Within the Margin

In the wake of the Newtown shooting in December, my WTM collaborator Matt Clausen published this piece to reflect upon where the national discussion might go. I intended to respond promptly, but I couldn’t find my intellectual and emotional footing. More than six months later, I still don’t have a game-changing set of answers to the questions raised since then about safety and freedoms. But I have thought a lot, which is all we can do sometimes. Here’s what came from that process. 

When Matt first published his piece about gun politics, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to engage the question he was asking – can we get everyone involved in the far-reaching gun discussion to the table for a fair and open-minded examination of how to prevent gun deaths in America? And what does “gun discussion” even mean anymore? I had spent years steeped in the belief that gun ownership and the wider gun culture was an innate and valuable part of our national heritage. For all that I appreciate most iconoclastic attempts to break down the mythologies that fuel American identity, this was one that the historian in me wanted to believe was abstract but valuable: a link to a frontier that played such a role in our past, an opportunity to connect the past and present through pastimes that had an inherently rustic association. Plus, I believed, and still believe, that rural America is right to occasionally feel misunderstood by urban dwellers. I’m a very geographic person; “place” is always a very salient concept for me. I saw no reason to upset a balance on gun policy that seemed in so many ways to be defined by place and how we as Americans related to it. The national Democratic party mostly saw things the same way, leaving behind gun control as a major policy position rather than fighting elections over an issue so mystically entwined with national identity.

I thought that my position was bringing us together via a sort of detente. It was allowing us to leave behind one piece of the culture wars that so often defined modern American politics, that divided us along stark lines that obscured our overarching commonalities.

I think was wrong. It turns out that no trust had been banked during that time. Those years of apparent consensus bought absolutely nothing from gun rights advocates. Instead, long before Newtown – and with great intensity in the months after – they armed themselves to the teeth. We watched gun sales skyrocket in the months leading up to President Obama’s re-election, lest victory at the ballot box embolden him to enact the long-held gun control schemes he had so long been plotting. Newtown itself was met with absurdities from gun advocates: raving fantasies about how violence in schools would be reduced if only we armed teachers and security guards, and ultimately, the defeat of bipartisan background check legislation in the U.S. Senate.

But in the months since Newtown, we also saw an imperfect but far more helpful contribution to the discussion, and it has come from many places: gun rights advocates, mental health advocates and those concerned more generally about society’s well-being completely separate from gun violence. It’s a critical piece of the puzzle: the idea that  mental health is the root issue in these killing sprees and in plenty of other violence acts, and there’s a reasonable case to be made with respect to the post-Newtown discussion. It sets aside the one-on-one gun violence that is still pervasive in many American neighborhoods, but I’m always happy to see people discussing mental health as a real issue in any context. Yet sadly, many of these dialogues – certainly including those occurring at the Congressional level – have overwhelmingly missed the point: they focus on the need to lock people up, on “crazy people” and sentencing and institutionalization and court-ordered treatment. There’s a place for that, in many cases. But that rhetorical linkage between crime and psychological well-being does two unhelpful things: one, it stigmatizes those with mental illness, turning them – I’m sorry, us – into criminals waiting to happen, and two, it pretends that access to treatment only starts to matter as a facet of public policy when someone has gone over the edge. In reality, we need to de-stigmatize mental illness so that individuals seek treatment long before he or she is damaged enough to hurt another person.

That’s a cultural shift that we need to take, and as much progress has been made in terms of accepting the fact that a large percentage of our population struggles with mental illness, we still have a ways to go. I’d like you to to pause for a minute to think about how many people in your life you can openly discuss your emotional troubles with when they go beyond the mundane and into the clinical. Not just the lousy day you had at work, or the slippage in a romantic relationship, but the lingering sadness that comes from loss, from being unsure of your purpose or goals in life, or a lack of close friendships, or the kids you miss now that they’ve grown up and are not scurrying around your house. Maybe it’s the anxiety that leaves you on edge for days at a time, snapping at minor trivialities. Maybe it’s the panic attacks you sometimes get crossing a bridge. Or at social events. Or the ones that come for seemingly no reason at all in the middle of the night when insomnia opens the flood gates, and you sit in the anxiously in the dark, afraid, confused and worried, wondering if things will be back to “normal” by the time you have to get up and go to work in the morning. How many people do you have for whom it’s okay to talk about those things – those seemingly irrational vulnerabilities – in detail? And how often does it feel like it’s okay to burden those people with any discussion of what’s happening? They’re so sympathetic, but you just know they have other things to worry about, too…now imagine it’s worse. Imagine the scope of your troubles involves horrific swings in mood and functioning, or bends in reality that divorce you from what “everyone else” is seeing, hearing, experiencing. Imagine the isolation is deeper – you really have no one.

That brings us to the second facet of the guns-and-health discussion, which is access. Remember that in many states, it’s pretty easy to get a gun and a carry permit. Gun shows and private sales make it a veritable free-for-all. It should be as easy, or easier, to seek the mental heath treatment you need. And guess what? That might mean that government has to spend money to expand access to care – to create new, affordable clinics, or to increase staffing at existing agencies, or to improve education and awareness of what’s out there and available. It also might mean that we have to impose new regulations on the insurance industry – it was only a few years ago that my home state of New York finally passed permanent parity legislation, requiring heath plans to provide comparable coverage for mental health treatment relative to treatment for physical ailments.

In this lingering era of  Tea Party politics, it’s not too fashionable to note that sometimes we have to invest or regulate. And there’s a great deal of overlap between reactionary, Tea Party conservatives and gun rights advocates. I find that I can’t count on most gun rights advocates serving in our state and federal governments to legislate these improvements in health care services – they’re too busy they’re too busy claiming that we’re coming to take their guns, that Barack Obama or Andrew Cuomo are fascist dictators, that they need to be armed to the teeth for that hypothetical day when they need to defend their homes against tyrannical oppressors.

That’s the state of affairs as I see it on the health care side. In terms of actual gun policy, I’m content for now to keep it simple. Background checks, folks. Ensure that we know who we’re selling to – every sale. Registration, folks. Ensure that we have a last known owner in association with any firearm, so that we can get to the root of illegal transfers and appropriately punish people who sell recklessly. These don’t need to be scary initiatives. These are common sense means of continuing to permit widespread ownership while ensuring that we decrease sales to dangerous people. And we have to understand that some of the people who go on to commit violent acts obtained their firearms through perfectly legal means, and then become criminals. And that means that some states are going to attempt to reduce the total number of firearms in circulation, and to restrict sales entirely of some kinds of firearms and accessories deemed to be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person – who may well have been the “right” person when (s)he initially acquired the gun, passing background checks and so forth. Categorizing and restricting various firearms as assault weapons is a much thornier matter, from how you do it in a technical sense all the way to whether it is even effective on a state-by-state (rather than federal) level.

Both my home state of New York and neighboring Connecticut passed comprehensive and bipartisan gun legislation in the aftermath of the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I think that Connecticut basically got their new law right, both in terms of what it actually does and the painstaking time taken to craft it. Inclusiveness and openness were the hallmarks of their process. If I were sitting in their state legislature, I would have voted for it. New York’s law, passed months before Connecticut, includes a few more bizarre features than our neighbors to the east, and was passed through an absurd process: in the middle of the night, with a message of necessity from the governor to waive the three-day waiting period before voting. Look, under those circumstances, I would have voted against it. Process matters. But let’s look at the fallout in New York, because as I said at the start of this piece, I think I was wrong about where the nation was in terms of trusting each other to be respectful in the gun debate.

As a staffer in the state legislature, passage of a gun control bill meant that I would not just experience the ensuing discussion up close, I would be part of the dialogue. And that discussion was one of the most frustrating that I have experienced. Given my reservations about the law and the way it was passed, I had as open a mind as one could hope for. I watched as people who knew better offered comments like “I became a felon overnight.” Well, no, you didn’t, for a few reasons – the simplest of which is that if you had a firearm that fell under the expanded assault weapons ban, you had until 2014 to register it.

“But registration leads to confiscation!” Oh? By whom? When is this confiscation taking place? And why? What is the government’s motivation? To gain greater control over society? To do what? I have had that conversation with dozens of NYS residents in the last six months. It always peters out when I try to get the other person to explain what the end-game is: Ok, Obama and Cuomo want to take all your guns…and then do what? What’s the big plan at the end of all of this? Conspiracy theories aren’t much fun if you don’t provide us with some hint as to the dramatic climax your antagonists are conspiring toward.

“High-capacity magazines can’t be restricted – they’re fun, plus if I’m repelling a home invasion, I need all the shots I can get!” Come on, guys. When your argument is that you’re not very good at hitting your target, you shouldn’t be angry at legislators. You should find something to play with besides guns. Or become a better shot.

***

We need to get better at dialogue in this country. Matt’s original post was skeptical that we were ready to do that, and he was all too correct, at least with respect to our national lawmaking body. The results in our state legislatures are more mixed – to stick with the local examples, New York and Connecticut passed laws, but only the latter engaged in a dialogue along the way. With respect to the people themselves, there is overwhelming consensus in support the gun control measures Washington actually did try to pass – but as we all know too well from watching it dabble in twenty-week abortion bans and sloppy farm bills in the months since the background checks vote, Congress is not a representative body in any actual sense.

We need to get better at trusting each other. Those living in more rural areas need to stop assuming that city folk don’t understand them and are out to change their way of life, and people in cities can’t assume that rural people are remnants of a different civilization. We also need to get better at dealing with realities as they exist on the ground: No one’s confiscating guns. No one’s discarding the Constitution (but try reading ALL of District of Columbia v. Heller – not just the parts gun advocates love – so that you can better understand the leeway granted states in regulating firearms). And there are lots of people who don’t know the first place to start when they feel their emotional grip becoming tenuous, so we can’t pretend that we’ve done enough to make those services available.

When we start to do those things, we might begin to tear down the ideological and political barriers to passing benign legislation like Manchin/Toomey. We might begin to operate in good faith, so that we get outcomes like Connecticut’s gun bill rather than New York’s. And we might start to repair the broken democratic process that allows people to kill background check legislation in the first place. Newtown is about the death of wonderful people, including many who, bless their tiny hearts, lived too short a time to ever lose their precious innocence. It should also be about a nation turning a corner in its approach to politics and governance.