It's Time for Us to Wake Up

When two (or three, or four) people conspired to bomb the Oklahoma City Federal Building last week, they joined the exceedingly exclusive club of terrorists who operate inside America. They joined another club, however, which is far less exclusive: American perpetrators of random violence.

Was the bombing related to the conflagration at David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas, which had happened exactly two years before? Are the bombers extremists? Or are they white supremacists? These questions have occupied most of the discussion of this tragedy, but they are not really relevant.

Koresh is dead, after all, and will remain dead; people who bomb Federal buildings and murder children are all extremists. It is simply an issue of definition. It is irrelevant that they are white supremacists, since we need no more evidence than their most recent action to convict them of moral decrepitude.

These questions all serve to keep the debate on (relatively) comfortable ground. We avoid asking the hardest question: Is it our fault? Is such brutality as isolated as we would like to believe, or is it the logical extension of a society which condones and perpetuates violence?

Violence fascinates and excites us. From the yearly Schwarzenegger blockbuster movie to the Mortal Kombat Super Nintendo phenomenon, we teach American children that murder is acceptable, as long as it is funny, or clever, or amusing. Yet we expect them to understand when we say that the Oklahoma City incident was none of these things. Moreover, we introduce them to the tools of real murder, and expect them not to carry out the lessons they learned from their video games. Stories of children killing children far too often mar the front pages of national newspapers.

The Oklahoma City bombing was not merely two lunatics with Ammonia Nitrate and blasting caps. It was a symptom of our violent society, but it was also a product of allowing private citizens to possess dangerous weapons, whether blasting caps or hand-guns.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), in a 1993 edition of its industry publication, editorialized: "There's a way to help ensure that new faces and pocketbooks will continue to patronize your business: Use the schools... Every decade there is a whole new crop of shining young faces taking their place in society as adults...How else would you get these potential customers and future leaders together?... Schools are an opportunity. Grasp it."

This fearful comment on the firearms industry's morality is baffling and enraging, but unsurprising. In our profit-driven world, we subconsciously know that gun companies seek new faces and pocketbooks in the same way banks, supermarkets and athletic events do. But unlike savings accounts, half gallons of milk and baseball games, guns kill, and we knowingly allow gun-makers to glorify this real life violence to American children.

Gun enthusiasts respond that guns don't kill, people do. This truism is too simple to be accurate, but it is interesting because it suggests that killing is a natural instinct for us, and guns are merely the mechanism of choice. Recent propaganda has gone so far as to sanctify handguns because they are less than one-third as likely as shotguns and rifles to cause fatalities.

Pro-gun groups have indicated that a hand-gun ban would actually increase shooting fatalities, by forcing criminals to switch to larger guns. But if banning handguns might lead to an increase in gun-related death rates, banning all guns certainly would not.

In America, we take our freedoms seriously, especially those sacrosanct freedoms specified in the Bill of Rights. We do not surrender any liberty to our government easily or quickly, and the right to keep and bear arms is no exception. We hold tightly to the roots of our rugged individualism; we feel that owning a gun preserves our autonomy and our independence from government control.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a staunch protector of our rights as citizens, has taken an uncharacteristically unprotective stance on the right to keep and bear arms. They reason that the Second Amendment was created to give states the right to maintain a militia to protect them from federal tyranny. It does not guarantee an individual right to bear arms.

Federal Courts have supported this view. In U.S. v. Warin, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, "Since the Second Amendment...applies only to the right of the State to maintain a militia and not to the individual's right to bear arms, there can be no serious claim to any express constitutional right to possess a firearm."

And even if the amendment were construed to guarantee the individual right to keep and bear arms, it would still be for the purpose of protecting against federal tyranny. If this were the case, then it would also have to protect the possession of nuclear weapons, armored tanks and short-range missiles. Handguns are of little value against the U.S. military, and therefore would not be the amendment's concern anyway. As pro-gun advocates presumably accept a ban on the personal possession of nuclear warheads, they are implicitly allowing the government to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

The debate, then, centers chiefly around when this control should stop. The National Rifle Association and the NSSF say it should stop now, or even that we have too much control and that regulation should be loosened. The Oklahoma City bombing, along with the rampant gun violence in our cities, provides a striking testimony to the contrary.

The problem is not that the American people do not have enough weapons, nor that they do not have powerful enough weapons. The bombing shows in no uncertain terms that the right to keep and bear arms is protected, but it shows equally clearly that a few extremists exercising these rights can kill hundreds of innocent citizens.

The ACLU, it seems, has the right idea, but it has not taken it far enough. Drastic problems require drastic solutions, and violence in America has become a drastic problem. America has conducted a 200-year experiment in allowing private citizens to own arms, and it is time we pronounced that experiment a failure.

We are over our heads, and if we want gun violence to stop, we might as well admit that giving more people more guns is not the right answer. As John Locke argued nearly three centuries ago, when we come together to form societies, we must surrender certain rights to the government in exchange for protection. It is time we surrendered the right to keep and bear arms to the Federal Government, so that the Federal Government can finally protect us in return.