Quick takes // By Ben FrankelCompeting rights: Florida shooting highlights tension between two rights
Many Americans accept the current gun trade-off: Much easier access to guns relative to other advanced societies – with a far larger number of gun fatalities relative to these advanced societies. Unless this general acceptance of the current trade-off changes – and this would amount to a cultural change — we are not going to see any meaningful legislative changes to the issue of access to guns. But the question that events such as the Florida school shooting raises should still be considered: It has to do with the clash between two constitutionally protected rights: The right to bear arms and the right for life and liberty. Americans have the right to bear arms, but they also have a fundamental right to life, that is, the right to live, which also means the right not to be killed by another human being. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s words (in his “All the laws but one” response to Chief Justice Taney): Should we be so adamant and so narrowly restrictive in our refusal to read the Second Amendment more broadly, even if the result of this absolutism is that other rights – fundamental rights, like the right to life —are being eroded?
The school shooting in Florida brings us, again, to the issue of gun violence in the United States.
Here are four quick comments:
The numbers
There are, on average, about 32,000 deaths caused by guns every year in the United States. About 19,000-are suicides in which guns are used, and about 12,000 are homicides. There are also a few hundred cases of accidental deaths caused by guns every year, many of them involving children (note that these numbers are approximations: The FBI, the CDC, gun safety groups, and gun rights advocates use different definitions and methodologies to arrive at these numbers. The numbers I cite above, however, are in the ball park).
The trade-off
If, not without difficulty, we take a detached view of the tragedy in Florida – and anywhere else where people are killed by guns – we should recognize that most Americans, implicitly, treat the trade-off between gun rights and gun violence more or less the same way they treat the trade-off between traffic speed limits and deadly traffic accidents.
The speed limit on most highways is 65 mph. There is no denial of the fact that if states imposed a lower highway speed limit – say, 50 mph or even 40 mph – there would be far fewer accidents and far fewer fatalities.
Such a move, however, would be too costly to the economy and too inconvenient and costly for individuals, forcing them spend much more time driving from one place to another.
But state authorities also realized that allowing people to drive at 100 mph may allow them to get to their destination faster, but at the cost of dramatically increasing the number of fatalities on the roads.
So most states settled on a trade-off: 65 mph. That speed limit is judged not to be too onerous for drivers trying to get to their destination, and the added number of fatal traffic accidents at 65 mph relative to lower speed limits is judged to be acceptable.
It appears to be the same with guns. Many Americans accept the current trade-off: Much easier access to guns relative to other advanced societies – with a far larger number of gun fatalities relative to these advanced societies.
Unless this general acceptance of the current trade-off changes – and this would amount to a cultural change — we are not going to see any meaningful legislative changes to the issue of access to guns.
