Don't buy the myth

As is my custom, I did not look at the news Monday morning before I walked to work. So I was in a good mood when I passed the security guard in lobby of the building where I work. My mood got even better when I noticed the guard had set out sugar cookies with pink frosting. When I asked why the cookies were out, the guard said they were to remind folks that October is breast cancer awareness month. I took a cookie and ate it. It was delicious.

I did not remember that we are in breast cancer awareness month. But I am aware of breast cancer. I am pretty sure that I have been aware of breast cancer since I was six years old. One of my best friends back then was a kid named John. John’s dad and my dad worked for the University of Northern Iowa. John’s parents and mine were the same age. Our families lived on the same street. John and I attended the same school. My mom liked John’s mom and that meant we saw each other a fair amount.

I am sure you know where this is heading. John’s mom got breast cancer. She underwent the treatments available to her. But those treatments were not successful and John’s mom died when John and I were seven. For the rest of the time we lived in Cedar Falls, my mom would visit John’s mom’s grave on Memorial Day. Like most young kids do with their parents, I adored my mom. I couldn’t imagine living without her and my heart still aches for kids like John that grow up without their mothers. This is a roundabout way of saying that you should donate some money to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. The BCRF has a 4-star rating by Charity Navigator if you are into that sort of thing.

I know people that make fun of things that raise “awareness.” And I am "aware" that breast cancer exists. But that cookie jolted me and reminded me of John and his mother. It also reminded me of how much I loved the street that John and I lived on and the school we attended. I lived on West 18th Street in  the third house in from the corner of West 18th and Hudson. It was such a cool house. It is hard to tell from the linked image but the house was built into a hill so that one could enter from the street, walk downstairs and walk out the back door and still be on a ground level yet under a deck overlooking the back yard. The hill continued downward towards the track field in the picture. The hill from the street to the track was not terribly high but it was steep enough for young kids to enjoy sledding down the hill in the winter. The field was where my classmates and I launched the model rockets we made in industrial arts class (mine flew about 10 feet and smashed when the parachute failed to deploy. One of many indicators that I was not fit for the industrial arts). The first time I rode a bike without training wheels was in the parking lot to the west of the track. A little further to the north is a small creek where one could sometimes see small fish, frogs, and turtles. It’s torn down now, but the school and its playground were to the west of the parking lot. That playground was one of the best school playgrounds I have ever seen. The playground was large enough for kids to play kickball but also had a large area set aside for a wide variety of slides, monkey bars, tunnels and other playground equipment. I remember how we used some of the equipment as the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise (you know, the Star Trek spaceship). I can also remember riding in my family’s bronze 1968 Ford Galaxie 500 as my older sister drove us around and we sang as hits of the day such as “American Pie.” I am eternally grateful that I won some genetic lottery that allowed me to grow up safe and secure in a mid-sized college town in the Midwest.

Thinking of those songs playing on the car radio reminds me that music has been a large part of my life. One of my earliest purchases where the money spent was entirely money I earned was the Elvis Presley album “C’mon Everybody.” I followed that purchase up with the Beatles’ album “Yesterday and Today.” I am confident that other than housing and automobiles, most of my disposable income has been spent on music. I am afraid to count how many records, CDs, tapes, and iTunes songs I own.

In addition to an avid consumer of recorded music, I played music in rock bands in high school and post-college. I also love going to see live music. I could go on at some length about a time that some local band I saw played an obscure cover song as part of their set. Some of the most memorable nights of my life are of concerts. For example, I remember seeing Soul Asylum play at the Union Ballroom in Milwaukee in 1988. This was a tour supporting the album two records before the band hit it big with Runaway Train. The opening act was Living Color, whose debut album was generating a lot more interest than Soul Asylum’s record. I remember wondering what it felt like for Soul Asylum to headline when there was more interest in the opening band. I could give a list of shows where I met some of the most important people in my life. But I do not want to embarrass anyone besides myself by identifying them. It is enough to say that live music, like my grade school, is a huge part of my life.

You know what else live music and grade school have in common? Mass shootings is what they have in common. The largest mass shooting in the history of the United States took place on Sunday night at a concert in Las Vegas. 60 people are dead and hundreds are injured as a result of that mass shooting. In 2012, 28 people were shot to death (most of the victims were grade school students at Sandy Hook Elementary School) in Newtown, Connecticut. Places that should be places of fun, joy, love, learning, and happiness geturned into places of unfathomable tragedy and suffering because some deranged person decided to start shooting people.

While mass shootings are not entirely unique to the United States, our country has way more than its share of deaths due to firearms. In 2016, CBS News cited a study by the American Journal of Medicine which showed that the total firearm death rate per 100,00 people in the United States is almost 300% higher than any other developed country. The article also mentions that while non-lethal crime rates are about the same, the gun-related murder rate in the United States is 25 times higher than the other countries. You can read the article here. The chart published with the article is below. The numbers are staggering.

Now one response to this information is to note that those countries have lower gun-related death rates because most of those countries have stringent laws controlling the private ownership of guns.  The United States does not regulate gun ownership the same way these other countries do. A friend of mine likes to point out that it is easier to legally own a gun than it is to legally drive a car. In response to the Las Vegas shooting, another friend pointed out that it was easier to get a gun than to adopt a cat.  Doug Criss at CNN wrote a piece about several things that it is harder to get than it is to get a gun.

I do not like these comparisons that Mr. Criss and my friends use to illustrate that it is too easy to get a gun.  These comparisons never seem to acknowledge one fundamental thing; that there is not a Constitutional right to owning a cat, or driving, or getting cold medicine but there is to owning a gun.

But the side opposing gun control also makes terrible arguments. For example, on Monday television personality Bill O’Reilly wrote that victims of gun deaths are “the price of freedom.”  Mr. O’Reilly continued, “The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have the right to arm themselves for protection.” So those grade school kids in Newtown and those concert attendees in Las Vegas died because the United States is the land of the free. I doubt that comforts the parents, loved ones, and friends of the victims. I do not find it comforting and I reject that cold-hearted calculus.  It also suggests that right to arm oneself is without limit. That suggestion is simply not true.

This article by Cass Sunstein begins with a discussion of former United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger’s view that the interpretation of the Second Amendment as enshrining an individual right to own guns is “one of the great pieces of fraud-I repeat the word ‘fraud’-on the American public” that Chief Justice Burger ever saw. Whatever the merits of Justice Burger’s view it has not been the law since 2008 when the United States Supreme Court issued District of Columbia. Heller. If I am sufficiently motivated, I will write more about Heller in the future. But for now, I think it is enough to say Justice Scalia’s majority decision and Justice Stevens’s dissent argue over what the men who wrote Second Amendment understood it to mean.

The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791. In 1791, most handguns and rifles could only hold a single bullet and, accordingly, could not fire very quickly.  An efficient soldier might fire two or three shots in a minute. One wonders what the Framers of the Constitution would think of modern guns.

Should we care what the Framers would think? Should people argue that the Second Amendment only applies to weapons available at the time the Second Amendment was adopted? Well, if one wants to be intellectually honest, one would also have to say that the same is true of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights. That would mean our freedom of speech would be limited to speech as it was understood in 1791 as would our freedom of “the press.” I dislike Internet trolls as much as anyone but I reject the argument that there is no freedom of speech on the Internet because the Internet did not exist in 1791. Likewise, our  right to be free of unreasonable searches would be limited to things thought to be searches in 1791. That seems bad too. Moreover, as I hope to explain in a subsequent post, I really do not like the idea that people who thought an acceptable compromise about slavery was to count slaves as 3/5 of a person also decide what rights we have more than two centuries later.  

Setting aside whether looking to the Framers to interpret the Constitution is the correct way to analyze things, the Heller court did say that not all restrictions regarding guns are unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in Heller, Justice Scalia rejected the argument that any type of firearm could be used for protection. On pages 54-56 of the opinion, Justice Scalia notes that a non-exhaustive list of permissible restrictions includes: (a) banning concealed weapons; (b) prohibiting felons and the mentally ill from owning guns; (c) prohibiting gun possession in sensitive places such as schools or government buildings; (d) placing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of guns; and (e) prohibiting “dangerous and unusual weapons.” As part of the last category, Justice Scalia specifically mentions “M-16 rifles and the like.”

Just because there are steps the government can take to regulate guns is not the same thing as saying that our government will take any steps. If the massacre of little kids in a school didn’t prompt any Federal gun legislation, I doubt there will be any action now. But do not accept the argument that the Constitution prohibits government from taking any action. That argument simply is not true. If we want mass shootings to stop, the first step is putting people in office that are willing to take steps to act on the five areas in Justice Scalia’s non-exhaustive list.