Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Death at Michigan State
Monday's mass shooting at Michigan State, in which three students were killed and five others injured, is just the latest of a tragic thread running through our society.
As a student of criminal law, I know that mass shootings like this are only a small fraction of the gun violence in our country. Still, this one hits hard. One of the students killed, sophomore Arielle Anderson, went to my high school, Grosse Pointe North. The photo of her above shows her in her prom dress, just two years ago. Another of the victims was a graduate of our rival school, Grosse Pointe South.
It might be true that guns don't kill people (they are inanimate objects) but it is completely true that gun owners kill people. The Supreme Court has held that there is an individual right to own and possess a gun, and we are paying the price for that broadly-held ideal.
When you weigh what we lose through easy gun ownership-- in terms of death by suicide and homicide-- it's hard to imagine that the benefits outweigh that loss of life.
Let me put that another way. Millions of Americans get a gun because they fear something that is very rare: someone will break into their home with malicious intent and they will have to defend themselves. The truth is that home invasions just don't happen very often, even compared to most other types of crime. But you know what is NOT rare? Depression in teen girls. The CDC reports that three out of five teen girls say they have a "persistent sadness," and suicide is way up. According to the New York Times, In 1982, there were 250 emergency room visits by suicidal adolescents. By 2010, the number had increased to 3,000. By 2022, it was 8,000." And that's not for the nation-- that's just one hospital on Long Island.
So, if you have teens in the house and think getting a gun will make you safer, you just aren't doing the math.
Politically, guns are hard to limit because gun makers and gun sellers have successfully convinced so many Americans that gun ownership is important for... something. Safety, maybe? But not really, since guns in a home make that home more dangerous when gun accidents and suicides are considered. Or maybe it's to maintain our independence from government? But not really, because your gun isn't really going to take down an armed unit of the government.
In the end, what the Constitution is perceived to say may not be the best thing for the people of this country in the present day. I know that flies in the face of the reverence of an infallible Constitution, but perhaps that idea needs to be mixed with a dose of reality. The Constitution was never meant to be a static document; the text itself creates a process for change via amendment. But we seem to be stuck in terms of amendments, as the last substantive one (the 26th, which lowered the voting age to 18) was ratified more than a half-century ago, in 1971. (the 27th amendment, regulating pay for Congress, was ratified in 1992 but actually was first submitted to the states in 1791).
The chances of an amendment to alter or remove the Second Amendment would be very low right now, given that it is hard to imagine 3/4ths of the states signing on.
And so here we are, with more dead children.
