Arms And The Words

Photo by danilo.alvesd on Unsplash.

Well, here we are again. Another day, and another story about how some kid with a gun shot up some place because the gun was there and the people were there and that was enough, and again the sides form, a little harder than before but still along the same lines, because the lines haven’t changed and won’t ever change.

So why even bother? As the junior senator from Connecticut said the other night, “Why are we even here?”, and he’s right, because why are we even here if we’re just going to repeat the same old back-and-forth saw about rights and agendas, with no one having an argument powerful enough to sway the other side and no one on the other side willing to be swayed?

It’s so frustrating because we can see the path, clear and laid out, easy to navigate, but the people who need to walk the path choose not to because of one word: guns.

If the word was literally any other word we’d be across to the other side by now. Chainsaws. If the word were chainsaws we’d be across.

There are thousands of people who use chainsaws responsibly. Some of them use chainsaws for a living. Chainsaws have the power to hurt people terribly, even kill people, and some people do die from chainsaws, but not many, because by and large the people who use chainsaws have been trained to use them, and use them with respect for what they can do and how they can hurt people.

However, if there were suddenly an influx of cheap but deadly chainsaws, and many more people began using chainsaws more indiscriminately, there would be a hue and cry from all sides for these chainsaws to be removed from the market and taken from the hands of users. There might even be a push for users to have proof of training, or for the most powerful chainsaws to be reserved for the most skilled users.

And the loudest calls for reform would come from the most experienced users of chainsaws.

The thing is, a chainsaw fits the definition of an arm. “A means of offense or defense”: Merriam-Webster has defined arms that way for generations, and under that definition, an arm could be a mace, or a broadsword, or raspberries, or a chainsaw, or a gun.

However, we – or rather, a vociferous minority of the body politic – insist arms mean a gun and nothing but a gun. And that’s where the problem lies.

“The right to bear arms” has been conflated with “the right to own a gun and carry it anywhere.” They’re not the same.

If the right to bear arms was treated with the same deference as the right to carry a gun everywhere, we would allow people to bring vials of serin into church or walk through Target wearing a vest loaded with explosives. A means of offense or defense; they’re all that.

But we don’t. We put sensible restrictions around these things, and in doing so, we admit that the right to bear arms is anything but universal.

Now, I'm not saying it should be universal. What I'm saying is that we’ve already decreed it to be not universal – until we arrive at guns and come to a dead stop.

So how do we leap this obstacle? The first and most difficult step is to disconnect the constitutional language from its current interpretation, and make people understand they’re not the same.

The next step is to remove the word “gun,” and get people to realize that we’ve already acknowledged that the second amendment, the right to bear arms, is not absolute. We’re down the slippery slope, so there’s no loss of rights in taking guns down with us.

Speaking of rights, we need to reframe that word. We too conveniently forget that every right we’re granted has a concomitant responsibility, like a weight and a counterweight.

We have the right to speak freely but the responsibility not to yell “fire!” in a crowded theatre. We have the right to assemble but the responsibility to not gather to overthrow a duly and legally elected government. We have the right to bear arms and the responsibility not to slaughter fellow citizens.

If we abuse the right, we understand that parameters may be placed around it.

While rights are stated in the Constitution, the responsibilities are there, too. You feel their presence.

It’s like when we were kids, and the one kid who acted up cost everyone recess privileges. You have the right to act any way you want on the playground, but the responsibility to behave – and if you don’t behave, the entire society suffers the penalty.

Yet we go on with the weaponized words in this debate. How warped is it, for instance, for a second-amendment defender to say the answer is to “harden the targets”? Are we to make every classroom, every grocery store, every church, every bar, every concert into a war zone, so that Cody from Wichita can legally pack heat inside a Tractor Supply?

On a semantic level, the opposite of hardening the targets is softening the targeter. To our ears that seems a much more reasonable approach, though we are not the ones who connect dots from God to America to the flag to freedom to rights to defense to guns and ultimately to death.

Sadly, language and wordsmithing don’t take guns off the streets, but they can be a way around the hardened targets and dug-in emplacements on both sides.

They’re things we can do, and they offer a place to start, by imploring everyone to stop fixating on the word “gun.” Substitute literally any other word, and then work toward logic.

But however we use our words from this point forward, they won’t bring back the kids in Uvalde or Parkland or Sandy Hook or Aurora. Someone exercised their rights on them, and they’re not coming back.