Guns are still destroying community in America

My right to own a firearm is shattering our right to be together

Well, damn it all to hell. A Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill. was disrupted by yet another mass shooting. Because of course it was: Nothing says “America” like a celebration of our freedom being canceled because of deadly violence.

Lynn Sweet @lynnsweet

My video.. I was at #Highland Park parade.. Terrified people fleeing July 4th parade when shooting started.

There’s not much new to say here. We know what’s going on: There are too many guns in America, with too much killing power, backed by a culture of death that fetishizes and celebrates the gun as the ultimate source of individual power and personal freedom. We are sick, and people are dying because of it.

What I wrote for The Week in 2018 remains true:

There is no place where people gather in America that is safe from gun violence. In fact, large gatherings are becoming dangerous targets for the angry and unhinged. As that ugly realization slowly settles in, and gun advocates stand their ground in refusing any new regulations on the ability to possess and use weapons of death, there will only be one option for people concerned about their own safety and the safety of their loved ones: retreat from the public square.

Among our basic civil rights as Americans is the simple right to be around other people. It's there in the First Amendment, alongside the rights to free speech and religion: "the right of the people to peaceably assemble." If our culture does not allow us to exercise our rights to speak and assemble peaceably, all the guarantees in the Constitution are meaningless. And it's not government that is undermining our right to such assemblies, it's armed citizens.

Guns are destroying community in America. They're making it impossible to be together, impossible to live together. It's time for the community, at long last, to take steps to truly protect itself.

The right to assemble — to simply be with each other — is both an individual right (I have the right to be with people) and a collective right: We can’t be “we” merely as individuals. But despite the collective language of the Second Amendment, gun rights as practiced are pretty much only individual rights. Simply put: My right to own a gun is threatening our right to be together.

And this has consequences. I am currently reading Bonnie Kristian’s forthcoming book, Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community. (Full disclosure: Bonnie was briefly my boss at The Week and I consider her a friend.) She makes a well-founded case that one source of our epistemic crisis in America — the reason we seem to be going a little nuts — is pure and simple loneliness. And it strikes me that the less we can gather together in public, the less we can do the simple things that make us a community, things like going to a Fourth of July parade, the more we’re going to keep going a little nuts, the more we’re going to hate each other and fight each other and believe any old conspiracy theory that comes down the pike. Because the result of mass shootings is going to be that people (many of us, anyway) are going to do everything they can to reduce the chances of becoming a target. We are going to lose each other.

Odds and ends

Speaking of guns: This piece in NYT documents a growing embrace of firearms in Eastern Europe in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’ll be interesting to see what the sudden uptick of gun ownership does to the homicide rates in those countries — or whether, like Finland does and the United States emphatically doesn’t, it can develop a gun culture that develops habits of responsibility and respect for others.

Joshua Zeitz: “The right to privacy — more specifically, the right to terminate a pregnancy — does not appear anywhere in the document, but neither does the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review. Both exist by strong implication.”

Today’s recommendation

Photo by Kelly L