Time to Reexamine the Second Amendment

In early July 2017 in Helena, MT, 23-year-old Katie Spencer was shot in the head by her boyfriend during an argument and died. In the spring of 2015, a teenager in Billings, MT, fatally shot his friend through a window, apparently mistaking him for a burglar. On May 16, 2017, Mason Moore, a deputy for Montana’s Broadwater County, was killed in a high-speed shootout by two men who had spent the previous evening using their guns to terrorize their family at a campground. Given the prominence of these stories and many like them, it surely surprises nobody that Americans are more likely than the citizens of any other nation to be murdered by someone wielding a gun. What some may not realize is the tragedy hidden in a broader statistic: most gunshot deaths in the United States are suicides.

Growing up in a libertarian state, I absorbed a pro-gun philosophy. Many people I know have always derived the majority of their protein from animals they have killed themselves, something that I struggled to convey to my urban peers when I moved east for college and to my foreign friends while living abroad. Even when they could accept that feeding your family might be an acceptable use for firearms, they wrestled with the idea that protection should extend beyond hunting rifles to handguns. The decisive, two-pronged counter-argument, I always thought, was that an armed populace could both serve as a deterrent to occupation by a hostile foreign power and act as a check against a tyrannical government.

However, while that may have held true at the time the second amendment was written, when unwieldy cannons stood supreme as the most powerful weapons, modern technology calls the logic into question. As a (Russian) friend pointed out during one recent discussion, citizens with handguns – or even AK-47s – stand no chance against military forces with nuclear weapons and chemical bombs. While some may argue that this is a reason to expand the interpretation of the second amendment and allow private ownership of vast arsenals, that is impractical and defeats the purpose of delegating national defense to the government in the first place. As a pure public good, it is one of the few things that even limited-government aficionados agree is an appropriate task for a central authority.

Cost-benefit arguments against the deterrent effect of a well-armed citizenry have tended to focus on the number of lives lost to gun violence. They point out that the probability of an occupation or dictatorship is slim, and, with certainty, many people will die from gunshot wounds. Additionally, although criminals will usually find ways to obtain guns, it doesn’t necessarily follow that legal gun ownership is an effective response. For instance, a study often cited by gun rights activists because it shows that legal gun owners don’t use their weapons nefariously also indicates that straw purchases are a likely source of guns used in crimes. While some might suggest this demonstrates the futility of gun control, it could also be taken as an argument for an entirely new take on the second amendment. In a parallel vein, in Montana, where the suicide rate consistently ranks as one of the highest in the United States, guns stored in the home are used for suicide 40 times more than for self-protection. It is not clear at all that the lives lost because gun ownership is easy are offset by a small possibility of occupation by an invading force or our own leaders.

Drugs, alcohol and mental illness are complicit in many gun-related deaths, including suicides, but we have shown ourselves as a society to be remarkably resistant to addressing those needs: proposed cuts to Medicaid in the most recent US budget would leave many vulnerable people without addiction treatment or coverage for mental health medications. Luckily, some solutions are – or should be – easy, since simply tightening handgun laws has been shown to reduce suicide rates. In states that instituted mandatory waiting periods and universal background checks in 2013 and 2014, suicides declined, even as they rose across the rest of the country.

Stricter gun laws won’t save everyone. As opponents of gun control point out, most female suicides involve poison, not guns. (The corollary, of course, is that suicide by poison is not always successful, while suicide by gun always is.) In addition, shooting ranges are unlikely to disappear anytime soon: in March 2017, a man walked into a popular range in Billings, MT, rented a gun, and killed himself. While any form of gun control evokes hysterical responses from many who are pro-gun, it seems irresponsible to ignore ways that we can uphold people’s perceived “right to bear arms” while also refusing to make it easy for people to kill themselves or others.

The libertarian in me who enjoys 9mm target practice balks at curtailed individual choice, but the role of any community should be to balance freedom and life. Is one person’s freedom worth another’s life? When our soldiers fight, they are struggling for our collective liberty – one life for the freedom of a nation. Some argue that this freedom includes the right to own guns, but it isn’t clear that the original reasoning for that right still makes sense. In the modern world, it seems we are upholding the rights of a few who want guns against the lives of many to whom we have denied help and who turn their guns on themselves. We have failed those people, and the least we can do for them is to have an honest conversation about all the factors that contribute to an imbalance between freedom and life in our communities.