We don’t have to like each other to govern together, but we should try to see and speak to each other as equals, so that we can debate, deliberate and disagree as members of a shared political community.
Guns, when carried as totems through public space, make this impossible. Whether they are carted to a restaurant or a grocery store, a park or a library, they send a clear message: that a disagreement might turn deadly, and that I, the gun wielder, do not respect you enough to refrain from the threat of lethal violence. This is especially true when guns are used to confront and intimidate protesters, as happened again and again during the racial justice protests and demonstrations of 2020 and 2021, according to Everytown, a gun safety organization.
The mere fact of armed counter-demonstrators brandishing guns at people they oppose is why legal scholars like Timothy Zick of the William & Mary Law School have warned that in our age of extremely permissive gun laws, the Second Amendment to the Constitution threatens to overwhelm and overtake the First. “The visible presence of firearms increases the risk of violence and death when exercising one’s First Amendment rights,” Zick and Diana Palmer, a part-time lecturer at Northeastern University, write in The Atlantic. “The increased risk of violence from open carry is enough to have a meaningful ‘chilling effect’ on citizens’ willingness to participate in political protests.”
A chilling effect on citizens’ willingness to participate in political protests is also a chilling effect on citizens’ ability to trust each other. And in the absence of trust, democracy is a hard game to play. When distrust “pervades democratic relations,” Allen writes, “it paralyzes democracy; it means that citizens no longer think it sensible, or feel secure enough, to place their fates in the hands of democratic strangers. Citizens’ distrust not of government but of each other leads the way to democratic disintegration.”
If, as Allen argues, “Democratic trust depends on public displays of an egalitarian, well-intentioned spirit,” then we are at a severe disadvantage, living as we do in a country where public space for so many people is saturated with guns, tools for — and symbols of — violence and domination.
Late last year, in Decatur, Ga., a man took his car to an auto repair shop. One of its employees, a mechanic, stepped into the car to test it. The man started shooting. He believed, mistakenly, that the mechanic was trying to steal his car; the mechanic was killed. A week later, in Washington D.C., a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed by a man who believed he was tampering with cars on the street. And a few days after that, in Newport News, Va., a 6-year-old brought a gun to his elementary school, where he shot and injured his teacher.
If an armed society is a polite society, it’s because an armed society is a fearful society, where we train our children in “lockdown drills” to evade shooters and go about our lives with an eye on the nearest exit. Democracy might be able to survive in that kind of society, but it will never thrive there.
Jamelle Bouie
Source link
