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A New Book on Guns – By Me!

September 5, 2023

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              I am pleased to tell you that today I published my 17th book on guns, which is available on Amazon both in print and electronic editions right here. The book is brief, 80 pages, but it deals with what has become a very significant issue in the whole discussion about guns, which is the issue of Stand Your Ground (SYG.)

              Except my book is not an examination of this issue from a legal point of view. Nor is it an attempt to explain how or why SYG laws, passed first in Florida in 2005, have now spread to at least 35 states.  And it is also not a discussion about how the gun industry has promoted SYG as a way to sell more guns, in particular the types of handguns which Americans sooner or later will be able to carry from state to state.

              My book considers SYG to be a type of behavior which has always been a way in which the black community first tried to protect themselves from the worst depredations of slavery, then as physical challenges to their free status by the Klan, and then as the fundamental strategy to achieve full civil rights as developed by Martin Luther King.

              The basic point I attempt to share with my readers is the idea that SYG has always been a method by which people who are legally and socially considered to be inferior can redress that unequal status against others who believe themselves to be more superior.

And in the United States, even with all the recent legal activity which is attempting to bring everyone to an equal par with everyone else, the basic fault line on who is better and who is worse, is still a line defined primarily with reference to race.

The United States is the only country in the entire world which created and enforced a racially based slave system in which there were no manumission practices at all. The last slave ship arrived here from Africa in 1808, but when the WPA team went out 130 years later and interviewed more than two thousand former slaves in seventeen states (and I use some of these interviews as references in my book) they could not find one black man or woman who was born on the other side.

The fact that we ‘gave’ freedom to our black population has always been an important, and frankly adverse factor in how whites think and talk about blacks, because this also presumes that the ‘better’ members of our society finally realized that there were other members of our society who had it worse.

But the whole point about SYG behavior and culture is that black slaves who then became black Americans knew the difference between what they were given as opposed to what they really deserved.

I hope you read and enjoy my latest book.

What Does ‘Stand Your Ground’ Really Mean?

August 18, 2023

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              Several years ago, I spent some time with Eric Adams, who then was Borough President of Brooklyn at the time. While Eric was a cop in New York City, he finished college, did law school, and then went into politics, ending up as Mayor of New York. I asked Eric how; policing had changed from what it was like when he first went on the job, and he immediately said, “Today, nobody backs down!”

              I began thinking about Eric’s comment because the whole issue of backing down or not backing down has become a very big deal in the gun debate, namely, what we think and say about Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws.

              The United States is the only country in the entire world which gives statutory protection to someone who refuses to first back off when faced with a threat. These SYG laws are an outgrowth of laws known as ‘Castle Doctrine’ which allow individuals to protect themselves with deadly force if the threat occurs inside their home, but SYG also can be used as a defense against violence which occurs in the street.

              The first SYG law was passed by Florida in 2005, and SYG laws now exist in 27 other states. The NRA did heavy lobbying in the Gunshine State before and during the law’s initial passage, and Gun-nut Nation continues to promote SYG because the law also lends itself to be a legal defense for carrying and using a gun.

              Probably the clearest definition of what SYG means and how it is used can be found in a statement by the National Conference of State Legislatures and can be accessed here. The statement notes that Florida took the concept of ‘Castle Doctrine’ and expanded it to cover armed response to a threat by anyone who was in a lawful location, whether this location was inside their home or not. The same groups which have promoted SYG laws have also promoted the elimination of gun-free zones.

              In its exhaustive study of gun research, RAND found that SYG laws may increase violent crime, but do not appear to have any positive or negative affect on defensive gun use, which is what Gun-nut Nation has been touting as the positive impact of SYG. The RAND group also could not find any connection between SYG laws and mass shootings or gun suicides.

              In a very detailed study (Stand Your Ground, A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense), Caroline Light argues that this legal sanction for armed, self-defense reflected a society which was first organized and controlled by white, property-owning males who held a monopoly on using lethal violence and is still very much the way our legal system addresses this issue today.

              To deny that today’s cultural ‘war’ and the woke debates are contemporary manifestations of socio-cultural attitudes reflecting challenges to this long-standing tradition of armed supremacy by white males would be to deny reality and ignore what is happening today. Because of nothing else, the MAGA attitudes that were shouted all over the place during the January 6th riot are manifestations of the idea that when attacked, you can and should stay in place.

              All that being said and accepted, I have decided to write a book on SYG, which will approach the issue from a very different perspective which needs to be acknowledged and understood.

              I believe that legal doctrines to the contrary, SYG behavior has its origins not in the supremacy of armed, white males, but rather as a way that blacks responded first to slavery and then post-slavery racism in the United States.

              The slave system, particularly in the lower South where slavery was the laboring mechanism which engendered the plantation economy, rested on the application of corporal punishment as the chief incentive for getting the work done, particularly because plantation products (tobacco, cotton) had brief periods when the crops had to be harvested and brought in.

              The numerous testimonies of slave life collected by the WPA and housed at the Library of Congress, contain endless references to how slaves would find ways to avoid suffering physical assaults by overseers in the fields, as well as how newly-freed, former slaves figured out how to resist the physical threats and actions of the Klan.

              In both situations, standing in place was often the way that blacks chose to protect themselves from threats and assaults by whites, a tradition which then became emblematic of the basic strategy developed by the civil rights movement and promoted by D. Martin Luther King.

              After all, when Rosa Parks wouldn’t go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, AL in 1955, wasn’t she standing her ground, even if she was sitting down?

              If the United States is the only country whose legal system embodies a Stand Your Ground defense, at least we should appreciate how and why this tradition came to be. Because even if SYG has become a short-hand method for justifying the alt-right drift of the GOP, its origins happen to embody some of the most important and noble behavior of the black race, behavior which deserves its rightful place in the history of the United States.

              And as Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter once observed, ‘history also has its place.’

A Gun Book Which You Should Read.

January 20, 2023

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              Mary Anne Franks is Professor of Law at the University of Miami Law School. Several years ago, she published a book, The Cult of the Constitution, which has a very interesting sub-                      title: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech.

I somehow missed this book when it first appeared, but for that matter, so did just about everyone else in both Gun-nut Nation and Gun-control Nation. So, I’m going to make up for lost time right now and begin by saying that Professor Franks has written a significant and important book.

I’m no Constitutional scholar, so my ability to write a seriously critical review of this work is somewhat limited, except when it comes to discussing the 2nd Amendment, or what the author refers to as ‘the cult of the gun.’ When the author talks about cults, she is really focusing on what she refers to as Constitutional ‘fundamentalism,’ which basically means interpreting the Constitution the way it was written by a group of 55 white men who came to Philadelphia to write and replace the Articles of Confederation with a new document which would serve to maintain the patriarchal social structure of a bunch of former British colonies now reborn as states.

What Professor Franks doesn’t mention is that of those 55 delegates, 34 happened to be attorneys, whose legal expertise and knowledge was largely a function of the British Common Law tradition, which still marks much of contemporary American jurisprudence to this very day.  Indeed, if you read the District of Columbia v. Heller opinion by Justice Scalia, which gave Constitutional protection to private ownership of handguns back in 2008, you will note that much of his text is a discussion of legal notions and definitions from the Common Law.

The author’s concern about how fundamentalist attitudes have crept into the interpretation of the Constitution, particularly the 2nd Amendment, grows out of the idea that ‘reverence and ignorance’ form the bedrock of fundamentalist beliefs. These beliefs are then strengthened by promoting the idea of victimhood, particularly the victimization of white men living in a world increasingly diverse and less open to the traditional patriarchal, heterosexual authority of those white, gun-owning men.

I can’t think of another public narrative out there which is more strongly promoted by one side over the other than the totally false and reverential idea that walking around with a gun will protect someone from becoming the victim of a crime. This nonsense has been the basic way in which the gun industry has kept itself in business for the last forty years since Americans stopped hunting and quit buying hunting and sporting guns.

On the other hand, I think the author’s attempt to push what she refers to as the gender, racial and socio-economic disparities between how armed, self-defense is protected for white men as opposed to everyone else, may be creating an argument which goes a little too far.

The biggest, single problem we encounter in discussing gun violence is that not only is most gun violence committed by individuals who do not have legal license to own or use a gun, but we have absolutely no idea about how many illegally owned guns are out there being carried around. So, to compare changes in gun laws (e.g., making it easier to carry a concealed gun) to changes in gun violence is to connect two phenomena which may have no real connection at all, no matter what those regression analyses endlessly promoted by public health researchers happen to say.

The smartest thing the NRA ever did to keep itself in business was to start referring to gun owners as ‘law-abiding gun owners’ as opposed to armed individuals who use their guns to break the law. And here is where Professor Franks needs to possibly reconsider her narrative because the idea of not backing down in the face of a real or imagined threat happens to be a longstanding American behavior which transcends the whole issue of the ownership and use of guns.

Between legislation and court decisions, standing your ground has become accepted behavior in more than 40 states. You can’t pin that widespread culture on the nefarious behavior of the NRA. America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ has always been reactive to the way the average person thinks, not the other way around.

That being said, The Cult of the Constitution is a very good and thoughtful book. Professor Franks has written a work which needs to be read.

Just Like Covid-19, Stand Your Ground Laws Continue To Spread.

December 22, 2020

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              Just in time for Christmas and no doubt in an effort to spread holiday cheer, the Ohio State Legislature has sent a bill to Governor Mike DeWine’s desk that would extend the state’s Stand Your Ground (SYG) doctrine to just about any place, any reason, or any time.

              The state’s current SYG law only allows someone to refuse to back asway from a confrontation if the incident takes place within an individual’s home or on the property around the home – the so-called ‘castle doctrine’ being the basis upon which a SYG explanation can be used.

              The new law expands SYG to just about any place where someone might gets into an argument with someone else. In other words, you could be walking down a public street minding your own business and bump into someone else by mistake. So, you say ‘I’m sorry’ but the guy you bumped into is in a lousy mood and he turns around and shoves you back.

              At the same time, he shoves you, he also says something like, ‘I’d like to kick your ass,’ and maybe comes towards you again. At which point under the new Ohio law you can pull out the ol’ trusty shootin’ iron and blast away.

              The spread of SYG laws into nearly 30 states is one of the concerns that my friends in Gun-control Nation raise again and again when they talk about the mis-use of guns. Or I should say, by the use of guns if we’re talking about most gun assaults. Such events usually to pistols manufactured by companies like Glock, S&W, Ruger, Beretta, Colt and Sig.

              These guns are designed to be used by one person to shoot another person, okay?

              Our friends in Gun-control Nation have always been concerned about SYG laws because of the alleged connection between such laws and gun violence, an idea which happens to be based on more of an assumption than any statistical proof. Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation looked at all the studies which evaluate the impact of SYG on gun violence rates and concluded that there is a ‘moderate’ possibility that SYG may increase homicides, which hardly makes the connection an established fact.

              The gun industry on the other hand, and the various organizational/political components comprising Gun-nut Nation, have always strongly supported SYG, for the same reason that they support carrying guns outside the home, i.e., the more we stand up to the bad guys, the safer we all will be.

              Is there any proof behind this self-serving argument from Gun-nut Nation about the value of SYG laws? We don’t need no stinkin’ proof. We know that walking around with a gun will protect you as well as walking into a crowded space today without a mask.

              What I find interesting about SYG laws, however, is the fact that they don’t exist in England and aren’t part of our legal heritage known as the Common Law. This is the major point of our friend Caroline Light’s book Stand Your Ground, which shows that such laws first appeared not in Great Britain but over here. To this day we are the only country whose legal heritage comes from the Common Law but whose legal system also includes SYG.

              Unfortunately, in the debate about this unique legal formulation, both pro-SYG and anti-SYG advocates miss one vital point. It’s not a question of whether or not an SYG law makes a law-abiding individual more prone to carry or use a gun. The real question, unanswered by both sides in the debate, is whether we have a unique culture which promotes SYG behavior, legal or not.

All the way back in 1957, the brilliant criminologist Marvin Wolfgang discovered that “the victim is often a major contributor to the criminal act.” In what type of crime did Wolfgang find this behavior to be most apparent? In homicide, what else.

              Why can’t the two sides in the gun debate drop their professed dislike for each other and start discussing the issue of culture and how people behave, regardless of what the laws tell them they can and cannot do?

In Florida, School Prayer And Stand Your Ground Is The Same Thing.

June 12, 2017

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In 1956 I was a 7th-grade student at Public School 29 in New York City and we began every day with a prayer from the New Testament read by our teacher who happened to be a communicant at the Catholic parish across the street. When I refused to fold my hands and bow my head because my family read the Old Testament at home, the teacher made me stand out in the hallway until the prayer was done.

SYG             It’s now more than 50 years since the Supreme Court ruled that public-school officials could not organize prayer services, but many states and localities get around the religion issue by letting the students lead the prayers. Last week the Florida Senate approved a bill (SB 436) that requires all school districts to allow for ‘voluntary’ expressions of religious belief on school property, which basically protects public prayer in the classroom, but does not contain any protections for students who choose not to participate, such as the way I behaved back in 1956.

The bill got a big play last week because it was passed as part of an agreement to pass another bill, SB 128, which makes it easier for Florida residents to use a ‘stand your ground’ defense if they happen to shoot someone besides themselves. This bill basically puts the burden of proof on the prosecution from the moment a defendant appears in Court, which means that if the State isn’t ready to present all relevant evidence at an initial, pre-trial hearing, the guy who did the shooting walks free.

Every Republican in the Florida State Senate voted for the change in SYG, ditto for what is being called a ‘stand for liberty’ by the sponsor of the religious ‘freedom’ bill. This State Senator, Dennis Baxley, represents the 12th District, which covers Marion, Sumter and Lake Counties and delivered between 60% and 70% of their 2016 Presidential votes to our temporary 45th President, a.k.a. Donald Trump. Baxley’s website says he understands that “family, freedom and faith must all flourish to keep our state and nation strong.”  Is he endorsed by the NRA?  Is New York a city?  I mean, family, faith and freedom – give me a break.

              Regarding Senator Baxley’s commitment to freedom, he says “As the father of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, Dennis Baxley believes that our Second Amendment rights are the bedrock of our nation’s freedom. He will fight against the erosion of this fundamental freedom.” In other words, Baxley has jumped on the latest lie being promoted by Gun-nut Nation, namely, the idea that the 2nd Amendment is the most important test in the Constitution, because armed citizens are the last defense against the tyranny of the state. And if you don’t believe this to be true, the proponents of this nonsense will also tell you that the Holocaust might not have resulted in the extermination of 6 million human beings if the Nazis had to go up against armed Jews.
              The moment that public officials like Dennis Baxley start waxing eloquent about their commitments to family, freedom and faith I find myself back in my 7th-grade classroom being marched out into the hall by a religiously-minded teacher who simply couldn’t comprehend my lack of religious belief. And I get the same, slightly sinking feeling whenever someone from Gun-nut Nation starts chanting about their God-given ‘rights’ to self-defense with a gun.
              I’m not sure why a fervent belief in gun violence is so often joined to a fervent belief in God, but they often seem to go hand in hand. And if anyone actually believes that SYG or concealed-carry laws help prevent gun violence, then I suggest you take a page from Senator Baxley’s playbook and join him in his support of the NRA. Because we shouldn’t have to justify or explain our belief in the power of the Almighty or the usefulness of a Glock 19.

Does Stand Your Ground Work? Sure Does If You Want To Shoot Someone.

February 14, 2017

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Caroline Light’s provocative and original book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair With Lethal Self Defense, is making its official debut next week and you can pick up a copy at (where else?) Amazon but I’m sure it will be at your independent bookseller as well.  Its appearance, incidentally, will no doubt coincide with the beginning of another attempt by Gun-nut Nation to push a bill through Congress that will let anyone with a concealed-carry license carry his gun through all 50 states.

light_standyourground_2             The idea that a gun license should be no different than a driver’s license has been a cherished gun-nut dream since then-Senator Larry Craig came out of his men’s room stall to speak in favor of a national, concealed-carry bill on the Senate floor. The bill is routinely filed every two years, it has always been just as routinely ignored, but guess who’s sitting in his office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue just waiting to sign such a bill into law?  And what better way to rev up his sturm und drang base and take their minds off the fact that he can’t really get anything done than to announce that they can now run around anywhere in the United States carrying their guns?

And this is what concealed-carry is really all about, namely, playing out a fantasy that I can protect myself from all those street thugs and bandidos because I’m carrying a gun. The fact that most of the folks who have concealed-carry licenses happen to live in places with little or no violent crime is entirely beside the point.  I really loved it when Trump-o said he could stand on the 5th Avenue sidewalk, shoot someone down and his supporters would still give him their votes. If he did, it would be the first time that a violent crime was committed on 5th Avenue since I don’t know when. But that didn’t stop Trump from bragging about how he allegedly walks around carrying a gun.

Caroline Light’s book isn’t about concealed-carry per se, it’s really a study of a peculiarly American legal phenomenon known as Stand Your Ground (SYG.) Because other Western countries may make it more difficult to get a concealed-carry license, but they are issued if you can show cause.  On the other hand, SYG laws are a peculiarly American phenomenon, and Professor Light does a first-rate job of explaining how and why our ‘love affair’ with lethal, self-defense departs so dramatically from Common Law traditions which, in England and other British colonial zones, don’t support the SYG legal position at all.

When the Supreme Court gave Americans a Constitutional protection in 2008 to keep handguns in the home for self-defense, the majority based its reasoning on a rather arbitrary analysis of the phrase ‘keep and bear arms.’ But according to Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, it also reflected an American ‘tradition’ of using guns, particularly handguns, for personal defense. What Light shows is that from the very beginnings of the country, the earliest legal cases which codified SYG involved physical disputes that were settled with a gun. I’m not sure that we yet fully understand exactly how and why guns proliferated in the United States, but the connection between gun ownership and the legal sanction of SYG is made very clear in this book.

The problem we have today, however, is that with so many guns floating around, what to the shooter may be a defensive act could be an offensive act to the person who gets shot.  Recently a 60-year old St. Louis man was found not guilty of assault after he shot and killed a 13-year old kid at a distance of 70 feet.  The teenager was running away after breaking into the man’s car, but under Missouri law, since the man felt ‘threatened,’ he had the right to yank out his gun. What kind of country do we live in where something like this can occur?  Some answers to that question are provided in Caroline Light’s new and important book.

 

 

Why Do Americans Stand Their Ground? Because The Law Says We Can.

January 19, 2017

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Last September I reviewed Caroline Light’s book, Stand Your Ground, and said it was a must-read.  The book is now about to be published, so I thought I would go back and discuss what I didn’t cover in my previous review.  Last time I discussed the major theme of the book, which is how and why America departed from the British, common-law tradition of retreating in the face of a direct threat and replaced it with laws which basically sanction the use of homicidal force in just about any kind of direct confrontation that might occur.  And what’s the most efficient way to respond to a real or imagined threat? We all know the answer to that.

laws           This time, however, I want to look at the issue which is somewhat tangential to Professor Light’s primary concern, but nevertheless must be addressed. At the same time that states began passing SYG laws, they also began easing restrictions on the ability of citizens to walk around with guns, two legal developments that are promoted vigorously by Gun-nut Nation, and which may set the legislative gun agenda on Capitol Hill in the Age of Trump.

For SYG and CCW the argument in favor goes like this: gun-owners are extremely law-abiding, people with concealed-carry permits even more so, bad guys will always try to avoid a criminal situation where their victim might be armed, hence, the armed citizen protects society from crime.  The NRA has been peddling this formula for more than twenty years, they trot it out every time an act of gun violence occurs in places where citizens should be able to carry guns (schools, airports, etc.) and Trump vigorously promoted this nonsense at every opportunity during the campaign.

But what if it’s not nonsense?  What if the end result of people walking around with guns is no real increase in gun-violence?  In that case, what difference would it make if a bunch of children masquerading as adults want to pretend they can behave like citizen-protectors and use their guns to shoot the bad guys and reduce our risk of harm?  The problem is that the evidence on the value of people carrying guns and playing cops and robbers is ambiguous, if not wholly incorrect, but the counter-argument, that the presence of armed citizens increases the risk of gun violence is also not a proven fact.

On the pro-gun side we have, as always, the works of Gary Kleck and John Lott. On the basis of 221 completed telephone interviews, Kleck decided that armed citizens were responsible for preventing upwards of 2 million crimes each year. Kleck’s fantasy has been more or less consigned to the dustbin and replaced by John Lott’s statistical mish-mash which nobody else can validate or reproduce. He says that when the number of concealed-carry licenses goes up, violent crime goes down.  Lott could teach Donald Trump a few things about how to get caught in a lie and keep insisting it’s the truth.

For GVP, the evidence pointing to increased gun violence in SYG states is not entirely conclusive but it’s strong.  On the other hand, the argument that letting people walk around ‘strapped’ generates more gun violence is less clear.  The numbers of gun deaths committed by CCW-holders averages roughly 100 per year – that’s not even 1 percent of all gun homicides and in many states the toll is less than 1 per year.

I like Caroline Light’s book – concise, readable and the analysis of court decisions is very well done.  It’s too bad it will only be taken seriously by advocates on one side.  The other side is too busy awaiting the day that every single last, bothersome gun law will finally be put to bed.  But a funny thing seems to be happening in DC because more people may show up to rally against Trump than to celebrate his great day. And most of the folks who give Trump low marks so far happen to be people who aren’t enamored of guns.  So we’ll see what we see.

 

 

What Do States That Vote GOP Have In Common? They Love Their Guns.

October 19, 2016

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Take a look at the projected electoral map on Nate Silver’s website.  Now take a look at the map which shows state-level gun-violence rates constructed by our friends at the Center for American Progress (found on Page 6 of their report, America Under Fire.) Notice anything?  I’ll give you a little hint: The states with the highest levels of gun violence are also the states that will probably end up voting for the GOP.  And if you want to talk about the elephant in the living room when it comes to guns, this is it.  Simply put: red states are where most gun violence occurs.

conference-program-pic           You won’t ever see this elephant if you listen to Gun-nut Nation, because as far as they are concerned, gun violence is only a problem in minority neighborhoods, and many, if not most of those neighborhoods are located in cities (Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles) within states which contain relatively few voters who back the GOP.  So when The Groper stands up at one of his Klan rallies and says that violent crime will go down if we make sure to be armed when we walk around those crime-infested spots, he’s pandering to the racist mentality of the lunatic fringe, but he’s also saying something that simply isn’t true.  Gee – what a surprise that Groper Trump would say something that isn’t true.

What is true is that gun violence appears to correlate most of all with lax gun laws, which is a polite way of saying that in many red states that there are no gun laws at all.  Or if there are any laws covering guns, they tend to be laws that actually give people more, not less legal use of guns.  The worst in this respect are ‘stand your ground’ laws (SYG) which allow people to use any level of lethal force if they believe they might otherwise face imminent harm, and they do not have to retreat or otherwise try to avoid the problem before yanking out a gun.  These laws now exist in 22 states, of which The Groper will probably win 17 or 18 of those states unless he screws things up a bit more. And what happens when an SYG law is put into effect?  According to a very comprehensive study from Everytown, the justifiable homicide rate goes up by more than twice.

Why are red-leaning states so resistant to passing laws that reduce gun violence, in particular laws which in other states appear to work?  Why is it so hard, for example, to get extended NICS-background checks in these states when all the polls show that even a healthy majority of gun owners believe that requiring background checks for private transfers would be a good thing? It would be tempting to put it down to the fact that since these are the states where most people own guns, therefore Gun-nut Nation can easily rally the troops, so to speak, whenever a new gun is being discussed.  But the issue goes deeper than that, and here is what it’s really all about.

The most powerful argument that Gun-nut Nation puts forth to block any kind of gun regulations is the ‘slippery-slope’ argument; i.e., if you let ‘them’ have any new law at all, then they’ll take another bite here, another bite there, and sooner or later there won’t be any guns at all.  And there happens to be a bit of truth to this argument, if only because most gun-sense activists, no matter how much they claim to ‘respect’ the 2nd Amendment, would be just as happy if all the guns really did go away.

Because the truth is, and here’s the real elephant in case you didn’t know, there’s one thing and one thing only which accounts for every act of gun violence, and that’s the existence of a gun. I apologize for putting it in such clear and uncompromising terms, but if you pull the trigger of a loaded gun, it’s going to go – bang!

 

 

An Important Book On Gun Violence Is Worth Waiting For.

September 23, 2016

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A new voice is about to be added to the debate about gun violence, and for those who take this debate seriously (because there are some debate participants who don’t) this is a voice with something important to say.  I am referring to Caroline Light, who directs undergraduate studies of women, gender and sexuality at Harvard and is about to publish a book, Stand Your Ground, America’s Love Affair With Lethal Self-Defense.

blacks-gunsNow you would think that a Harvard faculty member would, of course, be anti-gun.  But Professor Light happens to be a Southern girl who, not surprisingly, grew up in a family where there were guns. And while she clearly understands that gun violence can’t be separated from the existence of guns, particularly so many guns, she’s not barking up the usual, gun-control tree.  What she is after in her narrative, and certainly succeeds in this respect, is to explain how and why ‘stand your ground’ (SYG) laws have become so evident and pervasive throughout many parts of the United States.  Because the point is that 33 states now have such laws. And most of these states also grant residents the unquestioned right to walk around with a gun. Put two and two together and what do you get?  The legal sanctioning of gun violence, which is what the book Stand Your Ground is really all about.

Like most of our legal system, these laws came from the British common law tradition, which, on the one hand, recognized that a person had the right to protect himself from attacks except that the attack had to occur within the home; i.e., the ‘castle doctrine’ as it was known.  British law did not sanction lethal self-defense outside of one’s domicile, in fact, it was presumed that in a civilized, ordered society, retreat in the face of possible injury was always preferred.

The sanctity of human life transcending the necessity to protect oneself from possible injury disappeared, however, in the evolution of American penal law.  For that matter, the law’s recognition of armed self-protection in the case of home invasions (the ‘castle doctrine’) was extended to justify lethal self-defense in any location where the defender had the legal right to appear.  Cases which upheld this kind of reasoning appeared as early as 1806 and became common in the decades following the Civil War, particularly in the South.

Here is where Professor Light’s narrative gets interesting.  Because what she argues is that armed, self-defense, as codified in SYG laws coupled with concealed-carry laws (CCW) reflect a culture which celebrates the dominance of white men, particularly in the South, where ‘rugged individuality’ is a code for keeping women and African-Americans in their (subservient) ‘place.’ And rather than guns being used to equalize the power relations between white males and everyone else, what the author refers to as do-it-yourself (DIY) security just hardens the degree to which white male dominance continues to control the perceptions of crime, gender and race.

This is a complicated subject and I cannot really do justice to this book or fully discuss its subtle twists and turns. But it should come as no surprise that when we talk about anything related to gun culture (which certainly would embrace SYG) that we are basically talking about the South, because that’s where a majority of the civilian-owned guns and a majority of NRA members happen to be.  And while SYG and CCW laws have spread far beyond Dixie, this region gave birth to those laws and this is where such laws have resulted in significant increases in ‘lawful’ violence against women and Blacks.

The South may have lost the Civil War, but the mind-set which justified slavery back then is the same mind-set that embraces inequality today.  And anyone who believes that owning a gun endows them with more freedom than someone who is unarmed is drinking the same Kool-Aid that Jefferson Davis drank before Fort Sumter when he believed that Lincoln would back down. But plenty of that Kool-Aid is still going around.

Do We Always Need To Use Violence To Get What We Want? Dandy The Chimp Shows Us Another Way.

May 2, 2016

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , 1 Comment

In a brilliant and spellbinding book, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, Frans De Waal describes an experiment in which a bunch of chimpanzees walked over some partially-hidden grapefruits and then later in the afternoon when the group were dozing off in the trees, one of the chimps, Dandy, made a beeline back to the grapefruits and devoured every one.  Had this chimp tried to eat one of the grapefruits when the other chimps were around he probably would have been able, at best, to eat one or two.  But by developing a strategy that avoided confrontation with the other chimps he was able to reap a much greater reward.

conference-program-pic           I was reminded of this story by a report (thank you MH) about an 11-year old boy in Alabama who picked up a 9mm pistol and shot someone who had ‘invaded’ his home.  Now the whole episode still remains to be sorted out, but in fact the kid didn’t shoot the intruder because otherwise he would have been hurt, he fired his gun as the ‘bad guy’ was trying to jump over a back-yard fence and run away. The teen-age shooter’s mother said she didn’t know the identity of the burglar, but he had burglarized their home before. Huh?

It turns out that 22 states, including Alabama, have passed “Stand Your Ground” laws in the last ten years, although of late there have been some attempts to revise or scale back the extent of such laws.  But basically such a law gives an individual the right to use deadly force, not just in their home, but in just about any circumstances where they believe that otherwise they might be harmed or killed.  And the problem with such laws is that it may be used as a defense in the case cited above, even though the youngster shot someone who was running away.

As you might suspect, states with this law have experienced a substantial increase in justifiable homicides, even while the overall homicide rate continues to slowly dwindle down.  A report issued by our friends at Everytown found a 53% increase in justifiable homicides in states where STG laws were enacted, with a doubling of that number where the victims of justified murders were black.  Gee, what a surprise that violence, even state-sanctioned violence falls disproportionately on the shoulders of African-American men.

So there are two problems, it seems to me, with these laws.  First, the laws place the burden of proving that the homicide was not justifiable on the individuals least likely to be able to defend themselves in court because they just happen to be dead. But second, and more important, is the idea that we are justifying and embracing a form of behavior that rewards people for not trying to avoid confrontations and, if anything, for taking what might have been a brief and otherwise harmless difference of opinion and escalating it into a deadly and ultimately lethal fight. And what is the mechanism that always, in the classic words of Lester Adelson, “converts a spat into a slaying and a quarrel into a killing?“  A gun.

Now at this point if you want to send me a snarky email about your God-given right to defend yourself against criminals, terrorists or Hillary Clinton, save yourself some time.  The purpose of this comment is to provoke discussion among people who are genuinely concerned about America’s seeming infatuation with refusing to back down; refusing to find another, non-violent way; refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a non-confrontational response to a threat may, in fact, yield better results.

Which brings me back to Dandy the chimp who realized he had a choice between fighting with the other chimps over who would eat the grapefruits as opposed to waiting until he was alone and could eat all the fruit himself.  Now maybe if Dandy had a Glock he wouldn’t have needed to wait.  But if he had a Glock, another chimp doubtless would have owned a Ruger or a Smith.  Then what?

 

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