Public Comment

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The killing of 49 revelers in an Orlando nightclub on June 12 has produced more outrage than any other mass shooting in this country, even reaching the floor of Congress, where Democrats staged a sit-in protest against Republican intransigence on passing gun control legislation.

So far nothing much has changed in the stand-off between gun control and gun rights advocates, a divide that is sure to escalate in the presidential campaign. After the recent shooting, four measures designed to prevent terrorists from buying guns were defeated in the Senate. What can break the legislative deadlock on gun regulation?

There is a middle ground, not a distinct alternative, but an avenue that both sides might be willing to pursue: taxation and insurance. A public/private revenue stream based on responsible gun ownership could provide funding and opportunity for more effective regulation and compensation for victims. Establishing such a system could build common ground and cooperation between the two camps whose political paradigms are currently totally opposed. 

The notion that all firearms should be taxed and insured like vehicles is expressed in the insightful conclusion to a scholarly work on the second amendment by Saul Cornell: A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (2006). The Berkeley Public Library has only one copy, but the book is readily available in paperback. 

Cornell’s work is required reading for those who want to understand the second amendment and how the courts have interpreted the right to bear arms throughout our national history. It was published before Heller, the 2008 landmark Supreme Court case written by the late Judge Antonin Scalia, much heralded by conservatives and reviled by liberals. For a scathing analysis of Heller, read Michael Waldman’s The Second Amendment, A Biography (2014), which relies heavily on Cornell for background. The Berkeley Public Library has three copies. 

Briefly stated, Cornell found that the second amendment was intended to inscribe a civic or collective responsibility to serve in a defensive militia, as opposed to the British standing army. This traditional reading of the second amendment as collective responsibility, not an individual right, enabled the creation of the National Guard in 1903 and lasted well into the twentieth century. In response to the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, The National Rifle Association, once a sportsman’s club, morphed into an effective political lobby advocating an aggressive interpretation of the second amendment based on the individual right to bear arms; that’s the kernel of a complicated history. 

The Dominance Effect

Such control is momentary and illusory because violence invites social consequences from remorse to suicide, vengeance, or punishment, just as natural eruptions - earthquakes, fire, and flood - change the physical landscape. For every action there is a reaction. The convergence of June headlines: the worst mass killing in this nation’s history in Orlando and a light sentence for rape by a Stanford athlete was coincidental. But synchronicity matters, and it’s difficult to separate the import of such events. The common thread that binds gun and domestic violence is the need to dominate. 

In mourning for the Orlando victims, we should reflect upon the lessons of Macbeth, one of the great political dramas in our language, given a riveting production at Berkeley Rep this spring. In a parable of power and psychological truth, the pivotal scene occurs when Macduff learns of the slaughter of his family back home in Scotland. All my pretty ones? What all my pretty chickens and their dam at one fell swoop? Malcolm urges him to dispute it like a man, to which Macduff replies, I shall do so. But I must also feel it as a man. 

These words turn the action of the play towards the restoration of a just society. The exiles feel their own pain, by extension the agony of their country under tyranny, develop alliances and a strategy, and then act in common cause. Macduff’s resolve I shall do so is completed in the final combat scenes of liberation. 

The photos of the Orlando victims, mostly young Hispanics – half of them Puerto Rican – comprise a gallery of pretty brown boys and girls, all fallen in one fell swoop. We must first feel the pain as men and women, dispute the causes and consequences, and then we must act. We have a collective responsibility to end the slaughter of the innocents or relinquish our heritage as a free people. 

In a New York Times article Amanda Taub connects mass murder and domestic violence. FBI data shows that 57 percent of recent mass shootings “included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims — and that 16 percent of the attackers had previously been charged with domestic violence.” The correlation suggests that the perps need to control; it was no surprise to learn that Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, had routinely terrorized his first wife. “She has said that he forced her to hand over her paychecks to him, forbade her to leave the house except to go to work, and prevented her from contacting her parents. Even small perceived infractions were met with a violent response. ‘He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that,’ Ms. Yusufiy told The Washington Post.” 

The Islamic State preaches total dominance over women, hatred of homosexuals, and it seems everybody other than themselves, including Shiite Muslims, and routinely practices the most heinous atrocities. They are the world’s worst control freaks, role models for the damned and the deluded. Perhaps it matters less, although it’s a history worth considering, how they came to be. The recent Frontline documentary on the history of ISIS is an object lesson on the foreign policy debacle that never stops giving back: the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The USA helped to create this monster. 

But a political motive, whether that of a militant Islamist or a home grown racist, drives only a fraction of mass shooters, although the politically motivated target crowds and wreck more havoc in one fell swoop. Most of the shooters are loopy in one way or another, but what they have in common are the weapons. So our response must primarily focus on keeping tools of mass destruction out of the hands of the haters and the unhinged by enforcing the “well regulated” directive of the second amendment. 

Women in public office have been leaders for gun regulation. Notable Californians include Nancy Skinner, author of AB 1014, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has resumed an attempt to ban assault rifles. We need more strong women in positions of power who have the courage to stand up to the NRA. After hearing Senator Barbara Boxer talk about The Art of Tough at the Bay Area Book Festival, I felt a resurgence of the feminism that saved my own sanity so long ago. So guess who I support for President. 

One thing is certain. Donald Trump would be a disaster. Local hero Robert Reich has been writing some biting columns on Trump for the Chronicle, but one of his best is Trump’s Art of the Deal: Win at Any Cost, which rightly finds a threat in his need to dominate. If character is destiny, as in the tragedy of Macbeth, then Trump’s character makes him unfit to govern a democracy. “The only real hope for positive change is to make democracy stronger, not weaker,” Professor Reich writes. “The Trump bandwagon is marching down the road to tyranny.” 

Time to gather ye boughs in Birnam Wood.