Are we willing to curtail some our liberties (namely, those to bear arms) in order ensure a higher level of security for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our countrymen? After yet another mass shooting, Americans have once again failed to seriously address this tradeoff with regard to the Second Amendment. This tradeoff between liberty and safety is a fundamental component of our democracy, yet, it still doesn’t resonate with the large share of Americans who remain diametrically opposed to stricter gun control. In many other aspects of daily life, Americans have, been readily willing to relinquish freedoms in order to preserve our basic security. It’s a word that many Americans - those insulated from domestic violence, gang activity, and police brutality - only truly feel after a mass shooting.
In a “normal” month in today’s America, dozens of people are killed and, on average, one hundred are injured in mass shootings.Ī more appropriate word to describe this feeling is insecure, as in unsafe from imminent physical harm. Take a look at this comprehensive Mass Shooting Tracker, which reveals that for at least the last five years, not a month has gone by without several mass shootings, which are defined as single shooting events that injure or kill three or more individuals. Rather, it would be shocking to go a month, or even a week, without waking up to a mass shooting in America. In today’s America, mass shootings have become tragically mundane. Unfortunately, cold-blooded massacres such as those in Las Vegas, or in Aurora, or in Newtown, or in Columbine are not shocking at all. One word that immediately came to mind was shocking, but upon further reflection, I realized that that is not the right word at all because it connotes a sense of surprise. And every lover of liberty has heard them and known that they speak to that great truth about the constitution of civilized government–that we empower governments to protect us in a devil’s bargain from which we will lose in the long run.Like most Americans, I awoke on Monday, October 2nd to the sickening news out of Las Vegas, Nevada. Every student of American history knows them. They are quoted endlessly by those who assert that these two values coexist with one another in a precarious, ever-shifting state of balance that security concerns threaten ever to upset. A version of them is engraved on the Statue of Liberty. Indeed, Franklin’s are perhaps the most famous words ever written about the relationship. I started looking into this quotation because I am writing a frontal attack on the idea that liberty and security exist in some kind of “balance” with one another–and the quotation is kind of iconic to the balance thesis. Here’s an interesting historical fact I have dug up in some research for an essay I am writing about the relationship between liberty and security: That famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” does not mean what it seems to say.
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