Would that we were the “Gun-shy State” instead of the “Gunshine State.”
No, not a bunch of wimps and wusses or Second Amendment blasphemers, but a state that knows the difference between self-defense and self-delusion.
In fact, a state that would rather win an infrastructure challenge or an innovation competition than an arms race. A state that knows that 1.1 million Floridians with a license to conceal and carry does not make for a safer society. A state that doesn’t equate gun laws with Constitutional effrontery and gun rights with patriotic fervor.
It’s beyond problematic when packing a concealed weapon for self-defense is seen not as a failure of civil society, to be lamented, but as an act of citizenship to be celebrated. Another ideological arrow in the quiver of neo-American exceptionalism.
That awful incident at the Cobb Grove 16 is only the most recent Exhibit A for our need to rethink a culture that is increasingly warped when it comes to weapons. A popcorn assault is met with gunfire from a .380 semiautomatic.
The shooter was packing as part of his movie-matinee ensemble. Wallet? Check. Keys? Check? Gun? Check. Why have an unexercised right? Why have an unexploited Second Amendment? This is insane. “Lone Survivor,” the movie about kill-or-be-killed in the outlier hell of Afghanistan, made much more sense.
And no, this was not about texting-protocol abuse, as some in the Twitter World have suggested. This was about unconscionable, unnecessary use of deadly force. Cobb Grove as one-sided OK Corral.
And by the way, because conceal and carry is legal, even if against house rules, doesn’t make it otherwise right. It makes it not illegal. Big difference.
Here in Florida, we’ve recently seen a gun rights group sue to force state universities to allow guns in campus housing and in on-campus cars. We know that “Stand Your Ground” will still be standing after another ideology-driven session of the state legislature. We know that Marion Hammer will remain the patron saint of the locked-and-loaded crowd.
And in Washington, the ultimate response to Sandy Hook and Nancy Lanza’s “Live free or die,” home-arsenal mentality, was–in effect–nothing. No reinstitution of the federal ban on the possession, transfer or manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons that expired in 2004. Imagine, Congress couldn’t even agree to limit such weaponry to SWAT team members.
In the search for context in our evolving–or devolving–relationship with guns, look no farther than the National Rifle Association.
For most of its history, the NRA, founded in 1871, was mainly a hunting and “sporting” association. It supported, for example, the 1934 National Firearms Act, the first major federal gun-control legislation, and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act.
But by the 1970s the NRA was making the case that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun–as opposed to the people’s collective right to form a “well-regulated militia” in providing for the common defense. Ronald Reagan was the NRA’s first endorsed presidential candidate.
Today there are more firearms in the United States than there are Americans. And the U.S. population is well over 300 million. The U.S. has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world–far outstripping second place Yemen.
It’s a dubious distinction. While no civilian population is better, as it were, armed, one of the tragic upshots is that approximately 100,000 Americans, on average, are annually killed or wounded with guns. Typically none are militia muskets that the Founding Fathers were referencing in adopting the Bill of Rights in 1791.