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It’s not every day that the left wing professes its love of guns, but new firearm technology is changing that. Personalized firearms, or “smart guns,” are getting lots of attention as they become more and more of a reality. These weapons use a range of techniques to make sure guns don’t get into the wrong hands — from reading microchip implants in people to fingerprint scanning — and only fire when their legal owners pull the trigger. Almost as a law of physics, this is going to prevent some accidental deaths and make adventurous kids with gun-owning parents safer. With the National Rifle Association’s and gun store owners’ opposition and sane peoples’ support, requiring that all guns be smart is the debate of the day. But as the technology goes to the market and the fight heats up, the actual issue of violence in America can’t be pushed aside.
Lawmakers jumped on the idea of smart guns before these gadgets were even a reality. New Jersey passed a law in 2002 saying that, once the weapons were available to the public, retailers could only sell smart guns. A lot’s happened since then to remind us that an armed society (no matter how “smartly” armed it might be) isn’t polite. It’s just violent. In the year following the Century Theater mass shooting in Aurora, 23 mass killings happened in the U.S. As far as violent crime rates go, we’re somewhere in between Iran and North Korea — off the charts for an industrialized country.
That’s not surprising, since we have the highest rate of gun ownership in the world. Mexico, Haiti and Guatemala join us on the short list of countries where bearing arms is a constitutional right. Germany, on the other hand, doesn’t list gun ownership as a right and has a way lower gun homicide rate than us. Gun advocates still point to our Second Amendment to end any debate on regulation, saying that our right to own guns is clear as day. Too bad that there’s a huge amount (maybe even a majority) of law review articles published since 1888 that say it isn’t.
There’s still a feeling that the Second Amendment was put in place so we could have a good ol’ revolution someday. The dream of a popular revolt has kept gun advocates warm at night for far too long, though. Assuming the everyday gun-toting American can tear his eyes away from WWE for long enough to organize something like that, there are still a few holes in the logic of gun ownership. First, our government has already got us beat in the arena of violence. Americans using guns to revolt would be up against the bigger and better guns of a world superpower: the U.S. military. If our freedom fighters got a hold of those superior weapons, the government would still have aircraft and tanks. If we got our hands on those weapons, the jig would be up anyway; the government has nukes.
A second and more important reason that armed revolution is useless: We have more democratic and less bloody alternatives. We don’t live in a country like Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, when parliament was dissolved and secret police terrorized the country. We’re more privileged in America, and changing our country’s direction is just a matter of working together.
Ordinary Americans could have huge control over their government if they ever organized successfully. We got a taste of that possibility in 2011 during the Occupy Wall Street movement that started in September of that year. It might seem like this popular movement tuckered out ages ago, but OWS is still active — wiping out over 2,000 peoples’ student debt (about $4 million) with donation money just last year, for example. There’s no reason that peaceful movements can’t learn from Occupy and be more successful in the future. The track record is good so far; guns don’t bring people out of debt, or solve any other problems. Organized people do.
This is the conversation that we should be having, with smart guns being a small side note. For what it’s worth, the new technology and the laws that come with it are just common sense. We shouldn’t keep each other in danger with guns that fire for anybody. Whether smart guns become mandatory or not, our national obsession with weapons is keeping us in the dark ages. There are other ways to accomplish our goals and protect ourselves. They might become obvious if we step back to see what the real problem is: not guns in the wrong hands, but guns in anyone’s hands.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Jared Conner at jared.conner@colorado.edu.
