An Open Letter to Second Amendment Enthusiasts

Has it occurred to you that you might have committed a fatal strategic error by throwing your lot behind the National Rifle Association?

Could you consider the possibility that over the past 40 years, the NRA chose a strategy that guaranteed it will ultimately lose the war to set domestic firearms policy?

Let’s not get into any of the specific arguments you’ve undoubtedly seen and defended in recent months and years: the nature and scope of the Second Amendment, the notion that guns protect one’s home, how many lives are supposedly saved by armed citizens versus lives lost, that guns will ultimately defend you against some sort of government tyranny.

Put those aside.

I want you to take a brief look at the big picture.

Please consider the possibility that the NRA’s never-give-an-inch approach to U.S. firearms regulation might ultimately have set up you and other gun owners for failure in getting to have a say on the design of U.S. gun policy.

In order to understand this, you’ll have to try to view the situation from the perspective of the majority of your fellow citizens who are not so enthusiastic about gun ownership and national firearms policy as it’s been driven by the NRA in recent decades.

A basic, unassailable fact is that more than 30,000 American men, women, and children die every year from gunshot wounds. Or at least that was the case for many years past; the number may be climbing. It rose to 36,252 in 2015, and 38,658 in 2016, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If those numbers sound high to you, that’s because most public debates over guns, especially if the NRA and activist gun owners present the stats, immediately cut suicides from the total, because those typically make up two-thirds all gun deaths. This has the virtue, from the gun advocate’s perspective, of making firearms fatalities mostly a matter of criminal, mentally ill, or terrorist shooters: It’s a “bad guy with a gun” issue.

But why exclude suicides? The victim is just as dead, his or her absence grieved just as much by survivors, and a gun was the tool. The fact is, once you return suicides to the frame, most firearms deaths involve “good guys with guns,” who have little or no criminal record or history of mental illness . . . and even more troubling, several hundred of those annual suicides take wives and children with them (which doesn’t happen with hangings, pills, or leaps from a building or bridge).

It’s especially cruel to dismiss these deaths as unworthy of scrutiny when hundreds of them are U.S. military veterans, active-duty service people, and domestic law enforcement officers. A 2013 Veterans Administration study calculated that about “22 veterans were dying by suicide per day, or one every 65 minutes….”

Though that study did not identify method, another one published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine found that, of 2,206 suicides by military personnel and veterans in 16 states, 68.1 percent -- more than two-thirds -- were committed with a firearm.

Only figures for active-duty police officer suicides are available. According to Andy O’Hara, retired California Highway Patrol officer who founded the nonprofit The Badge of Life to collect statistics on police suicides and offer support to prevent them, no federal agency collects data on suicides that involve retired law enforcement officials.

One would think a gun owner would be especially interested in trying to save the lives of some of these well-trained and presumably patriotic Americans.

Some other time, I’ll analyze the assumptions and blind spots in arguments that overlook the role of guns in suicides. For now, just keep that figure of 30,000-to-40,000 annual U.S. gun deaths in mind.

To imply, as the NRA has by resisting any sort of firearms regulation, that the lives of 30,000 American citizens -- or even just 5,000 or a 100, if that’s how many we might save -- are less valuable than one’s right to own as many different kinds of handguns, rifles, semi-automatic rifles, and other deadly tools and ammunition as one likes . . . well, that comes across to the average American as unfeeling, brutal, and even morally reprehensible.

Second Amendment enthusiasts have tried to brush off calls for smarter regulations and better enforcement with the argument that if you don’t know how to handle a gun, you don’t have standing to discuss national firearms policy. But if you’re the experts, then you should have been pushing for solutions.

You might have shown some concern for your fellow citizens’ lives. You could have said: “Maybe we can do something to save some of these men, women, and children every year, instead of behaving as if more than 30,000 lives was ‘collateral damage,’ a mere ‘cost of doing business,’ to preserve my unlimited gun ownership.”

Sooner or later, given more than 30,000 gun fatalities every year, year after year, the U.S. was bound to amass too many victims and grieving survivors. Also, too many bystanders -- the victims’ non-gun-owning neighbors -- would eventually have to say: “This is not right. This is not acceptable. There has to be a way to reduce this casual, routine carnage.”

The signs were there. In the wake of various grievous shootings, nonprofit advocacy groups from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (2012) and Gabby and Mark Giffords’s Americans for Responsible Solutions (2013), to Everytown for Gun Safety (2014) have launched and proliferated. They joined forces with previous, longtime activist organizations such as the National Council to Control Handguns (1974, later known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence) and Stop Handgun Violence (1995).

You could have led the way. You could have been a hero here. You could have steered the NRA back to its honorable past as a proponent of sensible gun control regulations, such as permits for concealed carry, higher prison sentences for crimes committed with a gun, a waiting period for purchase, a ban on sales to non-citizens, and making gun sales records available to police (all successful NRA lobbying initiatives in the 1920s).

But by standing silent, if not actively supporting the NRA and saying, in effect (as Samuel Joseph “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher actually dared to say after the 2014 UC Santa Barbara Isla Vista mass shooting, in which a 22-year-old killed 6 and injured 14), “Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights” . . . you appeared to your fellow Americans as selfish, cruel, and amoral.

And the war to reset national firearms policy may finally have gotten up and strode off without you.