(This is an updated and expanded version of the letter printed in the Granville Sentinel, May 25, 2023. Given that this is a U.S. piece, partially published, I have eschewed my usual practice of using Canadian spellings.)
Dear Editor:
I read in the May 11 Granville Sentinel that Matt Simpson, the State Assemblyman for our District (114), applauds New York’s “updated language” that permits concealed-carry in the Adirondack Park and other State lands. I also read in the Albany Times-Union that he supports a proposed “stand-your-ground” law for the State. Ironically, the Sentinel article appeared alongside an update on the bail appeal of Kevin Monahan, who senselessly shot and killed young Kaylin Gillis in rural Hebron, New York, where I live. With all due respect to the Assemblyman, the last thing we need is wider concealed-carry, or any carry for that matter, and we certainly do not need a stand-your-ground law. New York’s “Castle Doctrine” and other standards already provide for reasonable self-defense.
Let me qualify: I grew up in a small town surrounded by wilderness, where hunting and long-gun ownership was taken for granted. I hunted when I was young. I am not against reasonable gun ownership per se, and I am certainly not against hunting. What I am against is the killing of young children in their classrooms. I am against someone using an assault rifle to murder ten people and wound three more at a Buffalo supermarket. I am against shooting a young man who mistakenly rings your doorbell, and against shooting two cheerleaders who get into the wrong car. I am against my neighbor taking pot shots at a group of retreating young people – killing one of them – who mistakenly had entered the wrong driveway.
More and more guns in more and more places do not make Americans safer and safer. If that were true, the U.S. would be the safest place in the world. But it is the opposite: compared to similar Western democracies like Canada, Britain, and Germany etc., the per capita rates of murder and gun violence are off-the-scale. Here, there are simply too many guns, too many handguns, too many military-grade guns, too many places we can carry them, and we are too free and too quick to use them. The result is a horrifying number gun-related deaths. As of May 8, 2023, there already had been 202 mass shootings in the United States for the year – nearly two per day. And as repugnant as it is startling, gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children – excluding infants – in this country. If this does not make one want to stop and reconsider what we are doing, how we are living, what would?
It seems obvious, but apparently must be said, since people do not appear to understand: States with more restrictive gun safety laws like California and New York have significantly lower rates of gun violence than states with weak or permissive laws, like Texas and Florida (Everytown Research). (1) These facts do not lie.
Further, stand-your-ground laws only make people trigger-happy, so that, for example, a movie theater argument and thrown popcorn result in a pulled gun and a death – and the killer walks, as happened in Florida. Multiple studies, including by the Rand Corporation, have found that homicide numbers go up, not down, after states enact stand-your-ground laws. (2)
I don’t pretend to know all the solutions to American gun mayhem, but a few things are obvious as a start: sensible gun control (that the majority of Americans support), limiting the public carrying of guns, concealed or otherwise, and reasonable self-defense standards (that we already have in New York State and in Canada) as opposed to stand-your-ground laws.
Enacting gun control legislation is, I admit, notoriously difficult given the funding of the gun-toting diehards, the recalcitrant Republican opposition, and a Supreme Court that has been acting rather unwisely in its recent interpretations. But there are practical ways to start, as Nicholas Kristof has so well outlined in his New York Times editorial. (3) He advocates an incremental harm-reduction approach, including stronger background checks, moderate limits on the types of weapons (automatic) that can be bought, and so on – regulatory efforts that are similar to those that have been used with success in reducing smoking deaths and making driving safer.
Of course, regulatory efforts run into the problem of that devilishly-phrased Second Amendment to the Constitution. Something from another time, an old notion written with confusing grammar: debating its true meaning stands between us and sanity. I will skip that. A constitution should serve a people, not people serve a constitution. And enlightened social policy should not be determined by consulting the likes of militant second-amendment supporters such as The Proud Boys, Ammon Bundy of Idaho, or Greg Abbot of Texas.
Start the struggle to change the damn thing! Amend it, or repeal it. Naïve, you say? Perhaps, but what is the alternative? 125 +/- gun deaths per day as it is now? 150? 250? 500? What is the number, exactly, that will inspire us to action? Amendments can be, and have been, changed or repealed (at least the misguided 18th).
Yet we must go further; it is not just the second amendment and laws that are the problem. It is the culture itself: a propensity for violence coupled with the “gun culture.” Over time. the belief in owning, carrying and using guns has become a American fetish, a form of cultural neurosis, complete with puerile notions of manliness and immature patriotism. One writer (Ed Pilkington) has called it a fatal attraction – a “fatal gun attraction,” that is. (4) He is correct. It is time for a program of cultural psychotherapy with the goal of putting guns back in their place as hunting weapons, not as something symbolizing freedom or manhood, not something to brandish, not something to carry around in public places, not something used to menace your neighbors, and certainly not something used to settle disputes – or for that matter, to be used as weapons of despair by alienated people, slaughtering innumerable others as they commit public suicide.
Which brings up the issue of mental health: services for the mentally ill have been touted as a solution. They are not. The United States does not have higher rates of mental illness than comparable countries. In addition it is a fallacy to say that the mentally ill have higher rates of murder and gun violence than the so-called “normal” population. They don’t. So one can’t say that mental illness is the problem. Proposals to fix gun violence with more mental health services are nothing but misdirection: a way to avoid facing the problem.
Addressing all of this, and the gun fetish particularly, will require a considerable cultural self-examination and public conversation. It is not impossible to do this, even with the likes of Fox News and Twitter as obstructionist forces. It has happened before: after World War Two, the populace, in public discourse, attempted to figure out what to do about mental illness and the practice of psychiatry. That conversation culminated in the establishment of the National Institute of Mental Health and later the very successful Community Mental Health Act, signed by President Kennedy in 1963. We can do this again with guns. Nothing less is required as part of the solution to the calamitous public health gun crisis that we are experiencing.
An Albany Times-Union article on May 14 discussed the intention of some Capital Region schools to restrict student smart-phone usage during school hours. Prominent among student concerns was they would be without their phones in a school shooting situation.
It shames us all to read this. It makes one ask: how could we allow things to get to this?
What sort of people are we? This last question, really, is the one we have to answer.
Yours sincerely,
Peter S. Cameron
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1. Gun Safety Laws Save Lives. Everytown Research, 2023. https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/
2. Effects of Stand-your-Ground Laws on Violent Crime. Rand Corporation, January 10, 2023. https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/stand-your-ground/violent-crime.html
3. Kristof, N. A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths. New York Times, April 11, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/opinion/gun-death-health.html
4. Pilkington, E. How America’s Fatal Gun Attraction Turned Schools into War Zones. The Guardian, May 12, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/13/mass-shootings-schools-guns-violence