If you were to come up with the model of a person who shouldn’t be allowed to purchase or possess firearms — any firearms, but particularly high-powered assault-style rifles — you’d be hard-pressed to think of a more obvious candidate than someone with military training and deep expertise in the use of guns, who had begun hearing voices and had already threatened to conduct a mass shooting.
Yet sadly this is no longer a hypothetical, because from what we know now, it appears this is the exact profile of the man who killed and wounded dozens of people across two sites in Lewiston, Maine on Wednesday. Having spent two weeks in a psych ward this summer, he should not have had access to any kind of firearms. The massacre in his hometown caused the pro-gun Democratic Congressman Jared Golden to apologize and change his mind to now support an assault weapon ban.
There’s a funny way we construe rights when it comes to guns. In the case of pretty much any other right we have as public in the United States, it’s understood that the right extends just as far as it doesn’t impinge on another person’s own rights. We have the right to vote, but we can’t vote to disenfranchise others based on political opinion. We all have the right to speech, but among its very limited abridgments is the use of speech to create a clear and present danger to other people. This makes sense; no one’s rights should be above anyone else’s.
That is, unless we’re talking about guns. When it comes to guns, a person’s Second Amendment right to own one effectively trounces all else. It trounces an abuse victim’s right to feel safe in her home, it trounces a child’s right to safety at school, it trounces thousands of Americans’ right to life itself. Tens of thousands of people are killed every year in accidents, murders and suicides where the simple subtraction of the gun would have made the difference between life or death.
This isn’t speculation, because guesswork isn’t necessary. Our rates of gun deaths aren’t just disproportionate compared to other countries — economic peers and developing alike — but wildly so. Canada, our northern neighbor that shares broadly similar economic, social and political traits, has a population-adjusted firearm homicide rate about one eighth of the United States. That’s not because there aren’t white supremacists, domestic abusers, disgruntled and hateful students and violently mentally ill people in Canada, or Spain, or Australia. It’s because those people can’t, with incredible ease, acquire and utilize a tool designed expressly to kill, even in untrained hands.
Yet rather than moving to control the flow of guns and keep them out of the hands of people who will use them to cause great harm, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Just this week, a federal judge struck down New York City’s gun licensing provisions that required the evaluation of an applicant’s moral character, claiming the measure was unconstitutionally over-broad. While the language may have been a little general, at least we can hope that trained NYPD evaluators would have been able to pick up on red flags like those of the Lewiston shooter. Now, they won’t get the chance.
New York Daily News Editorial Board
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