“It’s very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It’s easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.”

Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

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“If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”

Dalai Lama XIV

Read part 1 “Anger Management and the Losing Battle over Gun Control”

Gun Country
With over 300 million firearms in circulation, significantly higher rates of gun related death and injury than any other developed nation, and a cultural connection to gun ownership that predates the American Revolution, a more hotly contested issue than gun control is hard to name in the United States. While few disagree that gun violence is a real threat to public safety, the responses are fundamentally opposed. Those who favor gun control contend that the problem stems primarily from our abundance of and ease of access to guns. Opposition to gun control is mostly predicated on the ideas that our abundance of guns is a foregone conclusion and that a good actor with a gun is the best response to a bad actor with a one. Not only do the proposed solutions differ, both sides tend to believe that the other’s solution will actually exacerbate the problem and make us less safe. Neither position is completely irrational and neither group is cavalier about the deadly consequences of gun violence. They just have very different ideas about how to address the problem.

Obvious solution is not obvious.
The debate is poorly served by phrases like ‘common sense gun control’ that imply obvious solutions to a complex problem and appear dismissive of the political and logistical impediments to effective regulation, nor helpful are platitudes like ‘guns save lives’ that disregard the implied threat the live-saving guns are supposedly defending against. It is a fact that a gun is a deadly threat in the wrong hands. It is equally a fact that, in the right hands, a gun is the best available defense. Distinguishing right from wrong hands is not straightforward.
If there were no guns, and bad actors could not acquire any, then there would seemingly be no defensive need for guns. However there are tremendous, likely insurmountable, obstacles to anything approaching complete elimination of the gun threat. Any attempt at confiscation, even if it could overcome political opposition and constitutional challenge, would meet severe, almost certainly violent, resistance from otherwise law abiding, non violent citizens. The rank and file of law enforcement and the military tend to favor the right to bear arms and would consequently be reluctant or unwilling to enforce confiscation. Voluntary surrender would be less dangerous to implement but also less effective in reduction of gun supply. In either scenario, those most likely to be left in possession of guns, as gun control opponents like to point out, are the least law abiding (bad actors), while the most law abiding (good actors) would be disarmed.

Less bad guys and bad guns
Most gun control advocates do recognize the impossibility of anything approaching full scale confiscation. Instead, the stated aim is to keep guns away from those mostly likely to cause harm and restrict civilian access to the types of guns with the greatest killing potential, but, while not as contentious as an outright ban on all gun ownership, even these moderate goals face significant political opposition.
Why would anyone oppose stronger measures to keep guns out of the wrong hands? While difficult to gauge the potential effectiveness of such measures, it is certain that, with so many already in circulation, guns cannot be entirely kept out of the wrong hands, but surely more universal and stringent checks on firearm and ammunition purchases would result in some reduction in gun related injury and mortality. Why should we forgo sensible measures just because a perfect success rate is unattainable?

Why is getting to have a gun so damn important?
To understand the general aversion to restrictions on ownership, it is essential to understand the reasons for wanting to own guns. Guns are a part of American culture and history, and many feel a strong cultural connection to guns. In many parts of the country, shooting and hunting are a part of family and community life, learned and enjoyed from an early age. For such people, a firearm is something to enjoy and rely on rather than fear.
While hunting is still a means of procuring meat for many, the primary reason for hunting today is sport, not necessity. The emotional attachment to guns that many Americans have is understandable for those reared in gun culture, and most such individuals pose no threat to society, but deprivation of what amounts to a deadly toy is a meager cost for the benefit of even one averted mass killing. However, the reasons for gun ownership are not limited to sport.
As already mentioned, guns are effective defensive tools. Even someone trained in unarmed combat is at a significant disadvantage defending against an aggressor armed with a gun. For a defender at a physical disadvantage, a gun is a force equalizer, regardless of whether an attacker has a gun or just disproportionate strength or martial skill. In debates over reasonable licensing requirements for guns comparisons are often made to things like operating a car or broadcasting over a radio, but the ability to adequately defend oneself or one’s family against violent attack isn’t analogous to driving privilege. Loss of the latter might pose a regular and severe inconvenience, but the former can be a matter of survival. While the odds of needing to resort to armed self defense are low for most Americans, they are not trivial, and the cost of one instance of failure can be fatal.

Statistically likely to be a statistic
Gun owners are statistically many times more likely to be shot than non-gun owners, but everyone wants to believe that they are the statistical anomaly, and many in fact are not reflective of the level of ineptitude of the general population. There are plenty of gun owners who live their whole lives without any sort of firearm related mishap, much less a deadly one, regardless of whether they ever employ a gun defensively, not because they were lucky to escape some random statistical probability but because responsible observance of firearm safety prevented accidents from occuring. People are less likely to fear accidents that are within their control to prevent than they are to fear exogenous threats. It is statistically improbable that any individual will be violently killed, yet most of us still worry about violence directly impacting us, hence the debate over gun control. For those who have no experience or interest in guns and little to no expectation of being willing or able to defend themselves, the only reasonable option is to reduce the likelihood of violent threats materializing, but, for those who are comfortable using guns and with the prospect of defending themselves against someone with deadly intent, the argument that they shouldn’t be allowed the most effective means of defense against a mortal threat because statistically the average person is more likely to hurt themselves or someone else by mistake is not a persuasive one.
Despite the public safety costs of firearm abundance, it is not demonstrable that an individual has no need of self defense or that guns are not an effective means of defense, so, for those who want the ability to possess a gun, the possibility of being wrongfully denied is not simply an inconvenience, like not being granted a driver’s license. This is not to suggest that background checks are not a reasonable measure to reduce gun violence, but to point out that it is not unreasonable to be wary of impediments to possessing the means of self defense.

Why people-killing guns though?
Fair enough, but surely no one requires a military style assault weapon for sport or self defense. There’s no reason for an AR-15 other than playing army man or shooting up a school, right? Not necessarily.
First, let’s address the AR-15, or, more broadly, the AR platform. Yes, it was the rifle upon which the M-16, adopted by the US infantry during the Vietnam War, was based, and the AR-15 sold today is basically the civilian M-4, the current service rifle for the US military, without fully automatic firing capability. Besides looking like a military weapon, what makes it different from any other semi-automatic rifle? Magazine capacity, which determines the number of rounds that can be fired without reloading, is often cited as a feature only useful for killing lots of people, but any magazine-fed semi-automatic weapon can accept a longer magazine. All of the other features of the AR platform rifles that make them excellent for battle use translate well into legitimate civilian uses for rifles. They are like the Toyota pickup trucks of rifles–rugged, dependable, easily maintained, and versatile. Their modular design also makes them easy to repair or customize, and there are a wealth of aftermarket parts and accessories. They are exceptionally well crafted tools, and both good and bad actors gravitate towards the best suited tools. The AR-15 is chambered for the same round as the M-4 and is insufficient for deer or larger game, but many hunters use it for varmint hunting. The AR-10 fires a heavier round that is well suited to larger game.
What many who advocate for banning military-looking weapons fail to realize is that most of what they consider to be ‘hunting’ rifles look the way they do not because the style is more functionally appropriate to hunting but because it is just the older, traditional design of rifles in general, which, throughout the history of rifles, have mostly been used interchangeably for both military and hunting applications. The older M-1 service rifle looks like what most people picture when envisioning a hunting rifle. Battle rifles are not designed to look ‘cool’; they are designed to be light, rugged, and easy to shoot under field conditions. Military style weapons are designed strictly for function, whereas ‘hunting’ rifles are often designed with cosmetic embellishment. That’s not to say that you can’t hunt just fine with a non-military styled rifle, or that military style weapons don’t have a ‘cool’ factor that increases their appeal to some buyers, but it does mean that the ‘there’s no reason for a civilian to own one’ argument is not based in an understanding of the functional advantages of the rifles used by military forces.

You and what militia?
This is a good time to mention that no high powered rifle is suited for home defense. Rifles are designed to shoot long distances and penetrate. They go right through walls. Home defense requires low velocity weapons like pistols or shotguns. However, there are still reasons beyond sport for owning a battle rifle. Besides being perfectly well suited to hunting, battle rifles are good for, well, battles. A lot of staunch 2nd Amendment fundamentalists point to the need for the civilian population to be armed as a deterrent against government tyranny and overreach. There are lots of counter arguments to this, most of them delivered with mocking sarcasm, typically to the effect that no armed civilian or ragtag militia is any match for the modern US military. That the military has the civilians outgunned is indisputable. However, insurgencies with small arms and guerilla tactics have frustrated superior forces throughout history and continue to do so around the world today, to degrees that completely or mostly unarmed forces never could. A civilian force would be a distant underdog to the military, but a crushing victory by the military, forced to fight among the civilian population, would not be assured. It would be certainly costly, and that cost is actually to some degree a deterrent against the potential use of military force against the civilian population.
Another counter argument is that the risk of the US becoming a totalitarian police state is a paranoiac fantasy, and, despite what many perceive as a growing governmental encroachment on personal privacy and liberty, the leap to totalitarianism is still a big one. Still, no one can discount future possibilities with complete certainty, and it is relatively futile to try convincing someone that their belief that an armed populace is a significant component in curtailment of government power is baseless. Furthermore, while the government directing its military might against the civilian population seems far fetched, the potential for mass civil unrest at some point in this century is not as unthinkable. Political and cultural polarization have already led to isolated violent outbreaks, which usually stimulate these very debates over gun control. Any number of severe ‘trigger’ events, from economic collapse to natural disasters to coordinated terrorist attacks (foreign or domestic) to disease outbreak, could catalyze a cascade of crises and escalating violence leading to a societal breakdown of law and order. MIlitary and police forces could fracture and integrate with civilian insurgent factions, and the country could descend into a full scale civil war.
Blanket dismissals of the potential for war on US soil are no more conclusively supportable than proclamations of an imminent police state. The assertion that ‘no one needs a weapon of war’ is thus not assuredly true. The odds of having to defend oneself against violent attack are low, the odds of finding oneself in a war zone in the US are arguably even lower, but the high cost of either multiplied by even a low probability translates to a non-trivial risk. As with the question of universal background checks, I am not dismissing the banning of certain implements as unworthy of consideration, but I am arguing that weapons similar to those used by the military have utility beyond ‘fun with guns’, and that needs to be acknowledged and considered when crafting potential restrictions on the types of arms permitted for civilian ownership.

Knowledge is power…and guns are also.
Pro-gun opponents of gun control often reduce their own argument to ‘the solution to gun violence is more guns’, but just as gun control measures to reduce the potential for bad actors to commit horrific acts with guns deserve dispassionate consideration, there are proposals from the gun proponents that are worth examining further, specifically firearms education and defensive security measures.
We should not view objectives of threat reduction and threat defense as mutually exclusive, and education is the most accessible defensive response. I am personally of the opinion that there is no such thing as bad knowledge. We often embrace ignorance of subjects we find distasteful. The taboos around sex lead to many opposing any form of education about the mechanics or risks of sexual activity, despite ample evidence that sex education reduces unwanted pregnancy and sexual transmission of disease. Recognizing the virtual impossibility of significant reduction in or elimination of the plentiful civilian supply of guns means that the gun threat is a fact of life in America. It is possible to educate people about gun function, risks, and safety without encouraging or glamorizing gun use. In many schools, the ‘active shooter’ threat has given rise to education, for teachers and often students as well, in how to respond, including how to use ‘weapons of opportunity’ like desks or sharp pencils to fight back and subdue an attacker as a last resort of defense. If we accept this macabre preparatory response to the threat of gun violence, why are we so opposed to basic lessons in gun safety?
In the wake of horrific acts of gun violence, there is an understandable emotional aversion to anything involving guns, and there is also a tendency in any emotionally charged and polarized debate to resist any blending of solutions or other suggestion that anything proposed by the ‘other side’ has any merit, but such emotional responses do not move the conversation forward, nor do they do anything to protect us from violence. Those favoring more gun education as one answer to gun violence need to acknowledge the legitimacy of the fear of guns that many have. Condescendingly telling people reeling from the most recent slaughter that guns are nothing to be feared, and their problem is not guns but simply ignorance is counterproductive to any effort to actually improve gun literacy.
Firearm education is not the only way that education could be leveraged to prevent gun related harm. We could also develop curricula in life skills like conflict resolution, anger management, coping skills, and emotional wellness. These subjects have value far beyond just preventing violence, but they could also be effective in doing just that.

Presenting a harder target
If we acknowledge the ‘active shooter’ threat, why not take more direct defensive precautions? If such bad actors expected defensive opposition, would they not be less likely to select such a target? What is the effectiveness of security measures like controlled access or armed security? How do responses like publicly declared ‘gun free zones’ affect safety?
The counter argument to security measures is generally that we should not turn schools and other settings into ‘fortresses’, and granted it would be much better if there were no reason to consider doing so, but, even if things like universal background checks and assault weapons bans were adopted, we’ve already established the persistence of a threat even if reduced. While the ‘no fortresses’ position may seem like an irrational emotional response, ever present defenses do have the effect of constantly reminding the ‘protected’ of the violent threat. While some may feel safer with security in force, many others may feel less safe, and not just because of the reminder that they are potential victims of a shooter but because, for many, armed police, security, and other authorities are not universally associated with trustworthy protection.
Inciting a fearful response is a definite cost of security and must be weighed against the probability of security deterring or stopping an attack, but it is also possible to explore ways to maximize effective security while minimizing the fear response of those they’re intended to protect. ‘Gun free zone’ signs are routinely mocked by defense proponents, but they make lots of people feel safer, regardless of whether they actually create a safer or more vulnerable environment. A better alternative might be a posting that prohibits possession of any weapon except by explicitly authorized personnel. There need not even actually be any such explicitly authorized personnel for such a posting to have potential deterrent effect, while at the same time providing reassurance that there are strict limits on firearm carry within the particular setting. Other security measures, like ID badges and other means of access control, can significantly reduce an attacker’s ability to infiltrate without creating a militarized defensive environment.
It is particularly painful for many to contemplate the need for any kind of defensive measures, be they simply equipping with knowledge or with means of more active defense, because it is an admission of the limits on our ability to protect our children from the possibility of facing a murderous attacker. Adults, though, need to face the reality that there are such limits, be they limits on the ability to completely control the existence of bad actors or limits of political impediments to consensus on measures to reduce the potential for violent attacks. Seeking to reduce the means for bad actors to commit acts of gun violence is not incompatible with defense against such acts, including enabling good actors to directly confront materialized threats.
While acknowledging there is a place for defensive action, such measures can be taken to a dangerous extreme, most glaringly, that of arming reluctant or ill suited defenders. Use of a firearm requires knowledge of how to employ a gun with safety and effectiveness, including under stress. It also requires a person possessed not only of discipline and self control but also a willingness to kill another human in defense. Knowledge can be trained, but those other qualities are more difficult to cultivate and reliably test for. Thus do suggestions such as all school teachers and administrators being trained and armed weaken any reasonable proposals of training and defense responses to violent threats. Likewise do failures to acknowledge the legitimacy of people’s general fear of tools designed to kill only impede any serious effort to come to necessary consensus on actual responses.

Not a crazy idea
There is much agreement that greater focus on mental health could mitigate the tendency of individuals to act out violently or identify such individuals before they commit violence. A populace with better mental and emotional health is a worthwhile end itself, regardless of whether it would reduce the threat of violent actors. Lack of access to affordable mental healthcare should be addressed, as should the stigma that discourages people from seeking help in improving their emotional and cognitive wellness. Not only those with mental disorders can benefit from mental healthcare. Preventative wellness practices can improve anyone’s ability to cope with adverse circumstances and negative emotions in order to improve quality of life.
Most violent actors do not have actual mental disorders, though that doesn’t mean that they are mentally or emotionally healthy. Conversely, few patients with mental health diagnoses are violent. Improved mental health for the general population could result in fewer incidents of violence, but relying too heavily on the mental healthcare community to identify potential bad actors could have the unintended effect of discouraging those who need it most from seeking care. The trust founded on caregiver confidentiality is essential to the therapeutic process of identifying and addressing issues to improve mental health, and compromising that basis of trust would be to the detriment of not just reducing gun violence but the general mental health of the population.

Let’s put down the guns and talk about this.
While it may be ‘common sense’ that bad actors with guns are a danger and good actors with guns can protect against that danger, there is nothing simplistic or easy about ensuring that only good guys have guns or that only bad guys are denied guns. While we should all be able to agree on at least the basic objective of keeping guns from those with the highest likelihood of doing harm, we must acknowledge that the threat of violence will remain, and, for those that wish it, armed personal defense is a justifiable preference, such that a narrow line must be tread between impeding bad actors from gaining firepower and impeding everyone else’s ability to defend themselves.
As we strive to better prevent violent attacks, we should recognize that education and defensive strategy are not declarations of preventative failure. Both prevention and defense should be pursued together, and, just as gun control must respect those with justifiable reasons to want to have their own guns, education and security efforts must respect the perspectives of those for whom killing machines are a source of serious discomfort.
Most importantly, we must recognize that, other than the actual ‘bad actors’ among us, we all have the same ultimate objective to avoid innocent loss of life. The issue is so consequential that it is not possible to be entirely dispassionate about it. It is healthy to have an emotional response to indiscriminate slaughter or to contemplation of violence against oneself or one’s loved ones.
However, when we project that emotional investment into anger directed at those who have different visions of how to accomplish a common objective, we obstruct the process of crafting policy that could save lives, and we also contribute to the disunity and anger that can ultimately manifest in the worst of violent ways. As examined in greater depth in my earlier piece, choosing to listen without rushing to judgement and to strive for better understanding of those with whom we disagree is paramount in order to solve our common issues and to foster a healthier society.