1C Agenda 10-17-17: America's Love of Guns and the Gun Debate

Essay Assignment #3 Options from Contemporary & Classic Arguments in which you will use the Toulmin Argument (Due 10-24-17)

Option One: Support, refute, or complicate the argument that Garrett Hardin’s analogy in “Lifeboat Ethics” makes an effective argument against traditional liberal approaches to helping the poor.

Option Two: Support, refute, or complicate Harlan Coben’s argument in “The Undercover Parent” that parents are morally compelled to breach their children’s computer privacy for the sake of protecting their children.

Option Three: Addressing Alfred Edmond’s “Why Asking for a Job Applicant’s Facebook Password is Fair Game,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that prospective employees are morally obligated to give up their social media information to potential employers.

Option Four. In the context of Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation,” support, refute, or complicate that humans are morally compelled to eat a vegan diet.

Option Five. In the context of James Q. Wilson’s “Just Take Away Their Guns,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that anti-gun legislation is both ineffective and morally wrong.

Option Six. In the context of Charles Lawrence’s “On Racist Speech,” support, refute, or complicate the assertion that there are conditions that obligate us to censor speech so that there is no such thing as “free speech” as is commonly accepted.

Option Seven. In the context of the essays in Chapter 4, support, defend, or complicate the argument that in the New Economy college is an overrated and overpriced product that should cause many prospective college students to ponder more viable alternatives to building a strong career.

Why We Prefer to Stay in Our Opinion Bubble: The Backfire Effect

Resources for Gun Debate:

"Guns, Campuses, and Madness" by Frank Bruni; show with Stephen Colbert video

"A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths" by Nicholas Kristof

"After a 1996 Mass Shooting . . ." by Will Oremus

"The Simple Truth About Gun Control" by Adam Gopnik

"The Second Amendment Is a Gun-Control Amendment" by Adam Gopnik

"The Gun Debate Won't be Won with Statistics" by David Auerbach

John Oliver video on guns

Pew Research on American Gun Ownership

"Just Take Away Their Guns” by James Q. Wilson

THE PRESIDENT WANTS STILL tougher gun control legislation and thinks it will work. The public supports more gun control laws but suspects they won't work. The public is right.

Legal restraints on the lawful purchase of guns will have little effect on the illegal use of guns. There are some 200 million guns in private ownership, about one-third of them handguns. Only about 2 percent of the latter are employed to commit crimes. It would take a Draconian, and politically impossible, confiscation of legally purchased guns to make much of a difference in the number used by criminals. Moreover, only about one-sixth of the handguns used by serious criminals are purchased from a gun shop or pawnshop. Most of these handguns are stolen, borrowed or obtained through private purchases that wouldn't be affected by gun laws.

What is worse, any successful effort to shrink the stock of legally purchased guns (or of ammunition) would reduce the capacity of law-abiding people to defend themselves. Gun control advocates scoff at the importance of self-defense, but they are wrong to do so. Based on a household survey, Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, has estimated that every year, guns are used -- that is, displayed or fired -- for defensive purposes more than a million times, not counting their use by the police. If his estimate is correct, this means that the number of people who defend themselves with a gun exceeds the number of arrests for violent crimes and burglaries.

The available evidence supports the claim that self-defense is a legitimate form of deterrence. People who report to the National Crime Survey that they defended themselves with a weapon were less likely to lose property in a robbery or be injured in an assault than those who did not defend themselves. Statistics have shown that would-be burglars are threatened by gun-wielding victims about as many times a year as they are arrested (and much more often than they are sent to prison) and that the chances of a burglar being shot are about the same as his chances of going to jail. Criminals know these facts even if gun control advocates do not and so are less likely to burgle occupied homes in America than occupied ones in Europe, where the residents rarely have guns.

Some gun control advocates may concede these points but rejoin that the cost of self-defense is self-injury: Handgun owners are more likely to shoot themselves or their loved ones than a criminal. Not quite. Most gun accidents involve rifles and shotguns, not handguns. Moreover, the rate of fatal gun accidents has been declining while the level of gun ownership has been rising. There are fatal gun accidents just as there are fatal car accidents, but in fewer than 2 percent of the gun fatalities was the victim someone mistaken for an intruder.

Those who urge us to forbid or severely restrict the sale of guns ignore these facts. Worse, they adopt a position that is politically absurd. In effect, they say, "Your government, having failed to protect your person and your property from criminal assault, now intends to deprive you of the opportunity to protect yourself."

Opponents of gun control make a different mistake. The National Rifle Association and its allies tell us that "guns don't kill, people kill" and urge the Government to punish more severely people who use guns to commit crimes. Locking up criminals does protect society from future crimes, and the prospect of being locked up may deter criminals. But our experience with meting out tougher sentences is mixed. The tougher the prospective sentence the less likely it is to be imposed, or at least to be imposed swiftly. If the Legislature adds on time for crimes committed with a gun, prosecutors often bargain away the add-ons; even when they do not, the judges in many states are reluctant to impose add-ons.

Worse, the presence of a gun can contribute to the magnitude of the crime even on the part of those who worry about serving a long prison sentence. Many criminals carry guns not to rob stores but to protect themselves from other armed criminals. Gang violence has become more threatening to bystanders as gang members have begun to arm themselves. People may commit crimes, but guns make some crimes worse. Guns often convert spontaneous outbursts of anger into fatal encounters. When some people carry them on the streets, others will want to carry them to protect themselves, and an urban arms race will be underway.

OUR GOAL SHOULD NOT BE THE disarming of law-abiding citizens. It should be to reduce the number of people who carry guns unlawfully, especially in places -- on streets, in taverns -- where the mere presence of a gun can increase the hazards we all face. The most effective way to reduce illegal gun-carrying is to encourage the police to take guns away from people who carry them without a permit. This means encouraging the police to make street frisks.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution bans "unreasonable searches and seizures." In 1968 the Supreme Court decided (Terry v. Ohio) that a frisk -- patting down a person's outer clothing -- is proper if the officer has a "reasonable suspicion" that the person is armed and dangerous. If a pat-down reveals an object that might be a gun, the officer can enter the suspect's pocket to remove it. If the gun is being carried illegally, the suspect can be arrested.

The reasonable-suspicion test is much less stringent than the probable-cause standard the police must meet in order to make an arrest. A reasonable suspicion, however, is more than just a hunch; it must be supported by specific facts. The courts have held, not always consistently, that these facts include someone acting in a way that leads an experienced officer to conclude criminal activity may be afoot; someone fleeing at the approach of an officer; a person who fits a drug courier profile; a motorist stopped for a traffic violation who has a suspicious bulge in his pocket; a suspect identified by a reliable informant as carrying a gun. The Supreme Court has also upheld frisking people on probation or parole.

Some police departments frisk a lot of people, but usually the police frisk rather few, at least for the purpose of detecting illegal guns. In 1992 the police arrested about 240,000 people for illegally possessing or carrying a weapon. This is only about one-fourth as many as were arrested for public drunkenness. The average police officer will make no weapons arrests and confiscate no guns during any given year. Mark Moore, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, found that most weapons arrests were made because a citizen complained, not because the police were out looking for guns.

It is easy to see why. Many cities suffer from a shortage of officers, and even those with ample law-enforcement personnel worry about having their cases thrown out for constitutional reasons or being accused of police harassment. But the risk of violating the Constitution or engaging in actual, as opposed to perceived, harassment can be substantially reduced.

Each patrol officer can be given a list of people on probation or parole who live on that officer's beat and be rewarded for making frequent stops to insure that they are not carrying guns. Officers can be trained to recognize the kinds of actions that the Court will accept as providing the "reasonable suspicion" necessary for a stop and frisk. Membership in a gang known for assaults and drug dealing could be made the basis, by statute or Court precedent, for gun frisks.

And modern science can be enlisted to help. Metal detectors at airports have reduced the number of airplane bombings and skyjackings to nearly zero. But these detectors only work at very close range. What is needed is a device that will enable the police to detect the presence of a large lump of metal in someone's pocket from a distance of 10 or 15 feet. Receiving such a signal could supply the officer with reasonable grounds for a pat-down. Underemployed nuclear physicists and electronics engineers in the post-cold-war era surely have the talents for designing a better gun detector.

Even if we do all these things, there will still be complaints. Innocent people will be stopped. Young black and Hispanic men will probably be stopped more often than older white Anglo males or women of any race. But if we are serious about reducing drive-by shootings, fatal gang wars and lethal quarrels in public places, we must get illegal guns off the street. We cannot do this by multiplying the forms one fills out at gun shops or by pretending that guns are not a problem until a criminal uses one.

Arguments and Counterarguments

One. Futility Argument in paragraphs 1 and 2

There are too many guns out there. There is no way you’re going to take them off the streets. There would be an armed rebellion. Americans love their guns. Americans equate guns with masculinity, patriotism, and protection from The Other. So it’s too late. The toothpaste is out of the tube. You’re not putting the toothpaste back in.

America as a culture has a unique love for guns.

When there is something bad, evil, or destructive in American society that has deep cultural roots, do we just shrug our shoulders and give up. What about racism? Are we supposed to resign ourselves to any cultural pestilence that comes our way?

Two. Law-Abiding Argument in paragraph 3

Take away guns, and the criminals will still have them while the law-abiding will no longer be able to defend themselves.

But just owning a gun doesn’t work. You have to be well trained and psychologically prepared to use the gun. Also, without gun safety, you or a family member are at greater risk being killed by your own gun than a criminal’s.

Rebuttal in New Yorker by Adam Gopnik

We read in “The ‘Good Guy with a Gun’ is a Myth” in Slate, a liberal publication.

In response to the Las Vegas shooting, we also read in Slate: "No Pistol Could Have Stopped This."

Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association issued a passionate call to arms last year, painting a bleak picture of a dystopian America on the brink of collapse:

We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.

LaPierre’s central message: Owning a gun is the solution. The world is a scary place. There are bad guys everywhere threatening you and your family, and the only thing they’re afraid of is a gun in your hands.

Tragically, a record number of Americans subscribe to some version of this mythology, with 63 percent (67 percent of men polled and 58 percent of women) believing that guns truly do make them safer. The public’s confidence in firearms, however, is woefully misguided: The evidence overwhelmingly shows that guns leave everybody less safe, including their owners.

A study from October 2013 analyzed data from 27 developed nations to examine the impact of firearm prevalence on the mortality rate. It found an extremely strong direct relationship between the number of firearms and firearm deaths. The paper concludes: “The current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer.” This finding is bolstered by several previous studies that have revealed a significant link between gun ownership and firearm-related deaths. This international comparison is especially harrowing for women and children, who die from gun violence in America at far higher rates than in other countries.

If we examine data from within the United States, the odds aren’t any better for gun owners. The most recent study examining the relationship between firearms and homicide rates on a state level, published last April, found a significant positive relationship between gun ownership and overall homicide levels. Using data from 1981–2010 and the best firearm ownership proxy to date, the study found that for every 1 percent increase in gun ownership, there was a 1.1 percent increase in the firearm homicide rate and a 0.7 percent increase in the total homicide rate. This was after controlling for factors such as poverty, unemployment, income inequality, alcohol consumption, and nonhomicide violent crime. Further, the firearm ownership rate had no statistically significant impact on nonfirearm homicides, meaning there was no detectable substitution effect. That is, in the absence of guns, would-be criminals are not switching to knives or some other weapons to carry out homicide. These results are supported by a host of previous studies that illustrate that guns increase the rate of homicides.

Three. Compromise Fourth Amendment Argument in Paragraph 5

Police need more powers. Forget probable cause. Let’s use reasonable suspicion. But will this give the police too much powers. Will our country become a military state? Is James Q. Wilson encouraging this?

Four. Deterrent Argument in Paragraph 10

Does owning guns deter crime? Latest studies indicate otherwise. Also, read “Does Owning a Gun Make You Safer?”

Is James Q. Wilson championing our best interests? He wants to make a military state and is relying on old, inaccurate data that doesn’t support the Deterrent Theory of Gun Ownership.