If aliens came down to the planet earth, kidnapped a 6 year old child, and put a gun in your hand and said "we will destroy the Earth if you do not kill this 6 year old child", would you do it?
That is one of the ethical dilemma's posed to me during an Ethics class in Virginia Tech. The exercise was used to examine different ethical systems and their limitations. Based on Kant's categorical imperative, you probably wouldn't -- if killing is wrong than it is always wrong in all situations. But if you were a Utilitarian, in which actions must be judged based on what is the best outcome for the most people, you would do it without hesitation, though certainly with a heavy heart.
It is perhaps a crass question to raise today, a mere few days after the tragedy in Newton Connecticut that took the lives of 26 people, 20 of them children only 6 and 7 years old.
Yet isn't that exactly what we are doing? We as a country value our unfettered access to weapons of all kinds so much that we are willing to do nothing to mitigate these kinds of tragedies from happening over and over and over again; only its not the fate of the world that is at stake, but rather our Second Amendment right to bear arms - an amendment written in a very different time when the very best soldiers could fire a mere three poorly aimed rounds a minute.
As I said in the post after the Aurora shootings, I know that we will never ban all guns in this nation, and I don't want to. I know that banning assault weapons won't keep these kinds of things from happening again. I also know that probabilistically the chances it could happen to my daughter in her school are infinitesimally small.
But even if these events are mathematically rare, there is no question that they seem to be happening with a sickening regularity, and I know for damn sure our glorious Second Amendment as it currently stands, our "freedom", is not worth the death of one those innocent little children.
So what can we do? The answer from the right seems to be to just throw more guns at the problem. Could an administrator with an M-4 taken Lanza out? Maybe, if he or she knew what was doing. But by the time the teacher unlocked the weapon, loaded it up, donned her body armor and stormed out into the hall considerable damage would have already been done.
But I'll bite. You want to make it possible for trained teachers or administrators to keep guns on campus? I would rather not live in the old west, but okay. In return, how about banning body armor, or banning 100 round clips, or requiring special permits for buying assault weapons? I am not saying you can't have one, if you really want one (though God knows why anyone would actually need one), but I would rather make it very hard to get one.
I don't want to get rid of the second amendment, but I believe that the nearly unrestricted access to guns we currently have does us no good as a country at large. Closing one's eyes and hiding behind respect for the victims is no answer. The best way to honor those whose live's were tragically and senselessly cut so short is to work towards a society in which this happens less and less, not more and more. Something has to change; doing nothing is not worth the cost.
First let me say that I am no lover of guns. I don't fear them, have respect for them, but I agree that the second amendment is not what it used to be. If anyone could prove to me that getting rid of guns would actually end the violence, I'd be happy with that. However, I haven't yet seen a plan for restricting guns that will actually work. It's extremely difficult to get guns in California, but the gun violence there is through the roof. Only the people (like my dad) who are following the law are jumping through those hoops and certainly he's not going to open fire in a school. The guns are coming up through Mexico, are being acquired via bribes to corrupt cops who have them "locked up" from raids. Being part of my family means we know cops and border patrol and they're frustrated because they have leaks they can't plug. The guns come in, then "somehow" they go right back out onto the street. It's insane how many weapons are already out there, and a systematic destruction of them with net only the legal ones owned by good people in the first few years.
ReplyDeleteEven if I snapped my fingers and every gun on the planet went away, and no one could make another it would not stop the violence in schools. People are adaptive and creative and sick people (mentally sick) will lash out in different ways. A bomb, while harder to rig up, could kill a lot more kids and there are a lot of household chemicals that can be used for a bomb.
To stop school shootings/violence we need better access to mental health services for the families of these hurting boys, it needs to be cheaper, and there needs to not be a stigma. I have sat with a teenager all night to keep her from killing herself because the ER visit for help was too much money and her parents said not to take her. We felt so isolated and at our wits end and Nick we're freaking foster parents! It isn't like we don't know what we're doing. We're trained to deal with troubled kids- not some average single mother who has to leave her depressed child because it's that or be homeless. THAT is crazy. That is not right. If I had to do over again, we'd have taken her to the ER because it was too much for us to handle.
It won't do jack for the gun violence that kills hundreds of kids and other innocent bystanders on the streets because of drugs and gang violence, though. In that situation taking away every gun on the planet would have an immediate effect- but again, they'd get creative and find other ways. And it isn't actually possible to snap my fingers and make every gun go away.
We live in a broken society, with damaged and hurting people, who have almost no moral compass. Families either torn apart for one reason or another, or still together but under so much strain that things aren't working and everyone is paying the price. Until *that* problem is fixed, gun violence is just a drop in the bucket.