Gun Control in America Rests on an Anti-Tyranny Premise, and Young People's Views Aren't as Simple as "the Shooting Generation"

Freedom — or more precisely, protecting your own safety — is still the main reason people own guns.

On February 14, a 19-year-old high school student walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and turned his gun on teachers and classmates. The survivors stood up. The New York Times called these young people the "shooting generation": "Many of the victims' classmates did not react with quiet grief, but spoke their minds out loud… In television interviews, on social media, and even inside the school offices they locked themselves into to hide from the shooter, they spoke freely."

Calls for gun control spread like a virus, and the mainstream media covered the story around the clock, leading some to guess that America had reached a turning point. A run of poll numbers and historical facts says otherwise. Four of the five deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history happened after 2012, and yet the political tide has not swung toward the gun-control camp. Worse, a term as loose as "shooting generation" misleads people into treating the younger generation as a single bloc, and ignores the dissenting voices that panic and "political correctness" have muted. That diversity of positions and values is exactly why gun violence in America has gone unresolved for so long.

Many people still find it hard to connect "guns" with any danger close at hand. A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 50% of Americans think gun violence is a serious problem nationally, while only 19% think their own community is seriously threatened by it. Black Americans are the group most alert to the threat of shootings, but they are only 13% of the national population.

People keep buying guns. In America, buying a gun is anything but hard. Pass a criminal and mental-health background check that screens out less than 1% of applicants, and you can pick up a weapon at a Walmart or a sporting goods store. In 2016 there were 56,754 federally licensed gun retailers, up from 50,848 in 2012.

Most Americans have never felt the fierce empathy that comes from facing killing and death up close, and few have been threatened at gunpoint. Their attitude toward gun control turns on a value judgment that is short to state and extraordinarily hard to settle: which matters more, the security that gun control brings, or the right to bear arms that protects the people? Many, young people among them, choose the latter.

This deep-rooted gun culture turns on a powerful ideological core: the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Adopted in 1791, it reads: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

The people's sacred right to bear arms springs from the glorious history of winning independence from the oppression of the mother country, and stands as a symbol of resistance to tyranny and of individual freedom. No armed individual today can challenge the modern state's monopoly on violence, but follow the history back far enough and people still get from a gun to freedom.

That means the road to an outright gun ban was blocked long ago at the constitutional level. What people can do is work out how to make the circulation and use of guns safer — how to keep guns out of dangerous hands and out of use as murder weapons. That is what "gun control" means.

The most common gun-control measures are: banning gun sales to people with mental illness, running background checks on private buyers, tracking gun sales through a national database, and banning assault weapons (such as assault rifles) and high-capacity magazines.

The vague wording of the Second Amendment does leave room for gun control. The first half of the sentence seems to remind people that the right to bear arms comes from a specific political purpose. If it is not about forming a militia to defend the freedom of the state, should people be allowed to own guns at all? Gun-control supporters badly want to take that step.

In 2008, in a landmark ruling, four Supreme Court justices argued that the people hold arms only to keep an overly powerful federal government from threatening the sovereignty of the states, and that lawmakers may restrict an individual's access to guns for any other purpose. The other five justices ruled that an individual is free to possess a weapon as long as the purpose is lawful. In the 2010 McDonald case, the Court went further, stressing that "individual self-defense is the central component of the right protected by the Second Amendment."

In the United States, Supreme Court precedent carries the authority of statute. Even if the legislative and executive branches roll out tougher gun-control policies, gun-rights groups can still take the fight to the Supreme Court. Barring a major reshuffling of the Court, the way these lifetime-appointed justices read the Second Amendment is likely to keep disappointing the gun-control side.

After the 1999 Columbine school shooting, the number of Americans who chose to put gun rights first actually grew. The lobbying and messaging of gun-rights groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) appear to work better than the fierce denunciations of the gun-control camp.

The biggest surprise is that on gun control, generational differences barely show. "Millennials" (born in the 1980s and 1990s), who grew up alongside the Columbine kids, and "Generation Z" (born from the 1990s to the early 2000s), who have watched mass shootings again and again on television and on their phones, look much like their parents on several key measures.

A Gallup survey this year found that support for stricter gun policies among 18- to 29-year-olds matches the population as a whole. On ownership, 27% of 18- to 29-year-olds own a gun, only 3 percentage points below the overall rate.

On attitudes toward assault weapons, young people are even more permissive: among 18- to 34-year-olds, 49% want assault weapons banned. Among people over 50, 70% support a ban.

Gallup researcher Frank Newport said: "Sometimes people just surprise us, and we don't know what is driving the results we are seeing." A National Public Radio (NPR) headline pinned down the source of the surprise: "Millennials Are No More Liberal On Gun Control Than Elders, Polls Show." In American usage, "liberal" is a hard word to define and a hard one to translate; it is normally set against "conservative" and covers a range of values and ways of living that break with tradition. In two-party politics, the Democrats are generally the more "liberal" side, taking a more forward position on same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization and gun control. What puzzles people is this: young people who have clear positions on same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, who were shocked and angry when Trump won the election, are split on gun control and show no generational profile at all. Why?

Delaware, on the East Coast, was the first state to join the union. It voted Democratic in both the 2016 presidential election and the 2017 governor's race. At the University of Delaware, gun-owning students formed a club called Students for Second Amendment, whose Facebook group has more than 200 members. By its own account, one of the club's aims is to clear away prejudice against guns and get more people to enjoy owning them. Its regular activities include seminars on gun issues, live-fire target practice, and speaking up in local gun-control debates.

Interviewed by NPR, the club's 22-year-old president, Jeremy Grunden, showed an almost fundamentalist enthusiasm for gun rights: "Whatever guns the military has, we should have. Under the Second Amendment, we are supposed to be a well-equipped, well-trained militia. Frankly, we need more equipment, assault weapons included." Judging by his posts in the group, the president holds no firm party line — one moment he praises the Republican Trump, the next the Democratic governor, as long as they are on his side on gun control.

Clubs like this are not rare at American universities, and a few can even draw on student government funds to buy guns. Whenever a campus shooting happens, the mainstream media mutes them, and what the public sees instead is a contest between students and the NRA, between the weak and the strong, between "progressive" and "conservative" forces. But these clubs do exist. As the name of the University of Delaware club suggests, what they are doing is defending a right the Constitution recognizes — no different in kind from defending free speech or the right to same-sex marriage.

If there is a generational difference between young people and their parents, it may show up mostly in this: the way the younger generation talks about and handles guns turns on the word "safety." Beyond the grand story that ties the right to bear arms to individual freedom, people also need practical reasons to justify owning one.

Pew's 2017 data show that among people under 30 who live with a gun in the house (their own or a housemate's), 79% name "self-protection" as their main reason for having it — above the 66% of 30- to 49-year-olds, the 60% of 50- to 64-year-olds and the 34% of those over 65. Older Americans care more about hunting: 84% of people over 65 name "hunting" as the main reason, against just 52% of people under 30. Along the longer timeline, from Columbine in 1999 to 2013, the share of self-defense gun owners aged 18 to 49 rose by 25 percentage points.

It is natural to suspect a link between this "self-defense" language and the mass shootings themselves. After the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, the NRA's president answered calls for gun control with the line: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Pew's report shows the public is not optimistic about how well gun-control policy works, which strengthens the case for arming yourself. "My safety is mine to handle" echoes, up to a point, the classic reading of the Second Amendment: arm yourself, defend your freedom.

There is some dark humor in what followed. With the pro-gun Trump in office, defensive gun ownership became the choice of people who had never owned guns before.

From the data we can sketch the traditional gun owner: a middle-aged white man in a rural area, with less than a college education, who backs the Republican Party. His opposite number clearly smells danger in Trump. According to the BBC, inquiries to the Liberal Gun Club shot up after the 2016 election. Lara Smith, a spokesperson for the group, said some people fear that under Trump minority groups face harsher persecution, that citizens' constitutional rights are being eaten away, and that society is sliding into a fascist rule the country has never seen before — and that fear pushed them to buy the first gun of their lives. The NRA's answer-guns-with-guns argument may be more popular than the NRA itself imagined.

It should be said that in the wave of public anger the Florida school shooting set off, gun-rights groups are again under pressure. After several airlines stopped offering discounts to NRA members, gun sellers including Walmart raised the minimum age for buying a gun.

This past Wednesday, Trump dropped his pro-gun stance in televised remarks and urged stronger legislation on gun safety. But alongside Democratic lawmakers questioning his sincerity and his ability to push gun control through, Republican lawmakers restated to reporters that they oppose it.

Whether Trump's proposal reaches Capitol Hill, let alone becomes law, is not yet clear. According to the New York Times, the core of his remarks was a gun-control bill submitted to Congress after Sandy Hook. Republicans voted that bill down, making it one of the worst legislative defeats of the Obama years.

For the survivors of the Florida shooting, what they have to face is not only an unreadable president and a stubbornly conservative NRA, but the origins of how Americans understand freedom. The Guardian observed after last year's Las Vegas shooting: "From the Revolutionary War to the genocide of Native Americans, from the settling of the West to the embrace of anti-government American individualism, the shadow of the gun falls everywhere across American history. It does now, and perhaps it always will."

The young ranks of the University of Delaware's Students for Second Amendment and the first-time buyers worried about America's future are both carrying that history forward.

Charts: QDaily / Feng Xiuxia Banner: Unsplash / David Levêque Cover image: Wikipedia