GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

An American Obsession

America’s gun obsession is back in the news, thanks to another mass shooting — this time at a public high school in Florida.

The Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland left 17 dead, 14 wounded and a lot of questions. Nikolas Cruz, 19, has been charged. Cruz, a former student at the school, apparently owned an arsenal of weapons and suffered from mental illness.

The mass shooting in Florida returned attention to the national obsession with guns, but also obscures the real issues. The debate has focused on assault-style weapons and military-style guns, on “hardening” potential targets, and mental health.

This is both shortsighted and potentially dangerous. The focus on mental health is likely only to further stigmatize a vulnerable population and keep them from seeking help for fear of losing rights, while also further empowering police to intrude into private matters. For every Cruz out there that law enforcement might miss, there are dozens of others that do not pose a threat, or who might end up as a threat because of a confrontation. I've covered these kinds of mishaps -- a mentally unstable person feels threatened, raises a knife, a gun, a fireplace poker, and the cops have no choice but to shoot. Why ask police to go down that road?

We could “harden targets,” in this case schools, which brings with it serious challenges and questions: How much freedom do we surrender for the sake of safety? What do metal detectors tell students about how they are to navigate American society? We've already done this in a lot of urban high schools, which has altered the relationships among students, staff, the community and law enforcement, militarizing those relationships and perhaps training several generations of students to assume they live under occupation. I understand that the security measures were called for by parents and staff, in most cases, and that they were brought in to address a real problem. But I fear we made those decisions without fully understanding what the trade-offs would be.

We are getting lost in the thicket of competing claims and interests. We have a badly written and confusing gun amendment that was drafted at a time when we relied on militias and when the only guns of note were cumbersome and limited in their power. We don't want to discuss whether the amendment remains relevant in 21st-Century America, and instead we pretend that the founders were somehow all-knowing individuals and that the rules they put in place for an agrarian society in which only a small portion of the population could vote or even counted somehow cannot be changed.

The issues we need to discuss are not whether the various laws being discussed will help, but whether we should repeal the Second Amendment -- I've long said no, but I'm starting to come around to the idea -- and why it is we have such a fetish for firearms in this country. We are awash in guns -- nearly one on average for every person here — and own more firearms than any other nation in the world. We are victimized by gun violence more frequently than most other nations. We have to reverse this.

I'm not calling for confiscation or any kind of ban -- that will not work and doesn't seem fair. But we could mandate gun education and a gun "driver's test" before issuing licenses; we could require gun owners to carry liability insurance if they are to have a license and fine them were they not to carry it. We could require a title for firearms -- like with cars -- and not allow transfer of a firearm without the filing of the title with the state. We could require that stolen guns be reported and that those reports be made a part of a national database so that they can be tracked. The big thing, for me, would be to impose on the gun industry the kind of restraints we impose on others, limiting the kinds of guns they can make and sell. The discussion is about where we should draw the line between what is allowable and what is not, but we’ve hemmed ourselves in with a distorted reading of the Second Amendment that leaves all gun regulation vulnerable to court challenge.

It’s time to be honest about how we got here, so we can find a way out.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; tumblr, Hankkalet.tumblr.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Facebook, facebook.com/Hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites. Support my journalism at https://www.patreon.com/Newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2018

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