This unprecedented assault on the Constitutional rights of Americans was led in substantial part by American conservatives through their political voice in the Republican party. Regrettably, the Democratic party largely supported the Republican initiatives. Even more regrettably, the current Democratic administration has perpetuated most or all of these steps unabated.
Since 9-11, through 2010, there have been 25 deaths due to terrorism in the United States4.
3,000 deaths in a one-time event were sufficiently important for conservatives to shred the Constitution. 25 additional deaths in ten years have been sufficiently important for conservatives to continue to shred the Constitution, and to demonize and vilify anyone who speaks out against these measures.
Compare 9-11 to gun violence. In 2001, the same year that almost 3,000 people died in a terrorist attack, approximately 11,000 people in the United States were murdered by firearms2. Since then, the firearms murder rate has swung between 8,000 and 11,000 deaths annually3. (It's been trending downward of late.)
Yet according to my conservative friends, the Constitution is so profoundly sacred that any attempt to rein in gun violence is an unacceptable transgression of the Second Amendment. The liberty of keeping and bearing arms is so critical to American citizenship that almost 10,000 deaths per year are an acceptable price to pay.
My question for the Republican party is this: Why was a one-time event of 3,000 deaths so profoundly unacceptable that we changed our entire American way of life, when an annual epidemic of firearms death three times that size is simply part of the cost of a free society? Why is one selected part of the Bill of Rights so inviolable that to even discuss the possibility of gun control is tantamount to treason, while the rest of the Bill of Rights can be traded away in a sustained moment of panic?
In part, I think I can answer my own question. From what I can see of the conservative perspective, this comes down to the utility argument.
For example, motor vehicle deaths in 2001 totaled 42,1965. (Also trending downward since.) That's 1,400 percent of the 9-11 death toll, yet there was no outrage. We accept the motor vehicle death rate as part of the social cost of our transportation system. As a society, we assign a very high value to our transportation system. Furthermore, these deaths are by definition accidental, with the exception of vehicular homicide or vehicular suicide. No one expects to get into an accident, after all. So we trade utility for risk. High utility, low perceived risk.
Terrorism, on the other hand, has no social value whatsoever to anyone other than the terrorists themselves (and possibly the groups or causes they claim to represent). At any rate, Islamic terrorism of the sort that perpetrated the 9-11 attacks cannot be argued by anyone sane of any political persuasion to represent any positive value to the United States. (I am speaking here specifically of the attacks themselves, not the Bush administration's response.) Zero utility, high perceived risk.
Widespread private gun ownership has a strong perceived utility to people who favor such a policy. Target shooting, hunting, self-defense and defense of essential liberties are generally the positive values assigned to gun ownership by conservatives and other gun enthusiasts. To people of this viewpoint, much as how society as a whole accepts the automobile death rate as part of the social cost of widespread automobile use, the gun death rate is simply part of the social cost of widespread private gun ownership. And much as with vehicle deaths, no one expects to be shot by their own gun. Most people don't have a serious fear of violent crime in their daily lives. So we trade utility for risk. High utility (from the gun-owning perspective), low perceived risk.
So the real point of argument isn't to ask whether the deaths are acceptable. They are, much as automobile deaths are acceptable, if you assume up front that widespread private gun ownership provides social utility. The real point of argument is whether that assessment of utility is valid.
It is presumably obvious that I don't perceive any such utility.
I am indifferent to target shooting, and my negative opinions about hunting are purely personal and therefore don't translate into a policy stance on my part.
The self-defense argument collapses in the face of actual data about gun usage in the home, which is strongly unfavorable to the usual pro-gun position. Per Wikipedia, [E]very time a gun in the home was used in a self defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four accidental shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven attempted or completed suicides6. One standard conservative answer to that is the statistics don't account for millions of crimes deferred by gun ownership. This is another pro-gun claim that doesn't stand up to non-partisan investigation of the data7. Despite numerous personal anecdotes about self-defense, many of them true, as well as some cherished fringe scholarship on the Right, for society as a whole, the self-defense argument fails on the plain face of the facts.
Furthermore, even if I grant the self-defense argument in the terms framed by pro-gun people, it still doesn't make sense. Guns are needed for self-defense primarily because bad guys have guns. The only logical outcome of this situation is a positive feedback loop of ever more increasingly powerful and widely distributed weapons. An arms race between citizens and criminals. Whose interests does that serve?
As for the utility argument regarding the defense of essential liberties, insofar as I can tell, conservative America threw that one out the window when they demonstrated an aggressive willingness to trade away a broad spectrum of essential liberties in response to 9-11. If Republicans were the Constitutional absolutists they claim so stoutly to be with respect to the Second Amendment, there would have been a very different response to 9-11, the USA PATRIOT Act would not exist in anything like its current form, and life would be very different in America, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay.
It's simple common sense that fewer guns mean less violence. Gun violence statistics in the rest of the industrialized world bear this out unequivocally. That to even make this assertion in the national conversation is considered radical and unacceptable is a sign of how far into the culture of violence our society has descended.
The Tea Party constantly reminds us how important the wisdom of the Founders is. As Ben Franklin said, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Sources:
1. Source: Wikipedia.
2. Source: FBI press release.
3. Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports.
4. Source: University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database.
5. Source: Wikipedia.
6. Source: Wikipedia.
7. Source: Harvard University.