Personal liberties and public good: Where’s the balance?

Last weekend’s horrific massacre in Aurora, Colo. has reopened questions about gun control in America. With 12 people dead and 58 injured after a gunman fired assault weapons inside a movie theater, media are asking what legislation, if any, has been passed to protect the public.

The gun control debate has been around for years. In fact, 30-plus years ago, I wrote a research paper on it for my government class.

As the daughter of a farmer, I grew up with guns in the house. My father was never a hunter or gun enthusiast; he simply used the weapons to take care of dangerous or unwanted animals.

My brother, on the other hand, became interested in hunting as a teenager. He learned to use Dad’s guns to hunt with the neighbors.

So I grew up with an appreciation for guns’ usefulness. But I was also taught healthy respect for them and their power to take life. They were a tool used in necessity. And when I conducted research for my paper, I looked at both sides of the issue – from the dangers guns posed to people in communities struggling with violence to the needs of rural residents for hunting and protection.

But even 30 years ago, the number one force blocking any and all forms of gun control was the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Today, the NRA is the nation’s largest lobbying force. Most recently, they successfully blocked extending a ban on assault weapons, which most Americans, including NRA members, support.

NRA leadership, including NRA President Wayne LaPierre, successfully trots out two canards to block any gun control measures: that they will take away citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights and that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Both arguments oversimplify a complex issue and completely ignore public safety.

They also divert attention from the organization’s business goals. For the NRA is nothing more than a business whose nominal mission is to represent and protect the interests of gun owners. But like many other large organizations, leadership manipulates the organization to empower and enrich themselves.

As Alan Berlow relates in the first of a three-part series on the NRA in Salon Magazine (http://www.salon.com/2012/07/24/nras_doomsaying_sham/), the NRA’s leadership is happy to sell products (including concealed carry hoodies and liability insurance for shooting someone) and to e-mail alerts to solicit donations to their political action committee. Yet research shows these same leaders, who draw six-figure or more salaries, don’t donate themselves. As Berlow writes:

“Former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman has suggested one reason NRA big shots are happy to sit on their wallets. In his book ‘Richochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist,’ Feldman calls the NRA a ‘cynical, mercenary political cult … obsessed with wielding power while relentlessly squeezing contributions from its members.’ According to Feldman, NRA leaders ‘weren’t interested in actually solving problems, only in fueling perpetual crisis and controversy’ because ‘that was how they made their money.’”

Meanwhile, the NRA blocks compromise on gun laws that could protect the public.

As Edith Honan notes in a Reuters article recent polling by Republican pollster Frank Luntz shows gun owners, including NRA members, favor some ownership restrictions.

“Seventy-four percent of the current and former NRA members and 87 percent of the other gun owners supported criminal background checks of anyone purchasing a gun, according to the poll.” The results showed support for other checks as well.

In the wake of the Aurora massacre, we need to get beyond black-and-white arguments about guns and explore compromises. I think actor Jason Alexander said it best in an essay last weekend: “We will not prevent every tragedy. We cannot stop every maniac. But we certainly have done ourselves no good by allowing these particular weapons to be acquired freely by just about anyone... but this is not the time for reasonable people, on both sides of this issue, to be silent. We owe it to the people whose lives were ended and ruined yesterday to insist on a real discussion and hopefully on some real action.”