A Lesson from Dick and Jane

See Jane, so cute in her little cowgirl dress. She is pretending to be Dale Evans. Jane always minds her manners. See Dick, a.k.a. Snidely Whiplash, who has designs on the silver cap gun she wears in her holster. Jane knows he is a bad guy. She will not hand it over. Dick grabs it from her, and Jane begins to cry. A moment later, Dad comes in and takes the gun away from both of them, declaring, “If you can’t get along, I’ll have to take it away.”

That’s often how conflicts were resolved as I was growing up. I always thought of this as more of a coping technique than a disciplinary action - a parenting cop-out. I mean, here’s a perfect opportunity to teach Dick some critical moral lessons, or at least to protect Jane’s rightful possession of the toy, and it’s lost to the parent’s inability or unwillingness to enforce a fair code of conduct.

I recently became involved in an online discussion that began with a post by a concerned mother in the wake of the Arizona shootings. She claims to always ask the parents of her son’s new friends if they keep guns, and if so, she insists on seeing for herself how they are secured. She will not leave her son in their charge without a satisfactory answer, even if this means he has to miss the sixth grade social event of the year. I replied that the likelihood of her son being injured accidentally by a firearm is extremely low for his age group, given statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, so it’s probably ok for her to relax and worry more about his social development. My comment was intended to be casual parenting exchange, but the barrage of statistics that followed by others made it clear to me that this discussion was heading right down gun control lane. The numbers referred to often were the Small Arms Survey 2007, which lists the number of firearms per 100 residents by country, and assigns a ranking to each country accordingly. The U.S. ranks #1 with almost 90 guns per 100 residents. Wow, that really is a lot of guns! And here’s what I make of those rankings:

At first glance I’d say it’s pretty obvious the U.S. has a lot more guns per capita than any of the countries ranked, followed by Yemen, which I know little about, and Switzerland, where gun control laws are far more lax than here. I don’t see Israel in the rankings, but they also allow their citizens very easy access to guns. Ownership alone doesn’t give us a complete picture, though, so let’s compare homicide rates. Both Israel and Switzerland have very low homicide rates. Interesting that South Africa has the highest homicide rate, and a very low rate of gun ownership. I’m actually quite surprised by the low homicide rate in the U.S. relative to the number of guns, assuming this Wiki source is credible. I would have expected to at least see a correlation between gun availability and homicide rates here, but such isn’t the case. The numbers would suggest to me that perhaps guns are really not the issue at all - that homicide rates are influenced by a lot of other factors and that this is cause for further study. They’re also saying that, along with stepped up enforcement, social policy interventions to reduce handgun deaths among urban 17-24 year olds are important, as are mental health and suicide prevention initiatives. What they don’t suggest is that fear should overtake us, just yet.

France ranks as one of the lowest in homicide rates, so we might look to the French as an example of what’s right in their society. That’s a good comparison for me, since this is actually my first country and language.

My mother used to tell me that France was thought of as the enlightened place among old country Europeans of her parents’ day - everyone wanted to live there - the people were thought of as educated, refined, socially advanced. Unfortunately, this shining image did not stop the French from collaborating with the Nazis to send nearly all of its Jewish citizens to the gas chambers. So, the extremely low homicide rate will have to continue for many centuries, as I see it, before they can make up for the millions of innocents they executed. It didn’t stop there - the treatment of Algerians by the French a decade later was absolutely horrifying. How did these poor people defend themselves? They finally became armed and revolted - not as a militia, but as a severely abused underclass of individuals who resorted to gun smuggling and covert operations just to defend their lives.

One thing I noticed often about my mother and extended family is that, while they fully understood the cruel treatment of minorities they had witnessed in their country, they had a very muddled concept of what the U.S. constitution is all about. They thought, “If the law doesn’t work, the government should change it. Simple.” It must seem that way to other foreigners as well - they can’t figure out why we confused Americans don’t outlaw or severely limit gun ownership, or anything else that happens to get in the way of our short term progress. After all, can’t we just change the law again and again? It’s easy - the French do it. When Brigitte Bardot expresses her anti-Muslim sentiment publicly, she is fined under a new law that prohibits hate speech. Two years later, parliament passes a law prohibiting Muslim women from wearing veils in public on the grounds that religion should only be privately observed. Should we still be impressed with the low homicide rate in France?

As close as it seems that we have approached laws of the sort in this country, over the long term we still make much more human rights advances than many countries with fewer guns and/or lower homicide rates. A Holocaust couldn’t happen here, the battle of Algiers wouldn’t happen here. In spite of public criticism (and the freedom that allows it), even the most conservative among us defended their Muslim neighbors’ First Amendment right to build an Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero. Fred Phelps and the Westborough Church, hostile as they may speak, are not criminally charged for announcing their convictions (although the recent rulings will now limit their ability to disrupt others’ private observances). We owe all of this to our constitution - a fixed document, not a working document or a set of mere guidelines. That said, additional regulations limiting Second Amendment rights, which seem to be at the heart of the great gun control divide, would only serve to whittle away that very framework – proven for two centuries to be the only stabilizing structure of our often faltering society.

See Dick smirk. Dick knows where Dad has hidden the gun, and he’s going to go get it now. If Dad finds out, phooey! Dick will steal another one from Alice and Jerry’s house.