Whether someone owns a firearm or not is a personal decision. I respect how people reach that decision just so long as it doesn’t involve trying to make my decision for me. That includes people who decide that they think owning a gun is immoral. If they confine that to themselves–saying it doesn’t fit with their view of morality, for example–then no worries. If they say that my owning one is immortal, then we have an issue.
Most folks have the good sense not to take that position. They might think it, but they know that they’re going to stir up some hate and discontent by openly saying it.
It’s even worse when they use the worst possible examples to justify it.
And that’s just what the former president and editor-in-chief of Catholic News Service did when he decided to write a piece for a Catholic website with the headline, “Is it time to talk about the morality of gun ownership?”
It starts with this:
Imagine yourself in your house. A neighbor is banging on the front door and yelling. Or there are noises outside, a car window being smashed. What do you reach for?
Susan Lorincz reached for a gun. Embroiled in a dispute with her neighbor, Lorincz, standing behind a locked and bolted metal door, fired a bullet through the door, killing Ajika Owens, single mother of four.
Jason Lewis reached for a gun and went out at 3 a.m. to investigate when he heard noises on his street. Three teens were breaking into cars. When he yelled at the kids, he thought one of them was running toward him. He fired, killing 13-year-old Karon Desean Blake.
Lorincz is white. Lewis is black. Both victims were black. Lorincz lives in Florida, Lewis in Washington, D.C. Both were convicted in August of manslaughter and face years in prison.
The two stories are exhibits A and B in the madness that has overtaken a country in which there are more guns than people, a country which is unique among advanced countries for the number of deaths caused by guns, a country where lethal violence is considered option No.1 for self-protection of life and property.
Of course, this is a great example of cherry-picking examples to back up your position.
However, he doesn’t acknowledge the people who have used firearms to defend themselves; people who would be dead had they been unarmed. It happens more times than the alternative he presents here.
But with this as the initial framing of his piece, writer Greg Erlandson adds:
If guns weren’t involved, if fear wasn’t a factor, if the nightmare threat scripts that run in our minds hadn’t kicked in, Owens and Blake would be alive today. Instead of a gun, Lewis might have picked up a phone. Instead of a gun, Lorincz might have called 911.
The truth is that we’ve become the monsters in our own nightmares. We buy guns for security, yet feel ever more insecure. We buy guns because we feel threatened, yet we become the threats, not just to others, but to ourselves. More than half of all gun deaths in the United States are suicides. Guns are highly efficient at one thing: projecting a bullet into a neighbor, into a kid, into one’s own head.
No one feels secure: not us, not our neighbors, not our police. So, we buy still more guns. We play out Hollywood tropes, cop show scenarios in our minds. And every now and then, innocents die.
Lorincz and Lewis never planned to kill. They never planned to spend a decade or two in prison for taking someone else’s life. But the gun became the crutch, the protection that they leaned on instead of calling the police or relying on one’s neighbors. The gun is one more symbol of our isolation masquerading as self-reliance.
So clearly, Erlandson’s position is that gun ownership is, in fact, immoral. It’s immoral. He argues that lawful gun ownership is fueling our insecurities, which leads to more people buying guns, creating a vicious cycle.
Yet he ignores the fact that as gun ownership increased year after year for decades–and guns aren’t consumables that wear out quickly, so every gun purchase generally puts more guns in law-abiding hands, often new ones–the homicide rate decreased.
Taking the life of someone who represents no harm to you is immoral. No one argues otherwise.
But I fail to see there being any inherent morality to being a victim, either. There’s no moral superiority in lying dead in a puddle of your own blood simply because you refused to have the means to defend yourself.
Including a couple of examples of manslaughter doesn’t negate the legions out there who have successfully defended themselves with a firearm and done so when their lives were legitimately on the line. Of the two examples Erlandson gives, only one of them was potentially ambiguous enough to actually be applicable to his point.
“But you can call the police.”
The police often show up just in time to draw a chalk outline around your body when someone is threatening your life.
Yes, when someone is stealing from your car, call the cops. When they’re yelling outside and you’re scared, call the police.
When they’re trying to come into your home, knowing you’re there, things are different. Would Erlander have preferred this Texas family be slaughtered by a guy with a machete as they waited for the police to arrive? That’s just one of a legion of armed citizen stories we’ve covered here at Bearing Arms since the site first launched. These are people who fall outside of Erlandson’s ideas of morality, as do I and most of you.
Frankly, I don’t care.
The right to keep and bear arms has nothing at all to do with morality–you have a right to do all kinds of immoral things, after all–but being able to protect my home and my family is the moral thing for me to do as a father and a husband. Calling the police and just praying they show up in time to do something when I could have taken the steps to protect them isn’t.
