Guns and Nukes

On the face of it, it seems reasonable to insist on having the first at our personal disposal and the second at our government’s. The argument goes like this: There are bad people on our streets and untrustworthy foreign powers beyond our borders who want to do us harm and who have at their disposal, respectively, both means of doing it. And so, it is our personal and societal right and obligation to protect ourselves and other non-aggressive people and nations by possessing weapons in sufficient number and magnitude to prevail in any conceivable showdown with the forces of evil anywhere.

The facts presumed in this line of reasoning are hard to dispute. As are the normative claims about protecting ourselves and the innocent. What murks up the thinking, though, is our tendency to believe ourselves always to be truly innocent, and to assume that more equates with better when it comes to accumulating weapons for the purpose of keeping ourselves safe. From the standpoint of the Christian faith, the first belief is highly dubious: remember all that we once learned about the universality of sin? From the standpoint of theories about self-defense, the second belief is highly dangerous as well: remember all that we have learned lately about terrorism?

Typically accompanying the rationalization of seeking and acquiring more and more weapons, ostensibly for self-protection and never from aggressive intent, is the interdiction of any analysis of how human beings keep getting themselves into the situations that call for them (answer: from self-centeredness), and of with whom the blame most truly rests (answer: us as much as them). Admittedly, there is more to be said for this interdiction with respect to gun control than to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation agreements.

For all practical purposes, reigning in restrictions on the purchase of guns for personal use is now a lost cause in this country. Too many manufacturers have created too many of them. Too many criminals have more of them than any democratic system of laws and law enforcement can control. And too many people oppose even the barest tinkering with their freedom to buy and use any piece they want.

Whatever we may discover, therefore, by continuing to search out the whys of our addiction to guns will not help very much to vanquish it. Basically, our society has decided to live with the dangers of giving just about everyone an opportunity to get a hand on a gun (or both hands on more than one). And though it is difficult to understand why some folks think they need so many of them, violence on our streets is very real and a gun-toting citizenry might yet prove to be an important adjunct to a well-armed police force.

Nuclear proliferation, however, is a different story. Efforts to reduce the present number of nuclear weapons across the globe, to stop further production of them, and to keep tabs on existing arsenals make every bit of sense, no matter how many obstacles to their success must be faced and overcome at every step of the way. The major world powers have made huge progress on all this in recent decades and the progress is likely to continue, at least if so-called rogue nations can be prevented from getting in the way.

Nevertheless, it is still terrifying to contemplate the consequences of firing off even a few of the estimated 10,000 nuclear warheads that are currently operational around the globe. Maybe the predictions of nuclear winter are unfounded; they most certainly are more difficult to defend than I once thought they were. But from any mutual setting off of nukes we would still be dealing with an aftermath far more destructive than that of fights between even armed to the teeth street gang members in our cities.

The recent decision of the United States Supreme Court on the right to bear arms pretty well cinches it for gun lovers in this country. We have that right, the Court said, as individuals and not just as militia members. (For the life of me, however, I cannot see this implied in the language of the Second Amendment.) With respect to guns, then, we may no longer be able to press the question of how many is too many. But nothing prevents the international community from working for a nuclear weapons-free world. Indeed, we have the right and the responsibility to proclaim in the name of the Prince of Peace that very, very few are still far too many. Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that once and for all. It is disturbing testimony to the depth of human sinfulness that we still have as many of them around as we do.