You and Your Defense

Following the horrific massacre in Uvalde, Texas, calls for tightened gun control restrictions arose as predictably from some corners as the counter-argument that was tossed back that additional mental health assets and armed teachers and tougher law enforcement were the policies that would create a safer society. With the appalling frequency of these tragic events comes a sad familiarity with the resulting “debate”. By “debate”, of course, we refer to a habit on both sides of designating their opponents as “gun nuts” or “gun grabbers”, “red necks” or “socialists”, that has only intensified in the 23 years since Columbine, the decade since Sandy Hook, and the weeks since Uvalde, Texas. The usual suspects on both sides arrive on cue with the same arguments.

Yesterday saw politicians at protests across the state stridently attacking their opponents for wanting to take away individual rights. For taking an un-American step down a dark road to tyranny.

Was it a gun rights rally or an abortion rights march?

The parallels in the rhetoric would be ironically amusing were they not so troubling. Have Americans reached a point at which they are only capable of screaming at each other through the most simplistic and venal memes and sound bites you can imagine? Are we so incapable of wrapping our minds around ideas we disagree with that anyone espousing it can only be lying, evil, and intent on our destruction?

The first step to finding common ground on any issue has to be accepting the history as it happened, even if that history is an inconvenient reminder of hypocrisy or inconsistency.

• We begin by recalling that Governor Ronald Reagan, supported by the National Rifle Association, signed California’s 1967 Mulford Act, making open carry of firearms illegal in most urban and suburban areas after armed Black Panthers protested police brutality at the State Capitol.
• In 1963, after Lee Harvey Oswald used a mail-order rifle to assassinate JFK, the NRA endorsed making them illegal: “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”
• The NRA also supported the 1938 Federal Firearms Act and the 1934 National Firearms Act.

Let’s also point out some realities many Democrats would like to avoid remembering.

• Many long-serving Democratic political leaders supporting the Black Lives Matter protests also supported the mass incarceration of black men in the “War on Drugs.” During the 1990s they called for “more cops on the street,” and eagerly facilitated the militarization of police after 9/11.
• They put massive numbers of “weapons of war” on the streets in the hands of people who too often used them to kill Americans of color, or couldn’t be prevailed upon to use them at all to save teachers and children in Uvalde. Police cannot be relied on as protectors.
• They also allocated woefully insufficient resources to guarantee universal access to high-quality mental services in the Affordable Care Act even though they held the Presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress after campaigning on making such care a priority.

Here’s some other facts that don’t implicate one party or the other but also have to be considered:

1. Delaware sits in a 100-mile “border zone” wherein federal immigration officers are empowered to ignore most Constitutional rights. Delaware law enforcement agencies daily collect thousands of license-plate numbers from traveling citizens suspected of no crimes, hijack cell-phone meta-data indiscriminately as you drive up Route 1, and largely operate without civilian oversight. If individual gun rights were intended to prevent this kind of overreach, they have utterly failed.
2. Anyone desiring gun confiscation needs to realize that there are more privately held firearms in America than people. As Prohibition, abortion before Roe v Wade, and the War on Drugs have taught us, simply banning things you don’t like never works.
3. We imprison more of our own citizens, per capita, than any other developed nation — including China — and that hasn’t stopped the growth of gun violence. Thinking that we only need to “enforce the gun laws we have” and “not coddle criminals” is an Orwellian fantasy no matter how many privatized prisons we build or how many nonviolent drug users we put into cages.
4. Mental health care availability nationwide is a sick joke. According to the Commonwealth Fund, 50% of Americans have to drive more than an hour to receive mental health care because half the counties in the US don’t have even one psychiatrist in residence.
5. We are the world’s leading exporter of weapons of war, and routinely kill people in other countries in violation of international law and our own Constitution. Funding the most expensive military on Earth instead of taking care of our own citizens has real opportunity costs and cultural impact.
6. Delaware’s gun violence problem is statistically weighted by the City of Wilmington, where gun violence traces back to the systemic, long-term poverty created by state and municipal policies leaving it susceptible to an urban flight that has devastated the tax base.

Non-Partisan Delaware doesn’t have all the answers. It’s unlikely anyone does.

What we do have is the courage to admit that, a willingness to deal with all the facts, and a commitment to having these discussions like rational adults and statesmen. Ranting in public to pile up votes by demonizing those who disagree with us only makes the problems more intractable.

Extremists on either side will demonize themselves. We don’t need to help them.