GUNSENSE

LOOKING BACK ON AN ARKANSAS WINTER OF GUNS & INTO THE HEART OF NONVIOLENCE

As classes got started this semester, I got schooled.

I joined the struggle to keep guns from our public institutions of higher education in Arkansas. The bill in question would have allowed faculty and staff with concealed-carry permits to bring their weapons on campus; it was ultimately amended so that our Board of Directors can now vote to opt out of that law every year. If they do nothing, or vote in favor of it, then concealed-carry is legal on our campuses. The anti-gun lobby, in effect, won a concession, but we have to be ever vigilant, every year. Both sides celebrated.

Our Board is appointed by the governor, and so these appointments, and accordingly the gubernatorial election of 2014, take on great significance in the coming gun wars. We know this, and the NRA knows this. For campuses that elect or appoint their Board independently, like Northwest Arkansas Community College, their policies will be determined by their own Board. That's the way things stand now.

I say I got schooled because, although I'd grown up in a gun culture years ago, I'd never dealt with the NRA's lobbying wing nor confronted the radical gun market that the NRA targets in its ad campaigns. Politics generally is a bare-knuckled endeavor, I knew, but the NRA over the past forty years has built one of the most powerful and ruthless—some say the most powerful and the most ruthless—lobby in Washington, DC. They assign letter grades to our Senators, based on their conformity to the NRA's legislative agenda. It's embarrassing.

Like all good lobbyists, the NRA hasn't become powerful by sticking to the facts. Facts are at times, as my three-year old daughter would say, sooooo booooring. And often they aren't useful because they don't support the points you want them to support. They have to be contextualized. Or spun. And the NRA is very good at doing that. And the gun-control lobby is getting better at it.

But I learned things this winter. I learned a little bit about lobbing statistics at the opposing camp and waiting for the return volley. I studied the veterans of political action, both here in Arkansas and across the country, and I took notes. My friends here in Fayetteville and in Little Rock, the ones who wade deep into our state's politics and who are really making a difference, patiently explained to me the nuances of legislative language, process, and inuendo. I took more notes. 

I learned too that I'm not a political animal, to use an over-used phrase, nor was I meant to be. In some ways, I'm a political animal's nightmare: I'm a single-issue advocate. My political vision is narrow, obsessive, committed, limited. 

I was drawn to the gun issue by a perfect storm of interests: I grew up in a gun culture; I used to hunt; I fell out of love with hunting; I've had a life-long interest in nonviolence; and I went to a Who concert back when the boys were boys, and I decided then and there that I too wouldn't get fooled again. 

I also learned from this past legislative session that most of us think exclusively of gun-control when we think of lessening gun violence, and that's clearly one of the major avenues we must investigate.  But even though gun-violence in America is a large problem, so too is plain old violence—in the way we think, the way we dream, the way we conceptualize our communities, and the way we resolve our problems in those communities. The Washington Post recently featured a piece that explored this idea more fully. Thank the environmentalists and the consumer protection lobbies, I learned, for our falling crime rate because they were the ones that took the lead out of children's toys and our paint.

If you grew up in the Civil Rights era in the American South, as I did, or if you're younger, and you've kept your eyes open, you understand violence in one of its most potent forms—humiliation, descending from the legacy of slavery and share-cropping and extending to the latest barrage of voter-suppression legislation in our Assemblies or bullying on our school playgrounds. 

And if you understand systemic humiliation, then you understand one of the first and founding moments of nonviolent action. "The first principle of non-violent action," Gandhi wrote, "is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating."

So we no longer see gun reforms as confined to the bi-polar choices our legislators give us during their active legislative seaons. We support gun-control legislation, of course, and we encourage and assist our legislators in every way possible, but we realize that when our legislators go home, our job has just begun because we're starting a program of non-cooperation.

We look for other ways to advance the kind of nonviolent education that will gradually render gun-control less necessary because we are becoming less violent as a people.

And we make this promise to ourselves: we will not, as Tim Wise warned us about resisting the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, let the war-makers or the gun-sellers accuse us of being "insufficiently patriotic and dangerously naïve." 

No. It is far more idealistic to believe that a bombing campaign or an AR-15 will renovate a broken society than it is to suggest that we can and must refuse to co-operate with humiliation and the fear that rises from an NRA ad campaign.

And we refuse this humiliation now. Today. That is not naïve. That is realistic. 

I am not calling for us to become Gandhi, nor am I asking that we develop comprehensive school curricula that introduce our children to the power of compassion and the futility of war—although we certainly need a Gandhi, and if you have such a school program, I want to see it.

I am asking only that each of us spend some time learning how to avoid humiliation. Maybe we can reform one habitual perception we have of another person, a perception that would humiliate her if she learned of it. And maybe, even more importantly, we can learn to reform those self-perceptions that we use to humiliate ourselves, when self-humiliation is the order of our days. I can't stop the drone strikes on Afghanistan alone, but I am the only one that can stop the analogous destruction within myself. 

I need to get busy and do that.

So until the next legislative session rolls around in Arkansas, and the South loads its chambers for another surge of gun legislation, let's educate ourselves about these guns in our culture, of course, but let's also take the first step on the path of nonviolence. 

Let's stop co-operating with anything, anywhere that humiliates our human dignity.

 

 

 

 

ARKANSAS' WEEK THAT WAS: GUNS, GUNS, AND MORE GUNS

Senator Mark Pryor

Arkansas has been in the headlines recently. 

On Wednesday, April 17th of last week, the US Senate defeated the Manchin-Toomey amendment, and Senator Pryor's defection to the Republican cause ignited a firestorm that has yet to die down.  

This barbaric vote by the Senate occurred two days after the bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday, and will endure as one of the most ill-informed, tin-eared actions by the Senate in decades. As the manhunt expanded, Nate Bell, a state representative from Mena, took to his Twitter account to "wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?" The response from our state, from Boston, from the country, and indeed, from the world, was swift, unrelenting, and decisive—Mr. Bell, Twitter decided, was an idiot of Arkansas proportions.

That hurt, but that's what happened.

And as of Sunday, tweets were still being directed at Mr. Bell and  his unrepenetant idiocy: "Good morning fm Boston @NateBell4AR," reads one I found yesterday, "Did you know there is a WH petition for your resignation? Waiting http://wh.gov/eejX  | #bostonstrong." 

 I signed the petition, and you can too if you feel that Mr. Bell deserves national censure. 

For the record: Mr. Bell's apology, which expressed sorrow for the timing of his comment

Representative Nate Bell

rather than the substance of it, fell on deaf ears. His Facebook page, where the apology occurred, has gathered one of the most inspired strings of rejection and invective that I've recently witnessed on Facebook.

 Not to be outdone by Mr. Bell, a certain Mr. Chris Nogy wrote in the Benton County Republican newsletter that he was so incensed by the General Assembly's passage of the expanded Medicaid package, a bright spot in our legislative session, that he claime[d] "this betrayal deserved a quick implementation of [his] 2nd amendment rights to remove a domestic threat." The letter was on the 5 News website on Saturday, April 21.

Another Twitter explosion. And the rubble is still falling. A report on Mr. Nogy even showed up on The Daily Kos under the headline: "Benton County, Arkansas Republican, Chris Nogy Wants Pro-Medicaid Expansion Republicans To Be Shot."

Nogy's letter was described there as "absolutely disgusting," and that was generous.  

Mr. Chris Nogy

Nogy, or someone whose contorted prose style resembled the original letter's prose style, showed up in the comments section to the 5 News website that carried his letter. Once again, and sharing Mr. Bell's asbestos sensibility, Mr. Nogy added that he and the voters who agree with him "most likely won't try to kill them [the Republicans who voted for the Medicaid legislation] or hurt their families."

 How comforting. That's the kind of week it was.

Mr. Nogy had begun by declaring that his comment was not a retraction, but a "clarification." His prose is largely unreadable—I'd put him in the American insurrectionist literary tradition—so nothing was clarified by his comment except his enduring commitment to violence, implied or otherwise, to irrational over-statements, to threats, to intimidation, and to a cultivated ignorance.

I'm not alone in my feelings of weariness now. Violence is the problem—emotional, psychological, physical, philosophical—and violence begins in ignorance. And ignorance, when we cling to it, exhausts us.

I was reminded of Oscar Wilde, the Irish humorist, playwright, and writer. I suppose no two people could be more unlike than Oscar Wilde and Chris Nogy, but I also suppose that anyone you might choose would share very little with Wilde. He was one of a kind.

"Ignorance," Wilde observed, "is like a delicate exotic fruit. Touch it and the bloom is gone." 

Our own little exotic orchard here in Arkansas seems to be in full bloom this week. But there are good people working around that orchard, and I'm hoping these blooms will soon wither and drop before they bear their own strange fruit.

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AFTER MANCHIN-TOOMEY: WHY WE CAN (STILL) BE OPTIMISTIC ABOUT GUN CONTROL

As gun-control advocates around the country responded to the Senate's Wednesday vote on the Manchin-Toomey amendment, Gabrielle Giffords' New York Times Op-Ed piece, "A Senate in the Gun Lobby's Grip," spoke eloquently for the 90% of Americans who supported the legislation that 46 Senators denied. 

"Speaking," Giffords wrote, "is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I'm furious."

And that, in a nutshell, has characterized the national response to this travesty.

In fact, Giffords' piece has become a declaration of confidence for gun-control advocates around the country. A rallying paper. And now there's even a movement to make her piece the "most-read NYT op-ed ever."

Perhaps that will happen, perhaps it won't. The strong emotions that surround this issue will eventually fade, but the bereaved families will still be bereaved, and the problems that caused their bereavement will remain.

Fissures in the public trust have been opened by this vote, and they will not soon close.

It is time now not only to work for better legislation; it is time to heal, and it is time to educate, tointroduce to the national discourse the transformative power of compassion and nonviolence.

But here on the ground, where legislation is drafted and laws are made, all of us are wondering what lies ahead? That's hard to say.  But here are half a dozen things to consider as we move forward:

1. The Senate's vote against the Manchin-Toomey amendment might well have been the straw that broke the American public's back. The NRA clearly won this battle, but this battle might also mark a turning point in the war. This battle could potentially organize the forces of reason and civility in a way that we haven't yet seen.
2. The demographics of gun ownership currently describe an uncertain future for the NRA, and might even indicate that its stranglehold on Congress is loosening. In March of this year, The Pew Research Center gathered some enlightening numbers on the American gun-owner. The Center found that 37% of adults reported having a gun in the house, and of those people, 24% claimed to own it. The remaining 13% said that someone else owned the gun. So gun ownership in America is running at 24%.
3. The Center also found that roughly three-quarters of those who own guns are men, and 82% of them are white. And white men make up 32% of our adult population. Combine these statistics with another one: for the first time in the history of this country, the 2011 census revealed that minority birth rates exceeded those of the white population. I'm reminded of what Lindsey Graham said about the difficulties of keeping the GOP alive: "We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term." Nor, I might add, to keep our country awash in guns. The increasingly smaller and more radicalized percentage of white men who own guns—and whom the NRA targets—will only get smaller and smaller. And as they die out, it appears that they are taking their gene pool with them.
4. The NRA is finding little help from America's ethnic communities. Latinos strongly favor most forms of gun control; African-Americans support gun control at substantially higher numbers than whites; and Asian-American gun ownership in 2008 was running at 15%. As the comparatively gun-free ethnicities begin to dominate American demographics, and as the white, gun-carrying male occupies a smaller niche in the demographic, we can expect our elected representatives to reflect this diversity and to pass legislation that reflects the ideals of this newly emerging population.
5. Hunters now constitute less than 25% of the gun market, and forecasts suggest that by 2025, that figure will drop by 24%. So hunters—typically, the responsible gun owners—are fading away as well. This means, of course, that the NRA will increasingly have to market more assault weapons to fewer white males, if they are to maintain the gun manufacturers booming business. To bolster their sales in a dwindling white male market, the NRA has begun to reach out to women and minorities, but it is unclear how successful they have been.
6. Part of the NRA's success lies in the fact that for four decades, since it was radicalized in the late '70's, the NRA has been the only show in town for gun advocates. There are, of course, other gun lobbies that are very powerful, but none approach the public profile of the NRA—hence, the NRA get the lion's share of the donations, the attention, the leverage, and the solidarity accorded to those organizations that enjoy this kind of monopoly. Gun-control groups in this country are many and well-intentioned, and they tend to spring up around specific events or places. After Newtown, several of these groups rose to national prominence, and they have done essential work. As we move forward, I wonder if a national organization, with words like "national" or "American" in its title, might more efficiently serve the national legislative agenda for gun control. 

Obviously, the country is ready for reasonable gun control; large numbers of talented, smart, and dedicated activists have reported for duty and are charting out a safe and peaceful course for a more peaceful and secure future. The setback in the Senate was devastating, violent, and internationally embarassing, but I also believe that it gave this country what it needs to effect real change over the long haul—the Senate showed us, without ambiguity, that they have disregarded the country's will on this important issue.

It is not the first time that this happened, and it will not be the last time that it happens, but I cannot think of another red-letter issue of this importance where Congress's contemptuous disregard of the American people has long gone uncorrected.

And so Congress will not proceed uncorrected on the issue of reasonable gun control. While seeing clearly that hard work lies ahead for all of us, I already look forward to the victory that is coming.

 

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR & THE CHILDREN OF SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY

I recently read Martin Luther King Jr's eulogy for the four little girls who died in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 16, 1963.

King delivered the eulogy two days later, and its relevance to the Sandy Hook tragedy is inescapable. Change a few words, and King's eulogy could just as well have been written for the people of Newtown.

"These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims," King wrote, "of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetuated against humanity."

He continued:

And yet they died nobly . . . And so this afternoon they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows . . . They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.

King insisted, as difficult as it was, on viewing the suffering that had visited both Birmingham and the nation as a catalyst for redemption, saying simply and profoundly that "unmerited suffering is redemptive." He urged his congregation and the nation not to despair, not to become bitter, and most importantly, not to "harbor the desire to retaliate with violence." 

These are all difficult imperatives, but they are the foundation of social nonviolence—the only lasting antidote to the fear and paranoia cultivated by the NRA—and they are clearly the guiding values of the response that has come out of Newtown and the nation as a whole. As the brave parents of the children who fell at Sandy Hook have petitioned their Senators and Representatives to look deeply into the problems of gun-violence in America, and to repsond with the proper legislation, they have tirelessly hoed the long row that King hoed in Birmingham. 

King and his allies throughout the country were able to transform this atrocity and others like it into the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and this is clearly part of the redemption that King argued was owed those four little girls. 

It was a redemptive action undertaken by the living in honor of the dead. And now a similar spirit of redemption has risen out of Newtown and descended on the hall of Congress.

In the final paragraphs of his eulogy, King turned to the parents and reminded them of their children's accomplishments. The four children in Birmingham died, of course, in a church, and the children of Sandy Hook died in a school, but they are both houses of learning and cultivation of the human spirit. The parents of Sandy Hook understand these words in a way that only the survivors of tragedy can fathom:

And so today, you do not walk alone. You gave to this world wonderful children. They didn't live long lives, but they lived meaningful lives. Their lives were distressingly small in quantity, but glowingly large in quality. And no greater tribute can be paid to you as parents, and no greater epitaph can come to them as children, than where they died and what they were doing when they died.

I have nothing to add to Dr. King's words, except this: any redemption that arises from the Newtown tragedy must be a collective action, but it must be one that constantly remembers the indomitable spirit of each parent who lost a child at Sandy Hook Elementary. 

Their efforts, like their children's sacrificed lives, are "glowingly large in quality," and our actions as a people, moving forward in the wake of this slaughter, must constantly embody that quality in everthing that we say and do.

 

 

 

STATES UNITED TO PREVENT GUN VIOLENCE ROCKS A NEW VIDEO

Here at Gunsense, on Wednesday, April 10, I asked a simple question: Why, I wondered, was America so violent?

I didn't  have a clear answer, but I ended the posting with an observation that has always seemed to me obvious whenever I'm talking about the Second Amendment: 

While gun advocates cite the Founding Fathers as their protectors, the Founding Fathers never confronted the weapons we have now, weapons that boast a kill-rate per minute that no one from the eighteenth century could have imagined. And these kill-rates, as technology develops, will increase. To use the word "arms" to describe a muzzle-loading rifle from the 18th century and an assault rifle from the twenty-first century points only to the uselessness of the word in the current discussion. And it blinds us to the killing differences that are corralled under that one indiscriminate word.

I wish Adam Lanza had chosen a muzzle-loader for his attack. If he had, we would most likely not be having this conversation.

But he chose a modern assault rifle, and one that Madison never considered, or could have ever imagined, when he wrote the Second Amendment based on his current notion of the word "arms."

Sadly, our gun laws have not kept pace with our kill-rates, and we are now suffering the consequences of that problem. 

Imagine my surprise and delight when my sister-in-law alerted me last night to the following 30-second video from States United to Prevent Gun Violence:

Here was the filmed version of a script I'd written last week, and it made the point eloquently, quickly, and memorably—thank you States United to Prevent Gun Violence for this trenchant 30 seconds of film.

The video also makes the further point that most of us see through the NRA-generated, mindless rhetoric about the Second Amendment and the Founding Fathers.  We are all capable of reading constitutional history and have, in fact, done so, and have reached conclusions that differ substantially from the conclusions embedded in the gun rhetoric we confront everywhere.

Americans, all 90+ percent of us who support universal background checks, are not as ignorant, fearful, and paranoid as the NRA hopes we are. 

Gradually, our voices are taking their rightful places in the national discourse again, and videos like this one, as well as the recent ad from Moms Demand, play a large role in this process.

Thanks to both of these hard-working collectives united against gun violence!

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MOMS DEMAND ACTION TAKES ON THE NRA—WITH A SIMPLE IMAGE

I can't tell you how many times I've disagreed with the NRA, but marveled at their advertising prowess, at their ability to motivate their selected demographic with a simple image and a catchy phrase or slogan. And advertising executives will tell you the same thing: when it comes to moving their message, the NRA is the best in the business. I don't agree with their message but I recognize the efficiency of its vehicle. 

As the NRA became radicalized in the late '70's, the organization developed its advertising campaign accordingly and targeted an increasingly paranoid and insurrectionist faction of gun owners in America. And they have been doing so for nearly four decades now. And while gun ownership per family in our country has been decreasing steadily, and while hunting has declined as well, the radical faction targeted by the NRA has bolstered the gun manufacturers' sales, creating an odd scenario: more and more weapons are being purchased by fewer and fewer people, a condition brought on largely by the NRA's effective and fear-inducing advertising campaign. 

And the targeted demographic is predictably white, male, and aged 30-65, the very same demographic that the GOP hoped would carry the presidential election in 2012. It's a shrinking demographic, so in one sense, the NRA is appealing to a group of consumers that will gradually lose power as the years roll by.

I'd long wondered when gun control advocates would approach the NRA's expertise in advertising. We needed a concentrated approach to the public attention, a way of organizing those common-sense gun-control folks that dominate our country's polling. In short, we needed a way to counter the NRA's seizure of the national discourse.

Finally, with the release of the new image (above) from Moms Demand Action, the gun-control lobby seems to have come of age and offered us a captioned image that competes with the best the NRA has to offer.

The image is arresting primarily because we are confronted with a child carrying an assault rifle, an image that takes us directly to the child soldiers we have seen in Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. A second child is carrying a copy of "Little Red Riding Hood," and this takes us with equal efficiency to our childhood and the innocence that surrounds its central stories. And the image is racially diverse, another reflection of the true demographics of our country. Without a single word, a large part of the ad's work is already done:  weapons don't belong in schools, they are the scourge of innocence, and the wisdom embodied in our books is compromised whenever these weapons appear. 

Here then is an ad that finally speaks to who we are: a diverse nation of families who support common-sense gun-control, which includes universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons as well as the large-capacity magazines that typically accompany those weapons.

And then the caption: ONE CHILD IS HOLDING SOMETHING THAT'S BEEN BANNED IN AMERICA TO PROTECT THEM. GUESS WHICH ONE.

It's a devastating ad because it sweeps aside the Second Amendment rationalizations that would legalize these killing machines, and it does so quickly and with brutal efficiency.

Congratulations, Moms Demand!

You've come of age in a very short time.  You've learned from the NRA, and now you're using that knowledge to fuel a campaign that talks back to the NRA with real authority. 

And in just in time too. Our Congress will face an important series of gun-control votes in the near future. 

Let's spread this image, far and wide.

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WHY I AM AGAINST CONCEALED CARRY ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES: A TEACHERS PERSPECTIVE

Note: I originally wrote this piece in response to the 2013 bill, which became law, Act 226. With an opt-out clause in that law, our campuses have unanimously voted for two years to keep guns off of our campuses. My reasons for maintaining a gun-free classroom have not changed in the interim.

I am opposed to any bill that would allow licensed faculty, staff, or students to carry a concealed weapon on college and university campuses in Arkansas, and on any college campus, for that matter.

 Here’s why.

I speak from the perspective of a university professor.  I am neither a criminologist nor a police officer; nor do I have special expertise in the statistical analysis of violence.

So I will avoid the statistics wars; as heartfelt as they are, they rarely change minds anyway. They only harden attitudes, and we've got enough hardened attitudes as it is.

But no one that I've read has described the intangible cost that we'll pay the moment guns show up in our classes and hallways, and that is the story that I would like to tell.

This intangible story, the one that addresses the culture of higher education, is the teacher's story.

College campuses are odd environments in many ways, and that is part of their special appeal and their essential value. Students arrive here in pursuit of their lives, in effect, at an age when many of them have only the haziest notions of where those lives will lead them. Our faculty thrive on introducing these students to their own talents and potential, a job that requires, by turns, skepticism, patience, tolerance, exploration, backward steps, and new beginnings—over and over again.  

Our students undertake this kind of self-exploration and discovery without fear of penalty or embarrassment. We don't expect them to know what they think until they see what they've said, and if they don't like what they've said, then we can help them revise what they think.  

It’s a process that thrives, like an orchid, in a very specific, even fragile, climate. 

Introduce guns to this environment, and guns will modify this environment. And these orchids will perish.

Why?

Disagreements, heated discussions or arguments, frayed nerves as the semester ends, all-nighters, too much coffee, too many books, and not enought sleep—these are the standard operating conditions for students and faculty alike, and when we know that a .38 might be snuggled in that backpack, we also know that these conditions can now resolve themselves in nightmarish ways.

The compromise is clear: better to avoid the controversial topic, safer not to push the boundaries of a given ideology, far more prudent to avoid challenging our students to parse the discomforting complexity.  

At this point, our educational system, like the orchid, withers and dies. 

The fact is that guns and their regular companion, violence, have an impact on the free expression of ideas, and wherever guns are accepted as the normal accompaniment to books, laptops, backpacks, and iPhones, the reach of our ideas will shrink, and higher education will respond in the only way that it can—by condoning those ideas that are the least likely to excite controversy or to spawn disagreement and free inquiry. 

We will begin to mistake frightened agreement for vigorous examination, acceptance for investigation. 

This will happen by degrees, unnoticeably at first, but it will happen. And slowly, our ideas—and the values that accompany them—will conform to the influences that have nourished them: hostility, fear, aggression, threat, and retaliation.

This is not the kind of education that has distinguished this country for the last 250 years. Which is why Thomas Jefferson, in designing the University of Virginia, and James Madison, the author of the Second Amendment and a member of Virginia's Board of Visitors, forbade guns on campus.

This is not the American educational system that encouraged me to devote my life to it.

Good teaching, of course, like any profession, is an activity that requires an array of techniques and strategies. Much of our teaching occurs by example, by the policies that we enact and support, and by the lives that we lead—policies and lives that our students watch unfolding day by day.

We teach our students, then, by putting our lives on display, by showing our students that the most powerful ideas of our culture, the ones that we meet in our books and discuss in our classrooms, can also structure our lives and ultimately our society.

To allow faculty and staff to carry concealed handguns only strengthens the feelings of degradation, fear, and paranoia that give rise to the very culture of violence that we all work to dismantle every day. And it quietly sanctions the notion that our state laws, no less, encourage us to respond to violence with violence—a notion that, on a college campus, could easily lead to an unspeakable tragedy.

We do not create a peaceful campus, one that encourages the very specific pursuits that distinguish higher education, by allowing those who live, work, and learn together to carry into the classroom the weapons that can destroy that peace in a few seconds. 

The most powerful weapons concealed in our book-bags, the real tools we use to protect ourselves from hatred and violence, have always been our books and the ideas they generate. 

If this were to change, our mission would be irretrievably compromised.

And our students, our faculty, and our educational system would suffer accordingly.

—Sidney Burris, Professor, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

 

NRA LETTER TO OUR SENATORS—BEHAVE OR GET A BAD GRADE

A friend of mine, a journalist in Florida, received a letter from the NRA, regarding the Manchin-Toomey gun-control bill that is currently being considered by our US Senate. You can read it here. I've put in boldface the sections that are particularly revealing of the NRA's tactics.

As a teacher, I understand the power of the gradebook, but when I see it exercised by the NRA over our Senators, I don't know whom to blame: the NRA for being so self-righteous; the Senators for being so cowed; or people like me who rely on these grading systems, with all their problems. But of course these NRA grades are tied to real dollars when it comes time for our Senators to run—glad that's not the case in my classroom. At least not yet.

 

AMERICA: WHY ARE WE SO VIOLENT?

Short answer: I don't know.

But it's an important question because guns and violence often show up in the same conversation, or at the same crime scene, unlike, say, guns and marshmallows. At some point, even the most ardent gun advocates must admit that guns and violence have had a complex relationship.

Or as Dr. Garen Wintemute, at the UC Davis Medical Center, said: "It's not clear that guns cause violence, but it's absolutely clear that they change the outcome." 

As I've wondered about our love of guns, I've read history after history, and finally found this love difficult to explain. I'm driven to Jung, and that's a sign of my desperation. But if a country has a collective unconscious, a place where symbolic and formative energies occasionally take visible shapes and determine the course of that country's history, then surely America's unconscious bubbles over with the gun.

How else can we explain these numbers:

• America claims 4.5% of the world's population, while holding 40% of its civilian firearms.
• The U.S. death rate by firearms—homicides, suicides, accidents—was 10.2 per 100,000 in 2009. Among developed countries, Finland followed us at 4.47 per 100,000. In Canada, the rate was 2.5 per 100,000, and Great Britain was 0.25 per 100,000.
• America is the only country in the developed world that doesn't license gun owners across the board, and almost the only country (along with Canada and New Zealand) that doesn't license guns across the board.

Clearly, America is saturated with guns. And of course, many would point to this last statistic with pride, citing the Second Amendment as one of the founding documents that allow this special and unusual privilege of lightly restricted gun ownership.

D.H. Lawrence famously claimed that "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, desolate, and a killer." Maybe that works as well to explain our devotion to guns as any of the insights I might offer. Maybe it's part of our collective soul.

But two points occur to me.

First, and as I have said elsewhere, I support the Second Amendment.  But I will not willfully blind myself to what seems an obvious corollary to my support, and to our Amendment-protected love-affair with guns: as long as we have the most permissive gun laws in the world, we will most likely have the highest rates of homicide among developed countries. All of us, wherever we lie on the gun spectrum, must submit ourselves to a serious bout of social thinking, and it will be hard for us to do that. Social thinking is not an American strength. Particularly just now.

Second, we had better undertake that bout of thinking quickly because, while gun advocates cite the Founding Fathers as their protectors, the Founding Fathers never confronted the weapons we have now, weapons that boast a kill-rate per minute that no one from the eighteenth century could have imagined. And these kill-rates, as technology develops, will increase. To use the word "arms" to describe a muzzle-loading rifle from the 18th century and an assault rifle from the twenty-first century points only to the uselessness of the word in the current discussion. And it blinds us to the killing differences that are corralled under that one indiscriminate word.

I wish Adam Lanza had chosen a muzzle-loader for his attack. If he had, we would most likely not be having this conversation.

But he chose a modern assault rifle, and one that Madison never considered, or could have ever imagined, when he wrote the Second Amendment based on his current notion of the word "arms."

Sadly, our gun laws have not kept pace with our kill-rates, and we are now suffering the consequences of that problem. 

We need to recognize this as a nation and begin a reasonable dialogue to insure the safety of our citizens.

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HUFFINGTON POST PIECE ON "ARMED TEACHERS LEGISLATION" WRONG ABOUT ARKANSAS

A recent piece in The Huffington Post charts the troubles that several states have had recently in passing legislation designed to arm their teachers and their school staff. 

 Regarding our state, however, the piece claims that "Arkansas has enacted a new law allowing colleges to let staff with concealed gun permits bring their weapons on campus."

This is wrong.

The original bill, sponsored by Rep. Charlie Collins of Fayetteville, Arkansas, would have allowed staff and faculty who had concealed-carry permits to bring their weapons on our public college and university campuses.

However, the outcry against this bill forced an amendment, all the more remarkable since the bill was moving through a Republican-dominated General Assembly that has so far passed legislation that even its proponents confess is deeply conservative.

The amendment allows our Board of Trustees to meet annually and opt out of the concealed-carry law for twelve months at a time. I feel hopeful, at this point, that the Board will choose to opt out of the law, and our campuses remain gun-free for the next twelve months.

Those of us across the state who worked to secure this amendment are justly proud of our efforts, and we hope that the results of those efforts will be accurately reported in the future.

It makes a difference.