The students from that high school have shed light on the fears that students across the nation have – that they are vulnerable to the unspeakable violence that single armed assailants can do to students – or movie and concert-goers or religious groups.
Will the students be successful in moving policymakers to establish protective measures?
Well the proposals offered are many and varied. The gun lobby will repeat the mantra that any activity that restricts private ownership and use of firearms is unconstitutional, citing the Constitutional reference that “the right … to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Interestingly, the opening clause of the amendment is seldom mentioned. Technically, it’s called a prefratory and it serves to state the “whys” and “hows” of the guiding principle.
The prefatory tells us that the purpose of the amendment was to secure our fledgling free nation. And this militia, comprising citizen-soldiers in waiting, would be called upon to serve side-by-side with the nation’s modest standing army, under the direction of the Commander-in-Chief.
But the experience with a militia during the Revolutionary War was far from exemplary. Officers were frustrated with men who would abandon their posts to take care of tasks back home in their businesses and farms. And many were not disciplined to take orders and respond quickly.
So the Founding Fathers stated in the amendment that the militia would be “well regulated.”
Today militias look far different. Individual weapons have more than a hundred times more firepower than they did in revolutionary times. And with the best equipped military in the world, there is little need for citizen-soldiers ready to race to the front with home-owned flint-lock long guns.
Today’s militia are trained by the regular-army. They are the National Guards and military reserves who can – and often do –supplement or even replace our standing military units. And they are not privately equipped with weaponry. They are G.I.
So if the guaranteeing of gun ownership is not assured to provide “the security of a free state,” than toward what should gun ownership be “well regulated?”
Well, the students protesting show there is a clear and present danger. According to Politifact, more civilian Americans were killed by domestic firearms from 1968 to 2015 than were killed in wars the nation fought during that time. An average of over 11,000 citizens are killed annually by firearms. And the Gallup poll people – before the Florida massacre — found 39% of Americans feared being a mass killing victim.
And this fear has been expressed eloquently first by the survivors of the Parkland school mass murder, and then by thousands of their fellow students around the nation.
What if we had the luxury of “reregulating” our national gun policy from scratch to address this threat to our security?
I think we would recognize that a High Noon, individually armed, good guy vs. bad guy model was not a workable one. Those committed to creating havoc will always have the drop on innocents. If most of those concert-goers attacked in Las Vegas were armed, dozens would still have been killed before they realized what was happening.
Screening for mentally disabled would be just tinkering around the edges. Australia and England and other developed nations have a far lower rate of killing by firearms, but there is no evidence that they have lower rates of mental disability than we do.
But what those other nations seem to have realized is that the more firearms available to citizens the greater the likelihood that single and mass killings occur. To them, outside of hunters and others who work in natural settings, such as farmers, who generally are law-abiding and prudent, people have little personal need for weapons.
And why are we so enamored of assault weapons, which have no other purpose than to kill people and are usually central to crowd killings? What would be lost if they were outlawed, as they are in most modern nations? Maybe the fear our American students have been crying out about would be lost.
These young protesters are outspoken and eloquent in their pleas for common sense, but their opposition is formidable. The gun lobby is funded well by the firearm manufacturers. They underwrite the NRA, determined to frustrate actions which might cut the sales of weapons. The profit motive can be a powerful force.