A licence to kill?

We imagine that most of our readers are familiar with the notion that the two zeroes in the number that follows the name of the film character, James Bond, Agent 007, signifies that he has a licence to kill without fear of prosecution. In the real world, however, such a licence does not exist of course, even though as the recent mass murder of some 26 defenceless women and young children in Newtown, Connecticut, demonstrates, all that appears to be required is a murderous intent, the means of effecting the deed and a suicide wish to avoid the prosecution.

The intent and wish may arise from some disease of the mind that persuades the assailant that what he (very few mass murderers are women) is doing is not only right but also necessary, or from some imagined or real slight or humiliation by another. The means of carrying out the dastardly deed, while less easily acquired, is arguably facilitated somewhat by the readiness of access to explosives or, in the instant case, powerful assault weapons.

And, in the US, this latter access has been accommodated by the rather liberal construction which the Supreme Court has placed on the right to bear arms. While the Amendment at issue would seem to regard this as a collective right to in order form a “well regulated militia”, the learned judges have preferred to interpret it in a way that suggests each citizen has a nearly unfettered right to a semiautomatic assault weapon of his choice; a weapon whose only real purpose appears to be to kill another person or group of persons. One BBC news report claims that there were 88.8 firearms for every 100 Americans in 2007.

The recent murders of these innocents should have effectively foreclosed any such debate. But it will not. According to an article by Michael Cooper in the New York Times, “…the day before [the tragedy], lawmakers in Michigan passed a bill that would allow people to carry concealed weapons in schools”. The official responses have also been rather vague and inoffensive, such as President Obama’s call to “take more meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this” and another from an officer of an anti-gun violence group that “we are poised to harness [the] outrage and create a focused and sustained outcry for change”.

Still, if all that is required for the licence to commit mass murder are the intent and the means and the death wish, it remains difficult to see what effective action might be taken in the realm of the temporal other than a judicial acceptance that the current interpretation of the Second Amendment is not only inconsistent with modern reality of the protective state forces but also inherently conducive to incidents such as the Newtown horror.

Thomas Sowell, the celebrated social theorist, dismisses this thesis as a fallacy. In a column for  the London Guardian, he argued that gun control laws do not in fact control guns but simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available. He points to the statistic that while handgun ownership doubled in the twentieth century, the murder rate went down.

This argument may itself be fallacious. If we are concerned with reducing the incidence of mass murders such as those at Sandy Hook and the relatively recent incident in Aurora, Colorado, then the fact of disarming a law-abiding citizen or the murder rate for single victims are no longer material considerations. These incidents create a general insecurity in the populace distinct from that of the crimes of passion and contract killings that are no less worrisome.

Events such as the Newtown murders usually engender copycat action by some who perceive an opportunity for brief notoriety. While we remain thankful that a similar occurrence locally is unlikely, today we say a prayer of condolence for the parents of those children so tragically slain.