America Magazine gets "gun control" wrong

America Magazine is not often mistaken as a bastion of orthodox Catholic thought. That is why it wasn't much of a surprise when I read one of their most recent editorials regarding gun control. What is scary though, is that this type of thought is often consumed and agreed upon by unsuspecting Catholics and Americans desperate to find a solution, to a problem that they can't quite put their finger on.

Since they can't clearly define the problem, America decides to assign blame and define the problem that way. The problem is that they sloppily sling accusations around, treating them as fact, and come off looking foolish. Not only that, their proposal flies entirely in the face of Catholic teaching and subsidiarity.

Here is their Op-Ed:

The shooting in Tucson on Jan. 8 can be just one more moment of televised grief or it can be the door, if we dare to open it, to a sane and more just society.

The cover of The Economist for Jan. 15 summed up our situation well: a cartoon drawing of two screaming heads, mouths wide open and, in place of tongues, two hands sticking out clutching pistols. In American culture many people seem to think any problem can be resolved at gunpoint—from an imagined insult to a paranoid fear that appeals to the Second Amendment to protect us from “big government.”

Blame may be spread: our heritage of frontier violence; crime shows where handguns are everywhere; neighborhoods where a weapon defines a teenager’s masculinity; gun merchants who sell weapons to mad students who become mass killers, like the assassins who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech and five at Northern Illinois University; gun enthusiasts who preach that we should tote pistols to work, restaurants, ball games, political meetings, classes and even church.

Blame also the pusillanimous politicians who have sold their souls to the National Rifle Association at the cost of 100,000 shootings a year and 34 gun-related deaths a day in the United States.

Jerome Grossman of Boston, who blogs at “Relentless Liberal,” made three reasonable proposals on Jan. 10 for gun control: uniform regulations in all states; required physical, medical and written tests along with training in firearms; housing all guns in the local police station to be signed out for a reason, e.g., to hunt or target-shoot, not to shoot one’s spouse or one’s self, to settle an argument, or for children to play with.

But for the time being, our leaders—politicians, intellectuals and clergy—must call for immediate practical reforms to deal with the most glaring problems. No private citizen should own automatic weapons or guns with high capacity magazines like the 33-cartridge unit used in Tucson. Tough laws, strictly enforced, must deny guns to mentally ill individuals like Jared Loughner, ban guns at public events and require dealers to keep records of all legal sales.

President Obama praised the six who lost their lives in Tucson as representing “the best in America.” But how much do we value the lives and safety not just of a congresswoman, a judge and a 9-year-old girl, but of every neighbor? How will we answer that most basic question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

There are so many holes in this piece that I will treat it very basically, and you can gleam the rest from my outline.

First, they place blame on a claim that everything is handled at gun-point and that the 2nd Amendment is a protection from a "paranoid" fear of "big government." To be honest, one only needs to look at a place like Egypt to realize that the fear of government is not paranoid. Sure, we might not ever see an uprising like that in our country, but is it really paranoid? They have to say this though, because it strikes at the core of what the 2nd Amendment truly is - an iron-clad protection against government oppression.

Next, they blame culture. This is the easy shot claim to make, that somehow our culture is so gun-crazy and messed up, that we can't possibly allow free access to firearms because, well, we are all incapable of controlling ourselves. Again, this flies in the face of human dignity, subsidiarity, and freedom. But of course, like all liberals, America believes they are smarter than their readers, and therefore wants to care for them - in order to be maintain the lifestyle they choose.

Worst of all though, are the legal restrictions that America proposes. Almost all of them are either already in place or would make gun ownership null and void for all intents and purposes. The ones that really get me are the "uniform laws for all states" and "signing the guns out for use" requirements. Do you know how problematic that would be in a state like Alaska? We literally depend on firearms as tools and defense mechanisms against nature. Again, this is a "feel good" attempt to pander to their base of readers. It sickens me that such a shallow intellectual endeavor like this was committed by supposedly educated people, who are paid to write and think.

If we as Catholics are going to interject our thoughts and opinions into politics and society, we must adhere to the precepts of the faith. We can't play willy-nilly with facts, and make emotional feel-good appeals to convince others of our opinion. The Catholic Intellectual Tradition is rooted first and foremost on the teaching of the Word of God. From there we move into the learned thought of Catholic intellectuals who place their minds into the chasm that is Catholic teaching, filled to its quantum depths with an intricate system of precepts and understanding. To do what America did here is not only sloppy in a journalistic sense, but it is essentially anti-Catholic. They fly in the face of Catholic teaching, and haphazardly crash around the sacred teachings of the Church. I expect more from Catholic publications and so should you.

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