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It would seem that President Obama has a new prey in his sites. It is, however, a target that he has hunted for some time but never really managed to wound, let alone kill. The focus of Obama’s attention is gun violence and the aim is really to make American communities safer places to live.

The post Bang, bang — democracy’s dead: Obama and the politics of gun control appeared first on OUPblog.

In this post, starting again with a few highly-plausible Kantian metaphysical, moral, and political premises, I want to present two new, simple, step-by-step arguments which prove decisively that the ownership and use of firearms (aka guns) and capital punishment (aka the death penalty) are both rationally unjustified and immoral.

The post A world with persons but without guns or the death penalty appeared first on OUPblog.

By Philip J. Cook and Kristin A. Goss

The debate over gun control generates more heat than light. But no matter how vigorously the claims and counterclaims are asserted, the basic facts are not just a matter of personal opinion. Here are our conclusions about some of the factual issues that are at the heart of the gun debate.

1. Keeping a handgun to guard against intruders is now a Constitutional right. In Heller vs. District of Columbia (2008) and McDonald vs. Chicago (2010) the US Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 majority that the Second Amendment provides a personal right to keep guns in the home. States and cities are hence not allowed to prohibit the private possession of handguns. However, the Court made it clear in these decisions that the Second Amendment does not rule out reasonable regulations of gun possession and use.
2. Half of gun owners indicate that the primary reason they own a gun is self-defense. In practice, however, guns are only used in about 3% of cases where an intruder breaks into an occupied home, or about 30,000 times per year. That compares with over 42 million households with guns. One way to understand just how rare gun use is in self-defense of the home is to look at it this way: on average, a gun-owning household will use a gun to defend against an intruder once every 1,500 years.
3. As many Americans die of gunshot wounds as in motor-vehicle crashes (around 33,000). In the last 30 years, over 1 million Americans have died in civilian shootings — more than all American combat deaths in all wars in the last century.


Non violence sculpture by Carl Fredrik Reutersward, Malmo, Sweden. Photo by Francois Polito. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

4. Most gun deaths in the United States are suicides. There are 20,000 gun suicides per year, compared with 11,000 gun homicides and 600 fatal accidents. While there are hundreds of thousands of serious suicide attempts each year, mostly with drugs and cutting instruments, half of the successful suicides are with guns. The difference is in lethality — the case-fatality rate with guns is 90%, far higher than for the other common means. Availability influences choice of weapon; states with the highest prevalence of gun ownership have four times the gun suicide rate as the states with the lowest prevalence.
5. The homicide rate today is half of what it was in 1991. That is part of the good news in the United States — violent crime rates of all kinds have plunged since the early 1990s, and violent crime with guns has declined in proportion. (Two thirds of all homicides are committed with guns.) Still, homicide remains a serious problem — homicide is the second leading cause of death for American youths. Our homicide rates remain far higher than those of Canada, the UK, Australia, France, Israel, and other wealthy countries. We are not an exceptionally violent nation, but criminal violence in America is much more likely to involve guns and hence be fatal.
6. The widespread availability of guns in America does not cause violence, nor does it prevent violence. Generally speaking there is little statistical relationship between the prevalence of gun ownership in a jurisdiction and the overall rate of robbery, rape, domestic violence, or aggravated assault. But where gun ownership is common, the violence is more likely to involve guns and hence be more deadly than in jurisdictions where guns are scarcer. In place of the old bumper strip, we’d say: “Guns don’t kill people, they just make it real easy.”
7. The primary goal of gun regulation is to save lives by separating guns and violence. Federal and state laws regulate who is allowed to possess them, the circumstances under which they can be carried and discharged in public, certain design features, the record-keeping required when they are transferred, and the penalties for criminal use. The goal is to make it less likely that criminal assailants will use a gun. The evidence is clear that some of these regulations are effective and do save lives.
8. Gun violence can also be reduced by reducing overall violence rates. Gun violence represents the intersection of guns and violence. Effective action to strengthen our mental health, education, and criminal justice systems would reduce intentional violence rates across the board, including gun violence (both suicide and criminal assault). But there is no sense in the assertion that we should combat the causes of violence instead of regulating guns. The two approaches are quite distinct and both important.

 Kristin A. Goss is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. She is the author of Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. Philip J. Cook is ITT/Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Sociology at Duke University. He is the co-author (with Jens Ludwig) of Gun Violence: The Real Costs. Kristen A. Goss and Philip J. Cook are co-authors of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know®.

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The post Eight facts about the gun debate in the United States appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Elvin Lim

The tragic shootings in Newtown, CT, have plunged the nation into the foundational debate of American politics.

Over at Fox News, the focus as been on mourning and the tragedy of what happened. As far as the search for solutions go, the focus has been on how to cope, what to say to children, and what to do about better mental health screening. It is consistent with the conservative view that when bad things happen, they happen because of errant individuals, not flawed societies. The focus on mourning indicates the view that when bad things happen, they are the inevitable costs of liberty.

At MSNBC, the focus has been on tragedy as a wake up call, not a thing in itself to simply mourn; on finding legislative and governmental solutions — gun control. This is consistent with the liberal view that when bad things happen, they happen because of flawed societies, not just the result of errant individuals or evil as an abstract entity.

The question of which side is right is an imponderable. Conservatives believe that in the end, our vigilance against tyrannical government is our first civic duty. This was the logic behind the Second Amendment. It comes from a long line of Radical Whig thinking that the Anti-Federalists inherited. That is why Second Amendment purists can reasonably argue that that citizens should continue to have access to (even) semi-automatic guns. They will say that the Second Amendment is not just for hunting; it is for liberty against national armies. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that a government duly constituted by the people need not fear government; and it is citizen-on-citizen violence that we ought to try to prevent. This line of thinking began with Hobbes, who had theorized that we lay down our arms against each other, so that one amongst us alone wields the sword. Later, we called this sovereign the state. The Federalists leaned in this tradition.

Should we fear government more or fellow citizens who have access to guns? Should government or citizens enjoy the presumption of virtue? Who knows. There is no answer on earth that would permanently satisfy both political sides in America, because conservatives believe that most citizens, most of the time, are virtuous, and there is no need to take a legislative sledgehammer to restrict the liberty of a few errant individuals at the expense of everybody else. Liberals, conversely, believe that government and regulatory activity are virtuous and necessary most of the time, and there is little practical cost to most citizens to restrict a liberty (to bear arms) that is rarely, if ever, invoked. Put another way: conservatives focus on the vertical dimension of tyranny; liberals fear most the horizontal effects of mutual self-destruction.

What is a president to do? It depends on which side of the debate he stands. Barack Obama believes that the danger we pose to ourselves exceeds the danger of tyrannical government (for which a right to bear arms was originally codified). The winds of public opinion may be swaying in his direction, and Obama appeared to be ready to mould it when he asked: “Are we really prepared to say that we are powerless in the face of such carnage?”

Here is one neo-Federalist argument that Obama can use, should he take on modern Anti-Federalists. If the Constitution truly were of the people, then it is self-contradictory to speak of vigilance against it. In other words, the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It was written in an era of monarchy, as a bulwark against Kings. To those who claim to be constitutional conservatives, Obama may reasonably ask: either the federal government is not sanctioned by We the People, and therefore we must forever be jealous of it; or, the federal government represents the People and we need not treat it as a distant potentate and overstate our fear of it.

If this is to be the age of renewed faith in government, as it appears to be Obama’s mission, then the President will be more likely to convince Americans to lay down our arms; he will persuade us that our vigilance against government by the people is counter-prouctive and anachronistic. But, to move “forward,” he must first convince the NRA and its ideological compatriots that we can trust our government. Only the greatest of American presidents have succeeded in this most herculean of tasks, for our attachment to the spirit of ’76 cannot be understated.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

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The post On the Second Amendment: should we fear government or ourselves? appeared first on OUPblog.

I had a different post written. About ethics in nonfiction. I'd like to publish that post some day. I'm sure I will. But not today.

Because as much as we debate and discuss what is the best way for our children to learn, the best way for us to write for children, what constitutes nonfiction, how angry it makes me when people play fast and loose with the facts, all of that is moot if unstable people are able to have easy access to guns.

What good is it to create books for children, to teach them, to care so much, if people in power are too cowardly and bull-headed, too self-interested about their own political futures and too caught up in rhetoric, to legislate wisely to protect children? To protect all of us?

I don't have the words to talk about the calamity in Newtown, CT, in a way that will make the (mostly) men in power change the laws in this country. I don't have the perfect way of describing how angry I feel about the fact that it is really difficult for many mentally ill people to get good treatment and really easy for people in most states in our nation to get guns. Guns not for hunting, or killing the odd rabid raccoon on your land, but guns for murdering people.

People I've been writing with and talking with since Friday understand legislation better than I do. They understand guns and gun laws and gerrymandering and all the reasons why there is more regulation in automobile safety (which is of course a good thing to have) than in the purchase of guns. They understand that in some states it takes a month to get a gun while in a neighboring state you can walk into Walmart and buy one.  (I really like what Nicholas Kristoff had to say the other day in "Do We Have the Courage To Stop This?") 

There is no reason why there should be so many guns in this country--250,000,000 plus. There is no reason why there are so many guns that are easily concealable. Guns that you don't have to reload so you can murder people in movie theaters and children coloring at their first-grade tables. There is no reason. Don't give me the right to bear arms. Don't give me the argument that you want to defend yourself. A gun in your home is more likely to kill you or someone you love than an intruder. Don't give me that.

Give me a country like most of the other civilized countries in the world where people recognize that guns kill innocent people. Give me a country where we put health and safety first, where we put love first, where we put children first. (I really like what Gail Collins had to say about finding the best in our country again in "Looking for America." ) 

I did a school visit in Newtown, CT, in April, 2010. Not at Sandy Hook, but at the Catholic school a mile and a half away, St. Rose of Lima. It was a good day, really nice people, though there were a couple of snafus (on my part), funny things that happened that I liked to tell people about afterwards. Now all I can think about is those kids I met, their lovely parents and teachers, and how they've been touched by unspeakable tragedy. 

So many people I know are one degree away from this tragedy. 

But aren't we all?  

There's a Mr. Rogers quote that's been making the rounds. Have you seen it? Here it is, from this site, in case you haven't:

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world."

Lawrence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University.  He has published more than 100 books and articles, argued more than three dozen cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and has frequently testified before Congress on a broad range of constitutional issues.  In his newest book, The Invisible Constitution, he argues that there is an unseen Constitution-impalpable but powerful-that accompanies the parchment version.  Tribe illustrates how some of our more cherished and widely held beliefs about constitutional rights are not part of the written document but can be discerned only by piecing together hints and clues from its design and history.  In the excerpt below we look at Congress’s power over States and Cities.

It should go without saying that liberals aren’t the only ones who would suffer buyer’s remorse were we to accept a text-only Constitution as our lot.  Consider an act of Congress-the “Above-Average Gun Violence Act”-that requires any city in the United States with a higher-than-average annual per capita rate of violent crimes involving the use of firearms to enact, within one month of the Justice Department’s release of the relevant annual figures, a gun control law  (i.e., a law regulating the purchase, sale, and possession of firearms) that has been submitted to, and approved by, the attorney general, who in turn is directed to approve no gun control law that is not “at least as strict as that of the city or county in the United States with the lowest annual per capita rate of violent crime involving the use of firearms.”  Would such a congressional enactment be constitutional?  Can the question be answered by looking at the imaginary statute on its face, or would the answer depend on whether the statute was being applied to a city other than the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia?

As to the District of Columbia, there would be no difficulty finding an affirmative source of the authority being exercised by Congress.  It would be the Article I, section 8, clause 17, stating that “Congress shall have Power To…exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Accepting of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.” Whether acting directly, or through power it has delegated to the District of Columbia government, Congress is affirmatively authorized to regulate economic and social life throughout the nation’s capital, and thus to direct those whom it entrusts with governmental power over Washington, D.C., to adopt the firearms measures specified in the Above-Average Gun Violence Act-subject, of course, to any limitations we conclude the Second Amendment imposes on laws enacted by Congress.

As for other cities, it is at least strongly arguable that Congress, acting pursuant to the Commerce Clause, would be exercising one of the “powers…delegated to the United States by the Constituion,” as the Tenth Amendment requires.  The inclusion in the statute of firearms “possession” along with “purchase” and “sale” would, at least under modern precedent, be justified by the power of Congress, conferred by Article I, section 8, clause 18, “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers,” on the theory that Congress could reasonably deem federal control of possession essential to effective enforcement of a federal ban on purchase and sale-a theory articulated most recently by Justice Scalia in connection with the congressional ban on the possession as well as sale of marijuana, even under close supervision by a state that permits medically licensed marijuana use.

At most, however, this analysis establishes that the imagined federal statue falls within the affirmative authority of Congress under the Constitution, leaving open the question whether the statute nonetheless runs afoul of some negative constitutional prohibition.

The most obvious one would seem to be the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bare Arms, shall not be infringed.” Does the statute “infringe” that Second Amendment right?

There is precious little judicial precedent, but a mass of academic writing addresses the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment, with a majority of scholars concluding that it is only each state’s “well regulated Militia” that the Second Amendment protects from federal interference, and a minority arguing that the preamble’s reference to the necessity of a “well regulated Militia” should not render irrelevant or totally dilute “the right of the people”- even as individuals unconnected to any organized state military force-”to keep and bear Arms.”  Sorting through this body of precedent and scholarhsip would be well beyond the point of this book; it suffices here to recognize that neither pole in this ongoing debate can point to decisive textual support for its conclusion and that both must rely on sources of meaning well beyond the visable text.

A District of Columbia statute undergoing judicial challenge as of the writing of this book raises the question whether, whatever else it might mean, the Second Amendment has either no application or at most a far less obust application to congressional measures to regulate firearms traffic, possession, and use in the nation’s capital. Even if the preamble of the amendment is not read to limit its reach to weaponry in the hands of state militias as such, that preamble might well be read to limit the amendment’s reach to federal control of firearms in the hands of citizens in the several states, as opposed to federal control of firearms in distinctly federal territoris, and especially in the seat of the federal government.  If that reading were adopted, then the imagined statute would seem to pose no great constitutional difficulty in its application to the District of Columbia.  But what of its application to New Orleans or Dallas or Los Angeles?…