Freedom for Who?
Yesterday, September 4th, was the beginning of school shooting season. It happened at Apalachee High School near Winder, Georgia, and was done by a 14-year old boy whose parents had been warned about the concerns that their son could try to do a school shooting. The shooting was done with a rifle that had been given as a gift to the teenager by his father. I’ll say that one again — the parents knew that people were concerned about their son’s potential to do violence and still allowed him access to a weapon that would allow him to do that.
It’s no surprise that the beginning of school shooting season coincides with the beginning of school now. In fact, learning about yesterday’s shooting was how I realized schools were in session again. The number of shootings at schools is out of control, as you can plainly see in this chart from CNN:
It’s so normal in America today that it took GOP VP candidate JD Vance’s statements on the situation to compel me to say something about this one, instead of letting it pass by like so many shootings in my life. What did Vance say that required comment? Well, per the AP:
“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix. “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”
The Ohio senator was asked by a journalist what can be done to stop school shootings. He said further restricting access to guns, as many Democrats advocate, won’t end them, noting they happen in states with both lax and strict gun laws. He touted efforts in Congress to give schools more money for security.
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”
Calling school shootings “a fact of life” is an incredibly grim statement to hear from someone whose current job is to articulate a better vision for the county in an attempt to get elected. On a basic level it’s a great example of the old adage “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. The idea that the only solution to a problem with a gun is a different, better gun displays a lack of imagination that would be shocking if you heard it in a vacuum. The thing is, we aren’t looking at this in a vacuum, and this statement makes total sense in the context of the GOP’s conception of freedom overall.
My friend Scott Heins once told me that New York City is “100% freedom to, and zero percent freedom from”. I think it was when a video of a man with a moped on the subway went viral, and it made intuitive sense in that context, and if you’ve spent some time in the city it will make intuitive sense to you very quickly. But it’s got greater utility in this context because it allows us to intuitively understand the two different conceptions of freedom that we flatten into a single word in our political discourse. In this case, it’s straightforward to understand — your individual right to bear arms immediately trumps everyone else’s freedom to live securely and without fear. That’s the crux of the GOP’s stance on gun control, and nothing makes it more blatant than the response to a school shooting.
In his Four Freedoms speech, FDR defined Freedom from Fear last, saying:
“The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.”
FDR translated it into world terms because he was speaking in 1941, but the core of that message, that we need a reduction of arms in order to feel safe and not more of them, stands in stark contrast to the vision of security that Vance laid out today. I find it to be inspiring, that security comes from turning swords to plowshares instead of creating more swords. There’s a way forward there on guns, but that’s not thinking big enough.
When we talk about freedom, we have to ask ourselves — Freedom for who? It’s not just limited to guns, it’s a question of the tension between someone’s freedom to refuse to vaccinate their children versus your child’s freedom to live without getting measles. It’s the freedom to discriminate versus the freedom to love who you choose and be who you are. It’s the freedom to pollute versus your freedom to breathe. The reality is that the GOP’s conception of freedom is incredibly narrow, and we are due for a redefining of the term. We can’t have men like Vance tell us what freedom means, we need to seize it for our own, like FDR did, and redefine it in a way that doesn’t end in high school students dragging their wounded teacher out of the hallway on the first day of school.
