The American Right and Left on Gun Violence

From Aurora (CO) to Sandy Hook to Charleston to Chicago, violent gun tragedies in America, justifiably, have grabbed headline attention over the last few years. Activists decry the violence, the media spills much ink, and public officials engage in partisan grandstanding, but not a whole lot has been accomplished to solve the ongoing problem of homicide via guns. The violence continues, and thousands of innocent people are killed annually.

What do we make of all this? For sure, there’s a lot of blame to go around. One major failure is the inability of liberals and conservatives in Washington to bridge their differences and put forward effective policies. A major factor here is the ideological differences between both sides. This is what I’d like to focus on in this post. To explore these differences, let’s take a quick look at four salient gun debates that liberals and conservatives are currently engaged in. It’s the sharp disagreements on these debates, in part, effectively hamper much problem solving on guns from Washington.  

#Debate 1

Conservatives are right that more laws aren’t a panacea, as they don’t completely eliminate gun violence. Bureaucrats and their underlings make mistakes, there are administrative screw-ups and legal loopholes abound. For example, people who should be excluded from buying guns via background checks frequently aren’t prevented from doing so. They don’t show up as mental health risks, felons, etc.

But liberals are right, too, in that more laws can help reduce gun violence. Well-written and enforced laws can make it more difficult for miscreants and the troubled to gain access to weapons. It takes the White House, Congress, States, the FBI, police, judges, and so on, to get on the same page to craft and execute and monitor good legislation and to capture and punish those who violate the law. True, but that’s something that’s much easier said than done, however—as conservatives like to point out.

#Debate 2

Conservatives emphasize personal responsibility. Do the crime, do the time. They support strong, strict prison sentences for gun violence, illegal possession of weapons, etc. And they also exhort people who know and are in contact with gun violators and criminals to play their part by contacting police and mental health professionals. It’s their job as moral citizens.

Liberals say that harsh criminal sentences haven’t been an effective deterrent mechanism to prevent gun violence. Liberals would agree that 3^rd parties could do a better job in being a part of the solution, but believe that there can be limits to their effectiveness and willingness to do so. Gun criminals often hang around with people who themselves aren’t great citizens, not particularly responsible, and aren’t inclined to act as community watchdogs. Moreover, in some cases, tattling could mean that people implicate themselves in crimes. So the incentive to participate isn’t always there.

#Debate 3

Conservatives argue that gun rights are enshrined in the second amendment. They are a necessary hedge against a future tyrannical American government. Additionally, conservatives argue that the right to self-defense is a constitutionally protected right and has been upheld repeatedly, even expanded, in legal cases. Hence, any attempt to sharply roll back the freedom of Americans to acquire guns violate the Constitution and should be prohibited. Simple as that.

Most liberals are willing to bend on the primacy of the 2^nd amendment. They think the problem of gun rights is serious enough to create laws that circumscribe gun rights. Besides, the 2^nd amendment was written at a time in which the American republic was nascent and fragile, and when their experience with harsh British rule was fresh on their minds. Times have significantly changed, say liberals.

Moreover, what can citizens really do by hoarding weapons individually or collectively? The asymmetry in power between the government and private citizens has only widened over time, particularly as technology has improved. After all, Washington, backed by the military, has state-of-the-art weapons and defense systems, and, of course, nuclear power. Americans can’t compete with all that.

Debate #4

And then we have the data. They mean different things to different people. Let’s look at just a small sample to illustrate my point.

As liberals point out, the US is an increasingly militarized society—its military oversees the largest defense budget in the world, US police forces are rapidly arming themselves to the teeth with military-style weaponry, and US citizens are awash in guns. American citizens are speculated to hold about 300 million firearms, or about .9 per person. That per capita rate is 50 percent higher than the next most armed country, which is Yemen, a war torn basket-case. The US is much, much more prone to gun violence compared to other modern industrialized democracies. In fact, on gun violence, the US looks more like Mexico than, say, Britain or France. And mass shootings are on the upswing—though still rare.

But conservatives, meantime, are correct in highlighting the fact that gun violence is actually down since the peak violent days of the early 1990s. And while the US has recently averaged about 33,500 gun deaths per year (from 2000-2010), a little under two-thirds of those fatalities have been suicides, not homicides. Moreover, data indicate that defensive uses of weapons occur just as often as offensive uses of weapons, and that such uses of weapons are frequently effective. According to Slate.com, “studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was 'used' by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

So as we can see, both sides do make good points. But partisan mudslinging, while appealing for political reasons, misses much of the story of gun violence, as neither side has captured the full truth of what’s going on here. Unfortunately, bridging the ideological differences has been and will continue to be tough.

Entrenched partisan politics—interest group politics, the role of money in elections, and the voice of the hardliners on both the right and left in America—make compromise extremely difficult for those officials in Washington who might be willing to bend on their ideological positions. And even in the face of especially horrific events like the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school murders, which claimed the lives of 20 children and 6 staff members (plus the gunman’s mother and the shooter himself), the right and left in America really couldn’t find much common ground—at least not enough to begin to work toward remedying the problem of gun violence.