gun violence. This is true both across states in the U.S. and across the developed world. Next is whether owning a gun improves one’s personal safety — a question that should be central to the gun debate since two of every three gun owners say that protection is their primary reason for owning a firearm. Stanford professor John Donohue has spent much of his career researching this question, and he summarizes his findings in a 2015 Op-Ed:
For starters, only the tiniest fraction of victims of violent crime are able to use a gun in their defense. Over the period from 2007-2011, when roughly six million nonfatal violent crimes occurred each year, data from the National Crime Victimization Survey show that the victim did not defend with a gun in 99.2% of these incidents — this in a country with 300 million guns in civilian hands. In fact, a study of 198 cases of unwanted entry into occupied single-family dwellings in Atlanta (not limited to night when the residents were sleeping) found that the invader was twice as likely to obtain the victim’s gun than to have the victim use a firearm in self-defense.
This is a damning and powerful indictment against the necessity of owning a gun for protection: gun-owning Americans almost never successfully defend themselves against violent crime with their gun. Far more often, their gun is directly used against them by an attacker. One extensive study from 1998 concluded that “for every time a gun in the home was involved in a self-protection homicide, there is 1.3 unintentional deaths, 4.5 criminal homicides, and 37 firearm suicides.” In simple terms, if an American has a gun in their household, it is nearly forty times more likely to be an instrument of death to someone in the household than to be an instrument of protection.
Despite this overwhelming pattern of facts, nearly half the nation chooses to interpret the issue differently. The fact that Americans don’t view the gun issue as a liberty versus security trade off must lie in the framing. Gun control shouldn’t be about taking something away from Americans, it should be about giving them what they want most in the world: physical safety for them and their loved ones. Instead of lamenting those who “cling to guns,” policymakers should focus on the security side of the fence, where the grass is greener: “here’s how we can make you safer.”
President Trump called the Vegas attack “pure evil,” but this lofty rhetoric confuses gun violence with something unstoppable, like a hurricane, or something complex and endemic, like gang violence, police brutality, or terrorism. Mass shootings may be endemic, but they are not unstoppable or all that complex — Stephen Paddock could not have rapidly fired hundreds of rounds from hundreds of yards away without multiple high-powered weapons, unreasonable amounts of ammunition, and special conversion instruments that turn rifles into machine guns. Justifying ownership to deter these types of senseless tragedies is maliciously misleading — no one could defend themselves from an executioner perched 400 yards away in a 32nd floor window. Yet, as of this writing, gun sales are once again spiking in the wake of a national gun tragedy — specifically, the conversion instruments that turn hunting rifles into automatic weapons. Something is desperately, woefully wrong with a country where people respond to a violent attack by acquiring the violent attacker’s weapon of choice.
At risk of sounding over-dramatic, it is hard to conclude that the gun issue is anything other than a vermillion-colored stain on the American experiment. It is leaving the American project in tatters, stretching and testing the withering tensile strength of our social fabric. Preserving fundamental assumptions of safety was the Lockean justification for our system of government to exist. If the function of the state is to constrain individual action so as to promote the general welfare, shouldn’t one of its first priorities be disallowing cheap and easy access to stealing other citizens’ most important right? If we can’t even fix this, then what is it all for?
In an Atlantic article immediately following the attack, James Fallows explains this with astoundingly tragic beauty: “No other society allows the massacres to keep happening. Everyone around the world knows this about the United States. It is the worst aspect of the American national identity.” He’s right — other advanced societies have figured this stubborn thing out. An Onion headline that resurfaces after every mass shooting proves that satire can be the most penetrating truth: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The pain of waking up to a mass shooting, of rolling over in bed to read notifications of death, destruction and injury, is crushing and immediate — not again, not today. It is a pain that all Americans know, and a pain that my generation of Americans has never not known. We must make it a defining issue, because only then can it cease to be a defining problem. Guns are one of the gravest existential threats any American faces, and like any threat, we must be ready and willing to sacrifice some of our freedoms to protect it. Benjamin Franklin was wrong; Americans deserve both liberty and security, but we cannot prioritize the former at expense of the latter. As we wake up to yet another national tragedy, it is easy to believe that we have neither.
Micah Cash is a sophomore and staff writer for Stanford Politics.