To me it seems that we haven’t really had an honest debate about gun ownership in this country. One side points to the high level of gun violence and to examples in other countries which support the idea that a reduction in the ownership of certain weapons, and in particular making it harder to buy a gun, would go some way to reducing the frequency and severity of mass killings we saw recently in Virginia Tech. However, in this group there is a sub-group of unknown size that is opposed to anyone owning a handgun and wants to move towards prohibition. On the other side is a group that points fervently to the Second Amendment (always capitalized), treating it as only slightly less fundamental than the tablets carved by Moses. (Having Charlton Heston as President of the NRA conflates the Moses linkage further, presumably deliberately). Behind this is the unspoken acceptance that this kind of atrocity will occur from time to time, and is simply the price one has to pay for having the right to own a handgun, a right available to any wishing to take advantage of it. Since these events cannot be avoided any restriction is simply a concession to the step-by-step prohibitionist in the opposite camp, a group determined to ban all guns.
I am sure that each camp feels that the other is being intellectually dishonest, but also considers that their own basic message is too unpalatable to be used in public, permitting a certain level of disingenuousness.
Certainly the toll on the public from general gun ownership is not comparable, say, to the burden in lives and injuries from private ownership of automobiles. Society has never considered banning car ownership on the grounds that people get killed in significant numbers every year, although perhaps a significant difference is that murder by vehicle is relatively rare compared to death by accident.
There is a general precept that some burdens exist in society and are frequently worth the associated benefit. The problem with gun ownership is that the “benefit” of owning a handgun, whether psychological or practical accrues to the owner or purchaser, whereas the burden is borne by society in general. This is not true of automobile ownership. It is fairly clear that, despite what the NRA says, members of society do not themselves feel greatly comforted by other individuals carrying concealed handguns. The large number of establishments that ban concealed guns from their premises seems to support this. The NRA makes the implausible argument that if this freedom goes, all other freedoms will follow. The Association could make the argument that we cannot always expect the costs and the benefits to be borne by the same segment of society. Some people want to become private pilots, resulting in a certain risk that some small planes will fall out of the sky onto uninvolved passersby. Some people want to be able to have abortions, despite the fact that this is morally repugnant to other members of society. The proportions vary but typically costs and benefits don’t go hand-in-hand. When it comes to broad rights and privileges the payer and the player are often not the same person. The idea that this should be so – the costs and benefits should absolutely impact the same group of people – is a dangerous principle to adopt wholesale, although that doesn’t imply that society cannot adjust the way these costs and benefits play out via reasonable regulation of the activities under discussion. For that reason I think banning automatic and semi-automatic weapons, particularly handguns, while preserving the right of people to buy almost any other firearm, makes sense.
Unfortunately for the sake of progress on this and similar debates, neither party in the gun-control discussion will acknowledge the force of this argument. Each side would probably see it as too risky to advocate, sticking instead to a scorched-earth position that leads nowhere.
