The Family Jewels
Among all the other issues we face these days, there remains one underlying issue that always manages to bubble up when the going gets tough. This may be just my own sensibilities, but it has to do with guns. Just to review the facts, there are supposedly 393 million privately owned guns in America. There are about 260 million adults (people over 18 years old), so that would seem like 1.5 guns for every American adult. But other statistics show that 72 million Americans own guns. Assuming those are all adults, that would represent 28% of the adult population, a distinct minority. Furthermore, that statistic drives the number of guns on average owned by those gun-owning Americans to 5.5 guns per owner. Of those 393 million guns, 72 million are handguns and 20 million are assault rifles. That means that something like 23% of the guns owned are clearly not for hunting and for lack of trying to apply more imagination, I would say that those weapons are specifically owned for purposes of defense or security.
I suspect that I am like many other Americans in that I know some people that feel adamantly about their guns and about their right to bear whatever arms they want under the protection of their definition of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. I am not talking about hunters (though they do tend to hunt as well), but rather people who are specifically suspicious of anything that has to do with the government and thus want to have their own guns to defend themselves and their family should the need ever arise. And here’s the thing…they tend to be the sort of people who are so suspicious of the government and any and everybody that might lust after what is theirs, that they actually believe that there is a real threat for which those guns are a necessity. The part of that expectation that I cannot wrap my head around is exactly what sort of world they think they will be salvaging if it gets down to needing to defend and protect it with personal weaponry. My sense is that if we devolve to that level of Wild West action, the world will effectively be reverting to a modern version of the Dark Ages and that the least of our problems will be the defense of our personal wealth or even safety. I guess I am unclear about who thinks they can survive an apocalyptic outcome in a dystopian world that lives in the imagination of my gun nut friends.
The events in the Middle East, initiated two weeks ago by Hamas, have certainly changed the landscape of security in the world at large. While it may seem that the impact has been fairly narrow in that it has involved some 1,400 Israeli deaths and another 210 hostages held and remaining in Gaza. Even if we assume that it really also involves the 360,000 IDF troops amassed at the northern border of Gaza and even add to that the 2 million inhabitants of Gaza, that is still a fraction of world. But if we then add the other 6.5 million Jewish citizens of Israel on the assumption that they are all pretty much invested in the events that transpire in Gaza with Hamas, that is starting to get to be a significant scale. But, of course, we can all imagine that the 3 million people in the West Bank, the 107 million Egyptians, 11 million Jordanians, 5 million Lebanese, the 21 million Syrians, and perhaps the 87 million Iranians might have some vested interest in what happens in Gaza, not to mention the 10 million non-Israeli Jews in the world, 7.6 million of whom are Americans, who might care quite a bit about what happens in Gaza.
Today on the Sunday news shows I heard the Palestinian ambassador to the UN explain what he claims is the view widely across the Arab world that the root of all issues for the past 75 years in the Middle East has been the existence and dominance of the state of Israel in Palestine. If he is correct, we can perhaps say that the other 250+ million Arab world inhabitants not reflected in the numbers above have a lot of skin in this game as well. My point is simply what we all intuitively know that what is happening in Gaza is a very big deal to world peace and stability. And with all the other things going on in the world like the war in Ukraine (perpetrated by Russia, but supported by Iran, China and even North Korea), the ever-present risks in the South China Sea as China flexes its Taiwanese manifest destiny, and many other regional conflicts that will seize upon global turmoil, there is more than just a great deal at stake that goes well beyond the 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip.
My point in all of this is to discuss something that one of my gun-loving friends texted me tonight. I’m not sure where he got this from, but it sounds like it may have come from an NBC News report, “The deadly terrorist attack in Israel and the torrent of social media threats that followed have forced many American Jews to reconsider their long-held stances against owning or using guns. Firearms instructors and Jewish security groups across the country say they have been flooded with new clients in recent weeks, while gun shop owners in Florida say they’ve seen more Jews purchase firearms than ever before.” as a person who is decidedly anti-gun, I find that a troubling report if its true. I do not like to think that all of my various Jewish friends and colleagues feel so at risk that they feel the need to abandon their previously strongly-held views against owning guns and have chosen to solve that by arming themselves. That bothers me on several levels, not the least of which is that I feel that personal gun ownership for defense and safety is dangerous to everyone, mostly the new owners themselves, given the statistics on self-inflicted wounds and the taking of weapons by evildoers and using them against the owners of those weapons.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that extending the Israeli/Hamas conflagration beyond its local boundaries hurts us all. Just like my story a few days ago about conflating the Cornell president’s response to the Hamas attack to the inflated concerns over DEI influence on governance, it becomes all too easy to extend one tragic incident into any that you might choose. We should all be generally concerned about the increasing levels of violence in all aspects of our lives. Political violence has now taken as big a role as criminal violence in our lives, and when you combine that with waning tolerance in an 8 billion person world with lots of historical, religious, racial and cultural issues, that makes for a powder keg environment.
I am simply not a person who believes that lasting peace is achieved through aggressive deterrence. I believe it only comes from compromise and finding a path for sharing the resources of the world to a sufficient degree to give everyone a vested interest in the status quo. I do understand how idealistic that sounds, but I have a harder time seeing aggressive acts leading to anything but a temporary pause in hostilities. It is why a two-state solution in the Holy Lands has always made more sense to me, and I am encouraged to see it gaining more traction during the current crisis for the same reasons. So, what that says to me is that the only way to preserve the family jewels is to seek compromise rather than guns.