Amidst so much talk of privately owned guns, I feel compelled to say a word about my own, for I indeed am a gun-owner. My gun is a forty-five caliber Colt revolver, a genuine original “six-shooter”. It probably was manufactured in the 1880s. It belonged to my maternal grandfather, who was an employee of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, stationed in Salida, Colorado. For a country showing signs of political senility, the United States is a comparative infant. My father knew a man who had known a man who had known George Washington. My grandfather was born shortly after the Civil War and my mother, his youngest child, was not young when I was born. Three family generations easily occupy more than half our national history. My gun is an antique from America’s antiquity. It has been fired once—meaning one shot--in the last seventy years. My late elder brother, who inherited it in 1950, wanted to see if it still worked then. It did. He hit a tree at about fifteen yards. I don’t know where he came up with a projectile for it. We have never tried to find any. It has been preserved ever since in a safe place in the metaphoric mothballs of a leather holster probably dating from the early twentieth century. At rare intervals it gets a light wipe with a faintly oiled cloth. I don’t want anybody to take this gun away from me. My hope is that it will be passed on through generations yet unborn, a significant antique, a beautifully precise steel forging from a great age of American industry, and an intriguing material link to a proximate but vanished past.
My grandfather never heard of an event like that in Uvalde, though such events now seem almost common. Just how common? It depends upon whether you address the question from an ethical, a comparative, or a statistical point of view. From the ethical point of view, which must command the attention of every person with a conscience and surely commands our communal national consciousness at this very moment, the mass murder of young children in a primary school is an event so obscene as to render the question just asked about it obscene as well. The suggestion seems to be that we should establish a baseline number of annual school massacres against which the actual number might be deficient or excessive in any given year. If we use the language of ought, there ought to be no such events. But the tragic empirical fact is that there have been many, precisely documented by police and medical officials, and recorded and broadcast by journalists. We are thus provided with a very sound basis to make the comparative judgement that the United States is the runaway world leader in such atrocities.
It is the third approach to the question, the statistical part in its narrowest sense, that proves troublesome. How statistically likely is it that a given student will be murdered at any given school by a maniac? I don’t know the answer, except that it is very unlikely. On the day that the school in Uvalde was attacked, just about a hundred thousand other American public schools were not attacked. But current thinking about “safety measures” seems about as antiquated as my grandfather’s six-shooter. It accepts as a matter of grim possibility that all our schools are potential abattoirs. They are all “targets” to be “hardened” with high security techniques possibly appropriate for a military laboratory conducting classified research but hardly conducive of a wholesome and open educational experience. Teachers and students are further to enhance their own safety by training in simulated attacks.
According to Wayne La Pierre of the National Rifle Association, the appropriate response to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. This is a strategy of war. It was the strategy of Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease policy in the Second World War. It is the strategy of President Biden and other Western leaders in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. Here’s the idea: you supply the good guys, Mr. Zelensky, we’ll help supply the guns. In civil society the authorized armed good guys are the police. There were many police on the scene in Uvalde including a small group specially designated as school-protectors. We have learned that as many as nineteen of these assorted good guys stood by in uncertainty and inaction outside the door of a schoolroom within which children were being murdered. This is now the cause of probably justified criticism and even outrage, but can I honestly claim that I would have been the first to rush at that barricaded door? Or can we believe that a hundred thousand schools can indefinitely maintain honed and effective defense plans against rare events? Perhaps this grotesque episode at least provided a useful hint of the likely results of proposals, should they come into effect, to “Defund the Police!”
The patent renewal date stamped into the metal of my six-shooter is 1874. In the manufacturing of killing machines there have been giant strides since 1874. I will not fault vocal advocates of “gun rights” for introducing the language of military strategy into school safety, but surely there should be an update in the strategy reflecting revolutionary developments in the military weapons being used by the perpetrators. What military commander would begin by ceding a would-be assailant all the ground up to your very front door before taking action? If a disturbed youth armed with war weapons makes it to the school door, let alone penetrates a classroom, it will be a near miracle to escape without carnage. My own quixotic suggestion would be to rescind the second amendment, as Americans had the good sense to rescind the high-minded, well-meaning nineteenth (prohibition of alcohol) when it led to disastrous unintended consequences. Then our legislators could start afresh, liberated from eighteenth-century technological assumptions and the further mystification of an ambiguous ablative absolute about well-ordered militias. I already said this idea was quixotic. In fact it would probably embarrass the old hidalgo himself. So I move on. But even back in the surreal world of Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde there are intelligent and, yes, truly “common-sense” initiatives to address the problem of school shootings that do not await the firing of the first shot in a third-grade classroom to implement and that do not interfere with the right to own and bear arms any more than driver’s ed courses, vision tests, and insurance requirements interfere with an unenumerated right to own and drive a car. I will not rehearse these common-sense proposals. They are in the press every day. They reflect two main ideas. The first is that in America the available armory has changed quite a bit since the time of Natty Bumppo. The second is that it is best to keep mentally disturbed people and known criminals away from guns. These common-sense ideas do not rest on the assumption that gun owners are knuckle-dragging knuckleheads or that the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence is a sodality of effete leftists. They do begin with the assumption that Americans, polemically divided as they may be, are still bound together by a bond of common human decency, and for all their parochialism still wish to exhibit (as Jefferson put it) “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” This may already be a bridge too far. But everybody else in the world surely thinks we are crazy.
