The Disease of Individualism and Gun Ownership

It’s happened again. Four times in the last week a shooter armed to the teeth invaded a public place where people were innocently enjoying food and music or shopping. Trump will send out tweets with “thoughts and prayers,” Republican congressional representatives will show their piety with their “thoughts and prayers,” and not a blasted thing will be done. People will still be able to buy military style rifles with large capacity cartridges so they will be able to get off the maximum amount of shots before being taken down by law enforcement. This time around, perhaps the Democratically led House will introduce legislation related to a ban on assault weapons but we’ll see. For myself, I plan to call my representative and two senators tomorrow.

Our nation is sick. Sick unto death. The illness that has crippled us is a complex wad of fear and hatred, not unlike a cancerous tumor with a variety of DNA in it and none of it is good. In the public arena people call for a “national conversation” on the issue of gun violence. There’s already plenty of conversation, or at times talking at one another, going on now. In my view there is only one place, in two rooms, where that conversation will happen in a meaningful way. It is the House of Representatives and the Senate. Add onto that public hearings scheduled by both houses of Congress and we’ve got the beginnings of a national conversation. Nothing short of that will have any effect. The amount of money that supports the fundamentalist interpretation of the Second Amendment is the elephant in the room.

So what do we do? I’m between jobs right now so I don’t have a pulpit, but I do have my blog so I am using it as my pulpit.

The nature of our sickness, that ball of malicious DNA, has one component, individualism, which seems to control the conversation. Allow me to illustrate. The day of the Sandy Hook shooting I went to a Christmas party at a friend’s house. It was one of those parties you don’t want to miss, as it took over the whole first floor of a Victorian home and included several dozen interesting people. One doctor came, and somehow we ended up in conversation. He was a gun collector, with a variety of modern weapons, and he was deeply torn over the issue of his ability to own an assault weapon, which he did, and the same right of the shooter’s mother at Sandy Hook. What held him back from agreeing that nobody should have access to such weapons was individualism. If he wouldn’t hurt anyone with an assault rifle shouldn’t he be able to buy one? I tried to help him understand the importance of a societal covenant that because of the deadly nature of such weapons nobody, including law abiding citizens, should be able to own them. It didn’t work.

Each of us has an awareness of being an individual. I make my own choices, you make your own choices, and hopefully we won’t make bad choices that hurt others. But that right of individual choice does not extend indefinitely. I cannot choose to take another person’s life, for instance, and expect that society would be ok with it. I cannot choose to drive my car recklessly, under the influence of alcohol, and take the risk of killing another person if not myself as well. Society would not be ok with that. There are legal limits on individual choice. I would argue that our society needs to extend the limitation on individualism to cover assault or military style weapons. Nobody needs them. My right to go out and buy one (which I have no intention of doing) does not trump another person’s right to live. Take a look at this good article from a recent issue of Psychology today:https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/values-matter/201612/is-radical-individualism-destroying-our-moral-compass

Realistically, what is going to happen? One British journalist commented after Sandy Hook that the debate over gun control in the US was over, because it had become acceptable to slaughter children. Connecticut enacted some very strict gun laws, and that is very good. I hope the rest of the country will do the same after this horrible week.