This commentary is by Bill Agnew, an arborist from Charlotte.
Becca Brown McKnight (Guns are the leading cause of children’s deaths. When will we act?) and I share things in common: We’re parents, business owners, and I lived in Burlington where my child went through the school system from K-12.
One area of difference is our perceptions of guns in society. We’re opposites: It doesn’t sound like she likes guns while I use them as a source of entertainment, personal satisfaction, and revere them for what they represent politically. Certainly, the little hunting I do doesn’t keep me fed, so it’s mostly recreational value that my guns provide.
Except, there is more to it than that. Private ownership of firearms is enshrined in our Constitution (to the chagrin of many). You needn’t look hard to understand why our founding fathers specifically mentioned the right to arms as second in the Bill of Rights.
The right of the U.S. populace to be armed was a guarantor of personal and national protection from enemies within and without, and from the abuse of an overbearing government — a condition all too familiarly felt by the Founders. This nation was birthed from armed revolution, another inconvenient fact many would as soon forget.
As the Ukraine government desperately distributes assault rifles (real ones, not AR-15 semiautomatics) to any citizen willing to bear one, including many women, the Founders’ emphasis on the necessity of an armed populace for the common defense is again validated.
I continually bemoan the role of emotion over reason when discussing this topic. Mass shootings, including in schools but more generally involving any large, especially vulnerable group of innocents, account for 1% of guns deaths annually. Let me state that figure again: 1%. They certainly do not account for an equivalent proportion of media focus.
Lost in translation are the bulk of homicides that occur in minority and disadvantaged communities, with victims and perpetrators usually representing the same population. Such victimization is reported on episodically and usually only when notorious personalities become involved, while recently I notice mug shots of perpetrators are often withheld out of concern over reinforcing stereotypes — not a good fit with the Black Lives Matter narrative. Nothing ever seems to change for the better in those communities.
I question the statistic that firearms have overtaken automobiles as the leading cause of death in children. Young adolescent males engaging in criminal behavior are one of a number of drivers of gun violence in urban settings; lumping them into the category of “children” is disingenuous and promotes a false sense of the danger to most school-age children. Under such criteria, the mass murderer in Uvalde will be tallied as a child victim lost to gun violence, an outcome I’m personally uncomfortable with.
Finally, there’s the ugly truth that most gun deaths are people killed at their own hand: This represents roughly three-quarters of total gun deaths here in our state. Against this backdrop, what can be made of Becca’s call to action?
For me, her view represents perception overtaking reality. I understand it’s deeply felt and completely sincere; it’s just that it’s mostly wrong. No parent in Vermont has to fret over whether sending their child off to school is a safe choice.
My informed guess is school-age children in Vermont are statistically more likely to be killed by a firearm outside of a school setting than they are in one; school is actually one of the safest places for them to be. We don’t perceive it that way — a clear instance of objectivity being overwhelmed, in part by the power of media.
Responsible gun owners need pay attention here. Guns in the home must be safely stored from inquisitive young hands. In my view, blaming guns and their availability is a pretty “thin” approach — the status quo fallback, popular in opinion polling, but lacking very much practical efficacy.
Are New York or California, with their exponentially stricter regulations, any safer than Vermont in terms of mass shootings? You be the judge.
I’m not suggesting we ignore the problem of mass shootings. I believe it’s neither an easy nor simple fix, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation two decades removed from the Columbine school shooting. A rush to ban guns such as the AR-15 is a fraught, slippery approach. California banned them in 1989: the law is currently under appeal. California produces a list of specific firearms it labels as assault weapons, including specific guns as well as those with defined characteristics. It includes rifles, shotguns and handguns as assault weapons. It also has a magazine ban, again, under appeal; opposite court rulings have yet to provide a definitive answer.
The California Constitution lacks a specific right to bear arms, which the Vermont Constitution has. Another place with no constitutional right to arms is Canada, which banned “assault weapons” after a particularly gruesome mass killing in 2018. Its list of banned guns now stands at 1,800 and little or no progress has been made in taking them back from citizens who heretofore legally possessed them. Currently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has submitted new restrictions on handgun possession; he’s also declaring a stricter magazine capacity limit of five rounds of ammunition.
All this is by way of saying there is no simple, quick, or effective legislative solution. Vermont banned bump stocks, devices to increase the rate of fire of semiautomatic firearms, in 2018. A query with Vermont State Police as to how many such devices have been voluntarily turned in for required destruction had not been received at the time of writing. Mass civil disobedience around relinquishing banned items is an easy prediction to make, in my view.
It’s time to get serious about preventing, and mitigating, mass shootings. Short of proscriptive regulation or revoking amendments in both the U.S. and Vermont constitutions, focusing on gun control seems like a pretty ineffective way to go about it to me.
