I Don't Like Mondays

My family received a message from me last Monday informing them that I was in Kentucky, that I was OK, oh and by the way there had been a mass shooting about an hour away from where I was in Louisville, Kentucky. 

I was in Kentucky because I was on my way to Nashville which had had a school shooting the day after I arrived barely two weeks prior. And those are just the mass shootings that make the news. 

A mass shooting is defined as any shooting where 3 or more people are injured. There had been another fifteen mass shootings in the two weeks between the Nashville schools shooting and Louisville shooting. 

On my little detour from Route 66 to Ohio and Nashville I have had a lot of time to think about this. 

Since leaving Chicago I have driven 1500 miles, mostly in the right direction. And as I've driven those 1500 miles bugs have splatted against my windscreen. That insect, a unique life that was extinguished in a second by something natural selection had absolutely no way to predict and try to evolve around. In that snap second, gone. 

Most people know that Americans derive the right to bear arms from the second amendment. However very few people know the full 27 words in the Amendment.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." ¹

That's it. That's the full text of the second amendment. There are no additional clauses or sentences. It is a single 27 word sentence where the first three words are "A well regulated". I don't call this state of affairs well regulated

Fyi most scholars agree the "Militia" being referred to has now evolved into the modern State Guard (the US equivalent to Military Reservists).

What's more the Framers didn't just come up with the idea that you should just hand every citizen a gun and tell them to have at it all by themselves 

"That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law."²

• Bill of Rights [1688] 

No, English Common Law beat the Americans by at least a hundred years. But only for a Protestants. Something the notoriously Catholic former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who wrote a 2008 opinion³ upholding the individual's self-defence to own a gun rather than the collective security to ban a gun or class of gun probably would have had views on. He was also generally a champion of the somewhat euphemistically called religious rights as well.

 

School shootings in particular always hit a particular nerve with me, as I'm sure they do with most people. I think in large part because at 26 I am a member of the Columbine generation. The 1999 Columbine school shooting⁴ would have happened in my nursery year at school, meaning I do not remember a time before school shootings.

Being born and raised on the West Coast one of my earliest memories is in the US having an earthquake drill during first grade where we all had to get under our desks and hide. And while I distinctly remember my teacher calling out "Earthquake, Earthquake, Earthquake" during the drill. But as I've gotten older it's always struck me: what if that was an active shooter drill, or the way to ease 6 year olds into them.

To keep me company I've been listening to the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole's book on Brexit⁵ and how shocked he was at the willing blindness of the English to how soaked in blood Ulster was before the Good Friday Agreement, and could be again if Brexit goes poorly. And while I'm aware that I'm about to make a grossly naive oversimplification as someone who has had to actually use the phrase "The Real IRA is not actually the REAL IRA" when explaining the current situation in Northern Ireland. 

But I could not help thinking as I listened to all 14 hours of the book. After both the independence and civil wars of what is now the Republic of Ireland in the 1920s and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement the Republicans gave up their guns. These are people who wielded their rights to bear arms, rightly or wrongly and in many cases to excess, to overthrow a tyrannical state that was actively implementing policies to discriminate against them based on religious and ethnic prejudice. But most importantly these people knew when to put these arms down. Unfortunately that knowledge came at the price of thousands of lives lost and hundreds of thousands more maim.

There are legitimate arguments you can make for owning guns. I don't generally agree with them but I can empathize. Hunting is probably the best known. Some people just enjoy the thrill of firing guns and the challenge of marksmanship. In more rural and farming communities guns can have a very necessary deterrent factor. If you're a farmer and the cops are an hour away a gun will make somebody think twice from nicking your copper irrigation pipes. But those aren't the arguments being made by the gun nuts in the US. It's all government tyranny and protecting freedom. The NRA and their political allies seems to be trying to style themselves akin to the IRA without being willing to acknowledge the cost the Republican movement had on both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as well as the rest of the UK.

In one of my earlier blog posts I wrote about the American concept of freedom and the Ninth Amendment, how it establishes unenumerated rights. I maintain my position that the American constitution is a radical document, it is still a bastion of negative rights. It is very telling that one of the few rights it definitely grants is the right to purchase a weapon and then walk into your place of work after you've been fired and shot ten people as the shooter in Louisville did.