School shootings are a reflection of militaristic police state

The recent mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which seventeen were killed and fourteen injured, is the latest in a long series of such incidents in American schools. There have been killings in American schools since before the founding of the United States (the first was the Enoch Brown School massacre in 1764), but the incidence of such crimes only gathered pace after the Columbine killings in 1999. They have become so common that Americans seemed to become quite blasé about them - at least until the latest massacre, which has brought strident calls for stronger gun control.

The primary function of the state is to protect life and liberty. We give the government a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in order that it can fulfill this function. Many people in the United States believe that the state cannot adequately carry out this role and that they should have the right to possess and carry firearms for the express purpose of defending themselves. The Second Amendment to the Constitution enshrines this right, although (as I have written before) personal self-defence is not actually the purpose of the Second Amendment at all. 

The right to possess and carry firearms for self-defence does not exist in most other countries. There are limited rights to own firearms for sporting, hunting and pest-control purposes in most countries but even these are usually strictly controlled. In New Zealand, for example, gun owners are licensed through an onerous vetting process and those who do have them are subject to regular checks and inspections to ensure they continue to be safe owners.

The sharp rise in school shooting incidents in the United States over the past 20 years is paradoxical because it comes against a background of significantly decreased homicide rates over the same period. Many states have tightened the rules and background checks for purchases of firearms in recent years and the percentage of the population owning guns has remained static, which begs the question that if there is no obvious correlation between access to guns and the increase in school shootings, what is the cause?

I touched on a problem in my last post that I believe explains at least in part the phenomenon of school shootings - the disaffection of young men in Western society. Mass killings are almost always committed by young men and it seems the more we tell our young men that they are a menace to society, the more certain individuals are likely to act out the role in which we cast them.

Another possible explanation is the increasing resort to violence by the state. Police in the United States killed more than 1100 people in 2015, a rate that surely must exceed any other nation's law enforcement services. Many of these killings are unjustified (such as the case of Australian Justine Damond) and the officers involved are seldom held to account. The increasing militarisation of the police in America, which is increasing under President Trump, will undoubtedly mean more police killings of the people they are meant to serve. Violence begets violence and an escalation on one side of a conflict inevitably leads to a matching escalation on the other side.

The right wing in America has a hypocritical attitude to guns, supporting an unfettered right to bear arms while at the same time supporting a highly militaristic law and order state. I believe that a capable but restrained police force that protects the rights of its citizens should obviate the need for people to carry weapons for their own defence. We have a civilian police force to ensure we don't live in constant fear of attack by criminals but the problem in America is that it has become a place where people fear the police as much as the criminals.

There is evidence from other countries that America would be a safer place, with fewer mass killings, if gun ownership was significantly reduced. However, Americans won't agree to give up their guns while the police are armed like the 82nd Airborne. Any attempt to unilaterally confiscate guns in America would risk civil war. The de-escalation has to start with the government and it needs to be accompanied by policies such as the decriminalisation of recreational drugs that reduce the number of Americans who are targets of the police. But that would require a braver cohort of politicians than currently inhabit that country's halls of power.

Mass Killings, Gun Control and Individual Rights

The recent shooting of nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, allegedly by a young man acting out of a racist motivation, was a terrible thing. I have relatives in that city (including African-American relatives) and I can only imagine the horror they must feel at this dreadful crime so close to home. But the horror that is felt by Charlestonians is not helped by the opportunistic comments by President Obama and others about gun control.

Obama said that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries". He is wrong. This type of mass violence has occurred even here in comparatively peaceful New Zealand (with numerous incidents from the killing of 14 in Aramoana in 1990 to the six killed in Raurimu in 1997), and in other countries such as the 77 killed in Norway in 2011 and 35 killed in Australia in 1996. America has had the most incidents of mass shootings of any Western nation in recent years but proportionately it is only 6th on the list in number of fatalities and it is only 111th out of 218 countries in terms of total firearm homicides (see this Wikipedia article).

Most non-Americans have trouble understanding the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms. I have written before about why the Second Amendment to the Constitution exists - to Americans it is an important part of their system of government and it is unlikely to be given up in the foreseeable future, if ever. In any event, further controls on the sale of firearms in the US are unlikely to reduce the homicide rate because the vast majority of killings are carried out by criminal gangs (e.g. this article says 80% of Chicago gun homicides and non-fatal shootings are gang-related), typically using illegally-obtained firearms. Homicides with firearms have dropped by 40 - 50% over the past two decades despite the number of registered firearms having increased significantly (ibid).

I have been in two minds about whether I believe people should have the right to bear arms for their own protection. In a civil society we give up certain things, such as personally carrying out retributive justice, in return for the protection of our individual rights by the state. But we do not give up the right to self-defence. A firearm is simply a much more effective form of self-defence, and a remarkable equaliser when it comes to facing down a more powerful adversary, than one's fists. Should law-abiding people not be allowed that most effective form of self-defence just because a few use such weapons indiscriminately?

Personally, I am not into guns and don't feel the need to own them, despite having grown up around firearms and been trained to use them, but I live in a place where physical violence is a remote threat. If I lived in a more dangerous environment, for example the less-salubrious inner suburbs of some American cities, I would feel differently. Even here in New Zealand there are areas, particularly certain rural areas, where people I know feel the need to have firearms in their houses for personal protection. These areas are usually characterised by the absence of, or remoteness from, any form of police presence. In such circumstances it is foolhardy not to make some provision for the protection of yourself and your family.

There is no right to life if one does not have the right to protect one's life. On balance, I think law-abiding individuals should have the right to bear arms for their own protection.