Guns

The question of how to reduce gun violence in the U.S. and to eliminate or at least drastically curtail the number of public massacres is always a hot topic for debate.  In a nation where the gun genie was long ago let out of the bottle, there are no easy answers.

First of all, there can be no debate about the fact that the U.S. has a lot of guns of all types.  There are more guns per capita in the U.S. than any other nation in the world.  In fact, the U.S. has 35-50 % of the world’s civilian-owned guns divided among only 5% of the world’s population.  We have almost one gun for every man, woman and child in the country.

Second, the homicide by firearm rate in the U.S. is about 3 per 100,000 people, which is about eight to ten times higher than almost every other developed nation.  Interestingly, the developed country that comes closest to the U.S. in homicide rate, Switzerland (with a 0.7) is also number three in the gun ownership ranks.  Most Swiss men go through military service and keep some sort of weapon afterwards – probably a rifle.  But the U.S. still has more than four times the homicide rate that Switzerland does.

So one question is whether high rates of gun ownership can be correlated to high rates of homicide.  I don’t believe there can be any doubt that this is the case.  However, countries with low rates of gun ownership can also have high homicide rates if the countries have high crime rates and are politically chaotic.  In this case, the actual number of guns in circulation may be much higher than the statistics show.

Some nations with fairly high gun ownership do not have big problems with homicides.  Australia, Austria, Norway, New Zealand and Canada are examples.  My guess is that the gun ownership in these nations is generally focused on rifles and shotguns for hunting purposes as opposed to handguns for self-defense, but I am not certain about that.

Clearly the gun violence problem in the U.S. is not solely due to gun ownership or availability.  The U.S. also has more crime and more people in prison than any other developed nation.  One of the primary reasons that there is major opposition to more stringent gun control or even gun reduction (God forbid!) is the fear that more gun control will only result in less available guns for law-abiding citizens who want to protect themselves against the criminal element, who can always obtain guns. 

The public does not generally believe that gun control will reduce crime and homicides.  Gun control opponents point to Mexico with its very tight gun control laws and very high homicide rate to show the supposed folly of such an experiment.   But given the drug cartel situation in Mexico, which is, of course, a result of our insatiable hunger for drugs, it is not clear that Mexico is a good example of the results of gun control.  One can point to other countries with strong gun control laws in Europe that have had tremendous success – Great Britain being a good example.

But in the end crime and guns must be addressed together to make any real progress on this front.  Why is there so much violent crime in our country?  Why are so many of our citizens behind bars?  Why are we so different in this regard from Great Britain and Germany and France and Australia?  Is there any relationship between our gun culture and the level of violent crime we have?  What is the relationship between violent crime and drugs, or gangs?  It is estimated that about 12% of the homicides in the country are gang-related.  Now we face a triad of related issues – guns, crime and drugs.

But this triad does not explain the frequent occurrence of massacres such as Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora and Sandy Hook Elementary.  Is there something else in our culture or society that increases the probability of such attacks?  Is some potent mix of cultural decadence, violent video games and movies, and gun mania to blame for these horrific all-too-frequent national nightmares?

A mass shooting is clearly the act of someone who is mentally deranged.  But why does the U.S. have such a large number of mentally unbalanced or psychotic people who are willing or motivated to commit these horrible acts?  Do we have a larger problem with psychosis, or a problem with identification, or is the availability of weaponry the critical factor?  Some have argued that more rigorous background checks would reduce the incidence of these events, but it is not clear that any of the recent assailants would have been identified as psychotic before they acted.

At a minimum, it would seem reasonable to aggressively outlaw and eliminate the civilian ownership of multi-round semi-automatic rifles, which generally are the main weapons used in these tragedies.  Why is there such resistance to this proposal?  Both Australia and Great Britain took similar steps after massacres and have had great success.

But the opposition to gun laws is very deeply embedded in our society.  Why is it so uniquely vociferous in our country?  Part of it is the libertarian abhorrence of anyone telling people what they can or cannot own or do.  Part of it is a gun fetish that goes far beyond a healthy interest in hunting and sport shooting.  But the most intriguing and disturbing part of it is the anti-government paranoia that makes people want to stockpile guns in preparation for fighting against the government when they feel it has gone too far in controlling their lives.  This is what the 2^nd amendment really means to many Americans.  And it has taken on an almost religious symbolism and significance.  The NRA is the church organization for this religion.

So gun control is opposed for four reasons:  hunting, sport shooting, self-defense and protection against a future over-zealous government.  Hunting and sport shooting don’t really have much to do with the current gun debate.  Strong gun control and elimination of automatic weapons would not impact these hobbies.  The real opposition to gun control runs in a much deeper vein of government distrust and fear of the criminal element.

Recently, the gun lobby has changed its strategy from a defensive posture against more stringent gun control to an offensive strategy of supporting open carry and stand-your-ground laws. The argument is that if more people openly carry firearms there will be less crime and Sandy Hook/Columbine-type massacres will be curtailed. 

The counter-argument is that guns at-the-ready will cause far more accidents and moment-of-passion shootings (road rage, domestic arguments, bar fights, etc.) than the number of crimes or shootings they will prevent.  If handguns are available at a moment’s notice, then a moment’s fury or a youthful indiscretion is all that it takes to create a tragedy.  Are we really ready to sacrifice so many lives in accidents to make us feel a little bit more secure in our cars or homes?  Would we really be any more secure?

In the end, having more people carry weapons can really only be characterized as a cynical and short-sighted response to the problem of crime and mass shootings.  If we do not address the deeper problems of crime, incarceration, gun availability, mental illness and drugs, we will decay into a third-rate nation of fortress communities and frontier justice.  That would not be a place that many of us would choose to live.

Conscience, Morality and an Argument for the Existence of God

 I wrote this piece several months ago while going through yet another wrestling session with questions of faith.  It is just one aspect of this continuous debate.

The Enlightenment sparked a firestorm of intellectual debate about religion.  A Newtonian universe did not seem reconcilable with the miracles and myths of ancient religions and many began to question whether traditional religious dogma could be believed.  A profound confidence in man’s ability to reason caused many to view theology through the prism of rational thought and to acknowledge a belief in some sort of Deity, but not in the institutions of any religion.

American thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, and later Ralph Waldo Emerson and many others, were strong adherents of this ‘Deist’ wave of thought.  Jefferson famously cut out all of the so-called mythical parts of the New Testament to create a ‘Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth’ that was in his view a masterful expression of ethics and morality, but not a story about the son of God.  Jefferson and the others did not appear, though, to reject the notion of God, but merely the dogma of the church.

This skepticism about religion was sent into warp drive by the 19^th century development of the theory of evolution and discoveries about geological aging that seemed to preclude any literal interpretation of creation events.  As the impact of ‘Darwinism’ made its way into the intellectual landscape, many abandoned any belief in God at all and defined themselves as atheists.

This trend of intellectual rejection of God has continued to the present day.  It is probably safe to say that the majority of college professors and scientists are at least agnostic, if not defiantly atheistic.  But once one leaves the lofty domain of the intellectual the religious question is much murkier.  In the western world, church attendance has continuously diminished over time.  Yet the percentage of people that believe in some sort of God and heaven is still fairly high (typically greater than 50% and often as high as 75-90%), even in Europe where church attendance is almost non-existent.  This may be due in some cases to a ‘hedge your bet’ or ‘wishful thinking’ attitude rather than a thoughtful consideration of the arguments pro and con, but it is an interesting statistic nonetheless.

The Question of a Non-Religious Morality

One of the most basic characteristics of religion or theology is a set of moral precepts.  It is often stated that the biggest area of similarity in the world’s religions is their morality.  To be sure, there are plenty of gray areas, and ethicists make a good living exploring the nuances of moral and ethical laws, but the similarities are indeed striking and the basic moral structure is clear.

When one rejects God and religion, then morality and ethics become an interesting puzzle.  How does one derive a moral structure in a completely material world with no higher authority dictating it?  Is there a morality among the plants, or the animals, or the planets or the cosmos?  Is morality whatever we as humans define it to be?

Perhaps we should derive our morality from the laws of nature and the theory of evolution?  If we do this, how would it differ from what is generally accepted as moral behavior today?  We often cite Darwinism as ‘survival of the fittest’, a moniker that is probably not really completely accurate.  But there is certainly an element of truth in it. If the universe’s morality is based upon whatever causes it to become more efficient or more complex or more optimized or more highly developed, then certainly we must be willing to make some fairly hard-hearted decisions.

This logical train of thought is what actually occurred in the latter part of the 19^th century and into the middle of the 20^th century.  It included Nietzsche’s Superman and his belittling of the Christian ‘slave morality’ or morality of the weak.  It included the strong interest in eugenics to allow for a pruning of the human race to eliminate the weak-minded or physically impaired so as not to hinder the rapid progress of humanity.  It included the economic and quasi-philosophic (a la Ayn Rand) theories that celebrated (and still do!) the entrepreneur and the fabulously wealthy tycoons over the lowly worker, and argued for total free markets to propel the human race to ever higher achievements.  This morality was a morality of the strong, because the strong dictated the pace of development and progress.

Some of this morality took on nightmarish forms in the 20^th century – the Nazis and their eugenic holocaust for one - and became discredited.  But it can be argued that its logic is still incontrovertible if one believes only in a material world, perhaps just less dramatically or arbitrarily applied.

When one rejects the notion of a higher authority dictating morals, then the question of conscience becomes very interesting.  Why do we recoil at the thought of sterilizing the handicapped or the mentally deficient?  Why are we reluctant to kill others to get their food or possessions?  Is it because our conscience will not allow us to consider it?  And what is this conscience and where does it come from if not from some sort of higher authority?  Is it a product of evolution?  Why would we evolve to have such a conscience?  The animals don’t appear to be troubled by such concerns.  When they are hungry they eat another animal without the slightest bit of remorse!

Now we can argue that our higher evolved state has developed a conscience to allow us to form a more complex society to achieve ever more wonderful states of being.  This is certainly feasible where it concerns certain parts of the moral code – killing and stealing for example – that would otherwise cause society to unravel and create a less ideal situation for all.

But what about our compassion for the mentally deranged or the physically malformed or the developmentally disabled?  Or even those who appear not to have much motivation to work or contribute?  What a huge drain they are on our society!  We could develop our perfect world much more rapidly without dragging that part of the gene pool along with us!  Surely the part of our morality that prevents us from finding a quiet ‘solution’ for the infirm is a relic from the silly old religious times and ought to be jettisoned!

But our hearts ache for the weak, the sick and the downtrodden; for the mentally ill and the dispirited.  We continue to find powerful inspiration in acts of mercy, love and charity.  What imbues us with these emotions and feelings?

I find the argument that our consciences and moral pre-disposition are totally a result of evolution and its psycho/biological mechanics a weak one.  The logical path would be for human evolution to develop a very pragmatic moral code – to optimize the gene pool and focus attention and energy on the strong and successful.  But our hearts (souls?) will not accept that pragmatism, even when we do not embrace a spiritual belief system.

What is going on here?  Can it be that we all really do have a God-given conscience from some higher authority that is somehow innate and a part of some sort of soul or spirit?  Can our consciences and morality be interpreted or explained without including an external influence?

So in the end it is somewhat ironic that many of our most vociferous protectors of the weak and the downtrodden also claim to be atheists. Why do so many ardent advocates of social justice and moral behavior choose to totally deny any possibility of the divine?  For many it is a sincere belief that there is no valid evidence for any kind of spiritual phenomena.  For others it is a profound distaste for the human expressions of religious dogma.

The argument can be made that the fashionable intellectual rejection of God and religion is a combination of intellectual hubris and a very understandable reaction to the ills of institutional religion.  Intellectual hubris is the notion that anyone can truly categorically state that God exists or does not exist – an all-too-human example of pride.  To doubt is eminently reasonable, but to be certain is arrogance. 

Defiant atheism is surely a type of intellectual bravado, an affectation that feels good in the moment (or for many years) but probably does not have quite the same zest when contemplated on one’s deathbed.  Who in their final moment would not agree to continue to exist (or be resurrected) in some blissful form or another?  Only a stubborn fool would reject such an offer!

The other side of the atheistic trend is perfectly understandable as a reaction against the innumerable crimes perpetrated in the name of God by the world’s religions.  Is it any wonder that so many flock to the banner of non-belief when one considers the persecutions, wars, hatred, intolerance and enslavement in which religion has played a role?

So this is my modest attempt to demonstrate that the stubborn resilience of compassion could be an indication that we are indeed linked to something more than just the material world; that the divine, or God, fills our hearts with this compassion in the face of all logical and philosophical arguments against it.  For me, it is a comforting thought.