What you see above are tens of thousands of Americans running in terror from the functionally-automatic gunfire of Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas in October of 2017. It was the deadliest mass shooting in America's sordid history of mass shootings—471 people were shot, 60 of them fatally. I don't include this footage to be sensational, but rather to emphasize the scale of the event. It can't be measured merely in people shot or bullets fired, but in years of counseling and physical therapy, and the immeasurable grief of family and friends.
For every person shot, there are many more wounds we can't see; how many of the 22,000 Americans at the Route 91 Harvest music festival that night will forever be uncomfortable in crowded spaces, or flinch at loud noises? This is the tyranny of the gun, and it's ever-present in our schools, movie theaters, and grocery stores.
There is a school of thought that the Second Amendment is meant to equip us to protect our rights from a tyrannical government. On this, we needn't divine the intentions of the founding fathers, for they were quite explicit in their own words. They—the anti-federalists in particular—were concerned about the danger to democracy of a standing army in a time of peace. A well-armed citizenry was seen as the surest defense against the trespasses of would-be tyrants.
This week, President Biden mocked this concept, saying, "If you think you need weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons." This glib remark will no doubt be pleasing to the ears of liberals, like me, who advocate for gun control. But I would be more circumspect if I were him, considering that an unarmed group of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6 and successfully disrupted the certification of his electoral victory for several hours. If a handful of insurrectionists could do this without guns, imagine what they might have done with them.
It's important for those of us who advocate for gun control to understand the contemporaneous reasoning behind the Second Amendment. There's no question that the founders envisaged an individual right to bear arms as a deterrent to government tyranny. But what happens when the tyranny of the gun is greater than the tyranny the gun is supposed to protect us from?
Gun rights advocates will retort that the 15,000 people who are fatally shot in gun violence each year is nothing compared to the millions of deaths at the hands of oppressive governments throughout history, such as the Soviet Union, where private gun ownership was strictly regulated. But I am interested in reality, and the reality is that a tyrannical U.S. government is merely speculative, whereas the tyranny of the gun is ever-present in our public spaces and events. Today, we do not live in fear of our government. We do live in fear of guns.
The claim of government tyranny rings particularly hollow when you consider how impotent the government has been on gun control measures. The heinous Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, in which 20 children aged 6 and 7 were shot dead, resulted in no federal gun control measures. The Obama administration's gun violence task force, headed by then-Vice President Biden, proved utterly ineffectual at enacting any gun control legislation. And this is the government we're meant to be afraid of?
Many people feel that gun violence is an intractable problem in America, and that gun control simply won't work—even if they're otherwise sympathetic to the cause. To them I say, look at abortion. There's a constitutionally-protected right to abortion in this country, but that hasn't prevented numerous states from passing laws that run abortion clinics out of state, and bully, harass, and intimidate women into not getting abortions. Gun control can and should work on a similar premise; individuals should be disincentivized from obtaining a gun through various coercive measures, and the "providers" of guns—that is, manufacturers and sellers—should be targeted to make guns less available on the market.
I dare the Supreme Court to declare such measures unconstitutional, while it upholds similar restrictions on a woman's right to choose. The anti-abortion movement is endlessly innovative, while gun control advocates suffer from a lack of imagination.
Americans need to wake up to the very real danger of guns, rather than the imagined danger of government tyranny. The tyranny of the gun is pervasive. It affects all of us. Whether or not we ourselves or our family or friends have been victims of gun violence, the potential to be a victim of gun violence is constantly present in our public spaces. Measures can and should be taken to reduce this potentiality. We're Americans, damn it, and we deserve to send our children to school, or to go to a movie theater or a concert, with peace of mind. The American revolutionary spirit may have been necessarily pro-gun, but it's time to reclaim that very spirit to end the tyranny of the gun once and for all.