Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death?

I’ve never owned a gun.

I never want to own a gun.

Indeed, I would call myself a (soft) pacifist about most instances of violence: I believe that while there may indeed exist good reasons to resort to violence, the reality of the human situation is that we never need to use them in order to advance the goals of a world governed by human rights.

And yet, one of my earliest political experiences happened at a gun show.

My father, a big burly man with a Santa Claus beard and a sense of humour that never quite matured became friends with a single guy, middle aged while working as a traffic control person. This guy was an interesting character — he was like my dad: bold and brash with a lack of social graces that someone easily comes to forgive after getting to know him a bit.

I’d been working with my father on some odd jobs that he did on the weekend, when Doug gave him a call. “Norm! I’m doing some traffic control at a gun show in Burnaby. Wanna come down, check out some interesting equipment and hang out with me on the line?” Now I’d never been to a gun show before, and was curious what it was about. I’d grown up in a home heavily influenced by Mennonite pacifism, but like all little boys, I couldn’t get enough of military equipment used during the various wars we’ve been a part of. What little boy hasn’t taken an interest in the WWI flying aces or the WWII panzerkampfs of the German army?

“Dad! Let’s go!” I said, my 13 year old boyish grin betraying the fact that I’d get to spend the day with my father, his odd friend and some guns.

My father went to meet up with Doug and I started perusing the various booths, coming across the booth for the Libertarian Party of British Columbia. They were passing out literature intended on capturing support for more open and accessible gun policies. I remember being struck by the idea that more guns, despite how interesting they may be, is probably a bad idea for society at large.

“How can you promote the open and unrestricted use of firearms in British Columbia?” I asked with boyish curiosity. I wasn’t interested in a political argument so much as in learning about why gun owners wanted more freedom with respect to obtaining and using such dangerous equipment.

“Well, we stand for freedom and for liberty. Our friends to the south know that this means that each individual is able to obtain and use firearms for their own purposes, including for self-defense. Here in Canada we just don’t have that freedom.”

The answer made a little bit of sense, from the perspective of freedom to access firearms. But it still didn’t answer my underlying curiosity: why would we want more weapons designed with the intention of ending life, in the hands of greater numbers of people? Isn’t that how people get hurt?

Twenty years later, with much more education and a greater knowledge of the world around me (however limited my understanding may be), I still have the same question, only it feels so much more serious now than it did then. Our neighbour to the south may have prioritized the freedom of individuals to own and use firearms for whatever they see fit, including for self-defense, however rare such situations may be, but they have done so at a deep cost to American public safety.

The United States of America now has more gun-related death due to firearm misuse than any other country in the world.

There simply are not mass gun-related killings in other developed, industrialized nations. Other nations have prioritized public safety over the freedom to carry firearms. They are demonstrably safer with respect to gun-related murder; mass killings don’t happen with any kind of regularity in jurisdictions like Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. They don’t happen in most western European countries, and even in the developing world, gun deaths are more often related to politically motivated, militarized violence than anything else.

The question I asked of my Libertarian friend in 1995 is the same question I ask today, only I’ll be a little blunter about it than I was then: How can we promote the open and unrestricted use of firearms when we see the lives it costs, the communities it destroys, and the children it kills? Why can we not see that firearms are intended to kill living things, and as such, they need to be highly restricted and controlled?

It’s not about the underground gun trade. It’s about the legalized trade of killing machines. If my friends to the south have any sanity left in them, I’d urge them to seriously think about the consequences of prioritizing liberty over public safety. Because Liberty can’t save your nation when it attempts to do so at the cost of millions of lives, each and every year.

Give me Liberty or Give me Death? It seems the United States has chosen Death, and ironically, all in the name of Liberty.