Gun Violence Against Children and “Red Flag” Laws

It’s hard not to feel alienated from American culture right now. Nothing seems real or rational or humane. There are more guns manufactured in the country than there are people. Domestic terrorists hide the slaughter of innocents in collateral damage. Parochial hatreds of “aliens” are ruining the lives of tens of thousands of immigrant children and their families. Our nation is a bedlam. The cruelest and craziest of us prevail.

And our moral order has been virtually erased and replaced by the marketing dictums of the manufacturers of homicidal weaponry and their acolytes. Gun violence has become a normal cause of premature death, alarmingly so even here in New Mexico, or especially so.

Since the turn of the century, the Land of Enchantment has had a “consistently higher” rate of firearm death than U.S. rates, according to the New Mexico Indicator-Based Information System (NMIBIS). In 2017, New Mexico’s firearm death rate was 53% higher than the national rate, the leading cause of violent death in the state and the third leading cause of “injury death,” behind poisoning and fatal traffic accidents.

“Firearm injuries contributed significantly to premature mortality in New Mexico, accounting for a total of 12,283 Years of Potential Life Lost (YPPL) before the age of 75 years. Suicide due to firearm injury ranked as the sixth leading cause of premature death in the state…. Among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, New Mexico had the 10^th highest age-adjusted rate of firearm death in 2017, 18.5 per 100,000 population,” according to NMIBIS.

That’s why I wholeheartedly support Governor Lujan Grisham’s initiative in the Legislature this year to pass what’s called in the jargon of law enforcement, “a red flag” law, which she described as allowing “a temporary removal of a firearm from an individual who poses an extreme risk or threat to themselves or others,” according to the Albuquerque Journal.

Firearms are involved in “53.2% of intentional self-harm deaths (suicide) and 59% of assault deaths (homicide)” in New Mexico, NMIBIS says.

The Governor’s proposal protects New Mexicans’ right to bear arms, requiring a judge’s approval for the disarming of someone with a potential for doing harm. Nowhere, however, in the Second Amendment, which the Supreme Court says guarantees the right to gun ownership, does it say a person has a right to use guns to harm themselves or others.

For a regional culture like ours to valorize gun slinging paranoia at the expense of its children is as close to criminal insanity as stupidity can get. Firearms are the third leading cause of death among U.S. children from 1 to 17 years of age. In New Mexico, gun violence causes more than half of childhood homicides and more than a third of suicides. Guns, which are by their nature designed to kill living things, are a plague on New Mexico’s young people. Not only are they directly the cause of death, but as in all killings, the survivors are stricken by depression, despair and grief that can threaten their sanity and their very lives.

To argue that a “red flag” law would threaten a person’s right to bear arms, as the state’s sheriff’s association has, is to assume that the Second Amendment somehow protects the behavior of gun owners who misuse their weapons. The Second Amendment certainly doesn’t serve as a license to commit homicide, or to do anything with a gun beyond owning it. Yes, there is a philosophical trouble spot in a process that tries to predict and prevent wrongful gun behavior. But the confiscation of a gun owned by a person deemed to be dangerous serves as a temporary restraint, not as a permanent judgment of a person’s mental or moral state.

There’s no question that a “red flag” law could save lives. And in a nation mad with violence, that chance should prevail over the transparent and self-serving objections of the gun industry and its lobby. New Mexico’s children deserve that chance.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it