As we have yet another round of our repeated and possibly fruitless arguments about the role of guns in American society, there's one thing I desperately want to hear gun advocates say. It's not complicated, it would have the benefit of honesty, and it might enable us to move this debate to ground where we could actually make choices about what kind of society we want to have.
What I want to hear gun advocates say is, "This is the price America has to pay for the right some of us cherish."
The reason I want to hear this is that on no other basic debate over constitutional rights that I can think of does one side argue that there are no tradeoffs, that exercising a particular right, even in the most extreme way, doesn't actually involve any cost whatsoever. Only gun advocates say that.
When somebody shoots 49 people in a club with a military weapon that gun advocates work so desperately to keep as widely available as possible, they don't say, "That was terrible, but the right to have guns is so important that it's something we need to live with." When confronted with the fact that over 30,000 Americans are killed every year with guns, they don't say that this cost is acceptable, they say that guns had nothing whatsoever to do with all the people killed with guns. Maybe it was because of mental illness, or radical Islam, or video games. But guns? Why should we talk about guns?
There's no other right we talk about this way. When the exercise of other rights produces things we don't like, we don't deny that we're paying a price for something we value. When Nazis decide to hold a march and it makes us upset, nobody says, "Oh, we didn't have to endure that hateful sight because of free speech; it was our road-building policy that made it possible. Speech had nothing to do with it!" We say that as unpleasant as it was, we have to tolerate hateful speech because of our commitment to free expression. Nobody denies that it has a cost.
Now to be fair, on some extremely rare occasions a prominent conservative has acknowledged that our national gun fetish has a price. For instance, Ben Carson said last fall that while he treated gunshot victims as a doctor, "I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away." If your mind reels at how morally obtuse that is, then you know why it's an argument you almost never hear. Instead, gun advocates say that the real answer to the carnage guns inflict is to saturate our society with yet more guns. In other words, there's no tradeoff at all. It's as though someone said that if you're worried about the privacy we give up when we let the government snoop on our communications in order to stop terrorism, the answer is to just give the government all your passwords and set up a webcam in your bathroom, and then you'll have real privacy.
Nor does anyone talk this way about less fundamental rights, the things we merely want and need. Cars kill the same number of Americans as guns, but even though cars are incredibly useful, nobody denies that they're dangerous. So we try to make them as safe as possible. We build technologies into them, like seat belts, air bags, and anti-lock brakes. We try to make sure people are capable of handling them safely before we give them permission to drive. We pass new laws on things like texting while driving in order to eliminate the factors that make them less safe. Nobody says, "Well, the fact that your child was mowed down by a teenager texting on his phone doesn't have anything to do with cars and driving-let's put the focus where it belongs, on teen attention spans."
Perhaps it's because gun advocates look at their opponents and see people who put no value at all on gun rights, who would rather have America be more like, well, like almost every other industrialized country in the world, where guns are heavily restricted and gun ownership isn't seen as a "right" at all. They may think that arguing against those people requires taking an absolutely categorical position at all times. Or perhaps it's because that small proportion of gun owners, the ones who fight with fervid intensity against even the most modest restriction and regulation, really have sanctified guns in their own mind. An object so perfect in its wondrous glory can't possibly be blamed for anything done with it.
But the truth is that gun advocates do actually think that the price we're paying is a reasonable one for the existing gun regime, in which it's so spectacularly easy for almost anyone to obtain as many weapons as they like. Nobody thinks that the NRA or your average Republican politician is happy about the 30,000 Americans whose lives are ended by guns every year, but it's not a high enough number for them to embrace any measure that might inhibit gun ownership. It's not even high enough for them to tolerate some inconvenience, like making gun owners demonstrate that they know how to handle them safely and are able to store them where children can't get them.
Presumably, there's some number that would be too high. Maybe it would be a hundred thousand Americans killed with guns every year, or five hundred thousand, or a million. But 30,000? That's a price they think we can pay.
I have little doubt that some gun advocates genuinely believe that they'll probably have their home invaded by murderous gangs, or that they need their concealed carry permit because there's an ISIS strike team waiting at the supermarket, or that society is eternally on the brink of complete breakdown and their guns are the only way to protect their family against the cannibal hordes. But they also won't say to the rest of us what they say to each other, which is that guns are fun, guns are cool, guns make you feel like a man and that's the reason that guy in the shop is buying his fifth or tenth or 12th gun, not because he's the only thing standing between the rest of us and government's tyranny.
And the AR-15s that are getting so much attention? They aren't as popular as they are because it's impossible to defend your home without one. They're popular because they're relatively affordable, because they can be easily modified (so you can trick yours out with lots of cool accessories), and because having a gun designed for the military makes you feel like a real warrior.
That's a truth that can't withstand the light of day. If it's really not about needing guns but about people wanting them and loving them, then we'd have to ask exactly what price we're willing to pay for some people's love of guns. So maybe that's the question gun advocates should answer: If 30,000 dead Americans is an acceptable price to pay for your version of freedom, what price would be too high?
