American Bishops on Guns
The Catholic News Service is reporting:
The Catholic Church’s position on gun control is not easy to find; there are dozens of speeches and talks and a few documents that call for much tighter regulation of the global arms trade, but what about private gun ownership? The answer is resoundingly clear: Firearms in the hands of civilians should be strictly limited and eventually completely eliminated.
This appears to be the position of the USCCB, not necessarily the position of the entire Catholic Church, as the documents cited come not from the Vatican, but from the USCCB. In those documents, our bishops have this to say about the matter:
As bishops, we support measures that control the sale and use of firearms and make them safer (especially efforts that prevent their unsupervised use by children or anyone other than the owner), and we reiterate our call for sensible regulation of handguns.
Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice, USCCB, November 15, 2000.
And what are sensible regulations of handguns? The document quoted above cites the following document, which states:
Furthermore, the widespread use of handguns and automatic weapons in connection with drug commerce reinforces our repeated “call for effective and courageous action to control handguns, leading to their eventual elimination from our society.
New Slavery, New Freedom: A Pastoral Message on Substance Abuse, USCCB, 1990.
“New Slavery, New Freedom”, in turn, quotes another document entitled “Handgun Violence: A Threat to Life”, which concludes:
[W]e call for effective and courageous action to control handguns, leading to their eventual elimination from our society. Of course, reasonable exceptions ought to be made for the police, military, security guards, and pistol clubs where guns would be kept on the premises under secure conditions.
Handgun Violence: A Threat to Life, Committee on Social Development and World Peace, United States Catholic Conference, September 11, 1975.
This is more than a call for gun control. It is exactly what it says: a call to eliminate handgun ownership in our society. Is this a good idea? In this same document, the USCCB cites the following reasons for handgun elimination:
- In 1973, there were 28,000 firearms deaths.
- In 1975, it was estimated that nearly 30,000 would die from gunshot wounds.
- Over 100,000 people are wounded by guns each year, the victims of 160,000 armed robberies and 100,000 assaults with guns.
- In 1973, 2,700 people died in gun related accidents, which was the fifth most common cause of accidental death.
The facts, however, do not square with the USCCB’s claims. Accidental deaths from firearm have been decreasing since statistics were first kept in 1904. They have decreased even more substantially since 1975 when this document was written. Accidental deaths from firearms have fallen to tenth most common cause – lower even than accidental deaths involving pedal cycles – and are now at an all time low, despite the fact that firearms ownership in the United States has increased to an all time high. Total murders from firearms in the United States dropped to 9,146 in 2009, of which 6,452 involved handguns. This is approximately twenty thousand fewer deaths from firearms than in 1973 – over thirty years later.
It is even more intriguing that “Handgun Violence: A Threat to Life” suggests that this policy is in agreement with the United States Constitution:
We are, of course, concerned about the rights of the individual, as these rights are grounded in the Constitution and in the universal design of our Creator. We are convinced that our position is entirely in accord with the rights guaranteed by our Constitution, and particularly with the Second Amendment to the Constitution as these rights have been clarified by the United States Supreme Court. We affirm the traditional principle that individual rights to private property are limited by the universal demands of social order and human safety as well as the common good.
Granted that all of these documents were written long before the United States Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. ___, 130 S.Ct. 3020 (2010), when the only court case on the subject was United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), but even so, I do not see how this policy of the USCCB can possibly square with the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states that:
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.
Elimination of private gun ownership would infringe on this right. While I am aware that there was an interpretation of this amendment that said that the right in question did not belong to individual people, in my opinion, that was never a credible interpretation. This was precisely the question at issue in Heller, in which the Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment protects a right belonging to the individual.
But what does the Catechism of the Catholic Church say about gun control? Directly, not a lot:
The production and the sale of arms affect the common good of nations and of the international community. Hence public authorities have the right and duty to regulate them. The short-term pursuit of private or collective interests cannot legitimate undertakings that promote violence and conflict among nations and compromise the international juridical order.
I don’t disagree with what the Catechism teaches on this subject at all. There is a place for firearms regulation, and handgun regulation needs to be tailored to take into account the different ways that people use them. That said, any regulations need to be in accord with all of the facts and should not restrict the right of legitimate self-defense. For example, I agree with the USCCB’s call for laws prohibitting handgun ownership by convicted felons, the mentally ill and persons with a history of drug or alcohol abuse. If there were better enforcement of these laws, perhaps we would not have had the Columbine, Virginia Tech or Tucson massacres.
I believe that the USCCB may wish to revisit this topic. Our bishops may wish to ask themselves how individuals can band together to protect themselves from the government, when only the government has guns? History has shown, both in the Holodomor and in the Holocaust, for example, what happens to an unarmed populace when a tyrannical and dictatorial regime takes control. Furthermore, we live in a society in which the police aren’t always there to protect us, if not because they are tools of a totalitarian regime, then because there is simply a lack of numbers.
Sadly, I think the USCCB is saying, by implication, that people can’t be trusted to act in a virtuous and responsible manner with dangerous and powerful tools and that, therefore, people should not be free. It will always be true that some will not be responsible, but is it true of most? I don’t think so. That firearms ownership has increased while deaths from firearms has decreased is a testament to responsible gun owners throughout the United States.
Guns are a tool. There always has to be a human being involved in the discharge of a firearm, whether that discharge is accidental or intentional. I would be happier if, rather than controlling our access to a thing, our bishops were more focused on the proper, virtuous and responsible use of firearms. Things cannot be formed; only people can be formed.
I also wonder if the USCCB’s conclusions in “Handgun Violence: A Threat to Life” would have been different if our bishops had fully understood the direction the country was headed after the Supreme Court’s decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. The USCCB’s document was written in 1975, about two years later. The consequences of Roe/Doe, specifically that we might have a government that was committed to abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research, may not yet have been clear to them. They must have been praying and hoping for a quick repeal of this decision through legislation.
February 16th, 2011 at 5:51 am
The point never mentioned (and indeed I wonder if the bishops are even aware of it) is the overwhelming statistic on defensive firearms usage in the US. Yes, approximately 30,000 people die, and more are injured, but these numbers are dwarfed by the use of handguns to prevent 2.5 MILLION crimes (assault, rape, murder, home invasion, and on and on) per year. The TRUE story on civilian firearms is that their current usage pattern is in exact compliance with the Catechisms teachings.