Red States and Blue States and Guns, Oh My–And You Don't Want to Die
RED STATES AND BLUE STATES AND GUNS, OH MY—
AND YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE.
By Thomas Coffin
I hear you. Neither do I want to die for the cause of enhancing profits for the gun industry, nor do my loved ones or yours. I’ve written more than a few articles about this subject, the most recent being focused on our own military’s complicity in the bloodbath of the very people they are sworn to protect. It has become a sickening ritual of death, followed by shrugs and meaningless rhetoric, but no action.
A few more observations from this pulpit to hopefully break the impasse:
1) Red states have far more fatalities from gun violence than Blue states. (See Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close. Politico, 4.23.23.) In short, states with little or no regulation of gun ownership, possession, or assault weapons have, on average, significantly higher casualty statistics than those with legislative restraints in place. This emphatically rebuts the nonsensical claim that the solution to gun violence is to increase gun possession in all communities as opposed to reducing or eliminating the type of firearms being sold and utilized in the shootings.
2) The Kyle Rittenhouse and similar vigilante murders demonstrate the wisdom of the “well regulated” preface to the actual Second Amendment (as opposed to the NRA counterfeit version) and the utter folly of deleting that preface. Rittenhouse, a teenager, had no training in the legal standards governing use of deadly force that all police officers are required to undergo before being certified and entrusted with a badge and the authority of a peace officer. We see this all the time; for example, recall the Trayvon Martin killing by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain for a white gated community, who was suspicious of a black teenager walking in the neighborhood. And then there’s the fatal shooting of several motorists who were lost and knocked on a door or drove momentarily down the wrong driveway. Or how about the kid whose basketball bounced into the neighbor’s yard? He was shot at when he tried to retrieve the ball. This is deadly force used in situations where no degree of force is at all justified. Yet loose or even no regulations permit the sale and possession of the deadliest of the military’s combat firearms to the untrained and incompetent among the population so long as they can afford the cost.
3) Stand your ground laws pour gasoline on the flames of violence because they are always being cited by the shooters as justification for deadly force. Let’s revisit the Rittenhouse slaying of two protestors and wounding of a third. He claims he was standing his ground when he unleashed his AR-15 at them. Put yourself in the shoes of the protestors—here comes a heavily armed stranger in the midst of your march menacingly brandishing his firearm at you. He is not the police, and by all appearances he is an imminent threat to your life and the lives of everyone in the group. What, for example would you do if someone like that appeared in any assembly in which you were present, e.g., your school, place of worship, or a town hall meeting? Your first reaction might be, if you have the courage, to disarm him before he began shooting. Don’t you, as a potential victim, have the right to “stand your ground” and not be murdered? How is it that Rittenhouse gets to flip the script and cite stand my ground as self-defense when he is the aggressor threatening everyone with instant death? This is twisted logic. Indeed, it is so twisted that it is being used to justify deadly force to protect one’s sacred property, like a driveway, door bell, a yard being inadvertently trespassed by a bouncing ball or a black youth walking in the neighborhood.
4) A trained police officer knows the degree of force scales. The appropriate force may be as low as mere presence (a police car parked on the shoulder of the road) or the next level up, verbal commands, followed next by non-lethal force (e.g., handcuffs or making the subject lie prone on the ground with his hands extended, etc.) Deadly force is only allowed if the threat posed by the target presents the danger of death or serious bodily injury to the officer or others in the vicinity. And rarely, if ever, will a police officer unholster his or her firearm, wave it around, or point it at a crowd of people indiscriminately. The use of deadly force has to be justified by focused probable cause to believe the target is a dangerous deadly force threat to others. It is not a tactic to scatter a crowd of protestors and clear the streets.
The Rittenhouse debacle is a prime example of why it is so important to have regulations, training, and restrictions on those entrusted with the most lethal firearms developed for use in combat. A self-appointed vigilante should never be able to possess such a weapon to satisfy his fantasies and go on a deadly frolic. That he is toasted as a hero in certain right-wing circles is an insult to his victims and all victims of the gun industry’s greed.
This is life in America under the religion of its gun god and worshippers. To our shame, we literally are sacrificing our children and our rights to life and liberty to this cruel and utterly false idol. It is the worst sort of blasphemy.
P.S. After submitting this to my editor, I woke up to the news that a man in Texas used his AR-15 to murder his neighbors, including an 8-year old boy. The killer, it seems, had a practice of shooting the weapon frequently in his backyard and the father of children next door asked him politely to stop because one of them, a baby, was trying to sleep. All the dad said was “Hey man, could you not do that, we have an infant in here trying to sleep.” It was after 11 p.m. The neighbor responded by storming the house and killing five members of the family. Two women were slain as they threw their bodies over the surviving children in the bedroom.
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Thomas Coffin was the keynote speaker at the Blackberry Pie Society’s Political Party in February, 2020 and at Politics and Pie in October, 2022. He is a retired federal magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and a former professor at the UO Law School. Thomas retired in 2016 after 24 years on the bench, prior to which he had a career as a federal prosecutor spanning 21 years. He is married with 7 children. The Blackberry Pie Society is pleased to include a collection of his essays on our website. We will post them as they become available.
posted 5.4.2023