America's grim bargain on guns

When the Founding Fathers wrote and debated the Constitution and the idea of a right to bear arms came up, they weren't thinking about guns as an everyday tool. That's clear not only from the debate at the time and the fact that the Second Amendment puts guns in the context of "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," but also from the fact that firearm technology was so different then. If a ruffian tried to steal a sack of grain from your barn, it wouldn't do much good to say to him, "Stand fast, you vile rogue, whilst I pack my musket and prepare to deliver a ball of lead to your thieving hindquarters!"

But in the time since, we've made an implicit national bargain on the issue of guns, one maintained by that provision from such a different time. We make similar bargains when it comes to all our rights, tolerating one thing we might not like in exchange for something we want. We want a society in which everyone is free to say what they believe, and we accept that having that society means we'll have to tolerate speech we find repellent. We want to have a criminal justice system where every accused person is innocent until proven guilty, and we accept that it sometimes means a guilty person will go free.

In the simplest terms, our bargain on guns says that we want a society in which individuals can own guns, and we accept that there is some measure of danger in making that right nearly universal. Now you or I might not actually agree with either part of that bargain, but it's the one we made, and remake, collectively. But it's important to continuously take stock of what we're paying, and whether we still like the bargain we struck.

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Even for the most fervent gun advocates, we'd have to presume that there is some number of gun deaths that would make them say, "This is too high a price." Is that number 100,000? A million? Ten million? There's no way to know, but we do know that the actual number falls below their threshold. In 2013 that number was 33,636, or around 92 a day. Of those, 11,208 were homicides; the rest were accidents and suicides (which become far more likely when there's a gun in the home).

You might agree that 92 Americans dying each and every day from gun violence is a reasonable price to pay for what people get out of guns, whether it's the enjoyment they derive from shooting them, owning them, and thinking about them; the increased sense of safety they get from them (accurate or not); or the feeling of potency they get from being armed. Or you might not. But we shouldn't forget for a moment that those 92 dead Americans each and every day is the cost.

There are other, similar bargains we make. Car accidents kill about the same number of people as guns, but we agree that modern life as we have constructed it would be almost impossible without the automobile. We've tried various things to bring that cost down — improving the safety features of cars, discouraging and punishing drunk driving — but most of us are willing to say that it is indeed a terrible toll, but the benefits outweigh the costs.

On other issues of public safety, we act very differently. When it came to terrorism, we decided that to forestall even the tiniest chance of an attack, we would make all kinds of alterations to our lives — allow the government to track our phone calls, submit to all manner of absurd requests when boarding planes, spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a secretive new security state. That happened because three thousand Americans died. It takes around a month for three thousand Americans to be killed by gunfire.

What I would like to see someday is just one gun advocate say, "Yes, guns kill 33,000 Americans a year. But if that's the price we have to pay so I can have this thing I love, we all ought to pay it." It's not surprising that they don't say that, since so many people would find it unspeakably selfish and cruel. But it would be the truth.

Of course, gun advocates don't say that 33,000 gun deaths is an acceptable price to pay, because they've convinced themselves not only that guns have nothing to do with people being killed by guns, but that the answer to people being killed by guns is more guns. They take a sane argument about a specific situation (that particular shooter might have been stopped sooner if one trained person with a gun were there to fire back) and carry it to an insane level (we'd all be safer if as many people as possible were armed all the time).

If gun advocates were correct in their claim that the more guns there are in circulation the safer everyone is, then America would be the safest advanced country on earth. But of course we aren't. Among highly developed countries, we have both the highest rates of gun ownership and the highest rates of homicide — precisely the opposite of what gun advocates would predict.

But they will not be swayed. And the depressing reality is that when even advocates of gun safety are pushing for only the most modest measures like universal background checks (supported by around 90 percent of Americans but fought furiously by one of our two political parties), we are almost certainly going to have many more mass shootings, many more accidental shootings, and many more homicides.

You could stop every gun sale tomorrow and we would still be swimming in guns, over 300 million of them. We made our bargain, and this is where we've come.