There are ebbs and flows in any society. Here in America, we’ve experienced any countless number of progressions in our history. From emancipation and the granting of suffrage to African Americans and women to the prohibition of alcohol (and its subsequent reversal thirteen years later), America has always been a society of tinkering, tweaking, and (at least in theory) improving. We don’t always get it right, but you would be hard-pressed to find folks who try harder than the good, ole U.S. of A.
Which is why I find some of the political action taken after the horrific Parkland school massacre commendable.
Now, I’m one of the biggest supporters of the 2nd Amendment and gun rights that you’ll find. And largely, up until now, I’ve held off on wading into the gun debate ignited after Parkland due to the overwhelming wave of politicization that has been sparked in the aftermath. I legitimately think the tragedy at Parkland deserves our sympathies and forces our reconsideration of gun legislation.
An all-out ban? Perhaps not. But I’m not opposed to more stringent background checks and vetting, increased mental health services and screening, and better gun safety advocacy.
However, recent discussions in political circles and realities brought to bear by large retailers such as Kroger, Wal-Mart, and Dick’s Sporting Goods moving the minimum age to purchase a gun to 21 seems silly and counterintuitive.
Now, let me qualify myself. As a 19-year-old, I am one of the millions of Americans disproportionately affected by these decisions. I am not, however, a gun owner, nor have I ever been a gun owner. Nor do I really have any intention to ever be a gun owner.
So why should I care?
Well, like most ebbs and flows, these decisions have effects that reach beyond guns and gun ownership.
The rationale for the decision to change the minimum age by these retailers stems from the fact that the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Jacob Cruz, was 19 years old at the time of the shooting (just a few months older than myself), and 18 when he purchased the weapon used in the attack.
In this case, I don’t deny that a minimum age requirement of 21 would likely have prevented, or at the very least delayed, Cruz from making his attack.
There is also no denying that such a minimum would have stopped millions of other legal adults from enacting their constitutionally protected right to bear arms.
My problem with the age minimum gets to the heart of my issue with age minimums in general. Just as Mothers Against Drunk Driving claims that their successful push to raise the minimum drinking age in the 1980s to 21 reduced drunk driving, here too moral entrepreneurs will make the claim that a national minimum age to own guns will reduce gun violence amongst young people.
And they’re not wrong. Instances of drunk driving did in fact drop in the aftermath of the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act. Which, from a numerical perspective, makes sense. Fewer people were legally sanctioned to drink, and therefore fewer accidents occurred. But just because those people had been removed from the system, didn’t mean that the problem had been solved. The equivalent would be stating that anyone under 21 cannot be issued a driver’s license and then feigning surprise when the number of car owners goes down. A change in the numbers, not a change in the reality.
Anyone who’s spent any significant amount of time on a college campus since 1984 will tell you, it’s not as if there has been some kind of vast, immovable change of heart. Rather, the law only managed to cut off those more casual partakers of alcohol, all the while driving more problematic drinkers underground and fostering a real problem of young adult binge drinking.
In this, the act affected not the underlying cause, rather only the overlying symptoms.
The same thing would happen with a minimum age for gun ownership at 21.
The law would only remove the right to bear arms from responsible, legal adults while covering up other dangerous behavior.
None of this to mention that very pertinent term, “legal adult.” 18 is the age of majority in America. An 18-year-old can see R-rated movies, sign official documentation, consent to sex, get married, vote, join the army and die, all of his or her own accord.
In this context, a national minimum age to own a gun at 21 would be ridiculous.
All of this is just part of a larger trend towards infantilization of young Americans, a trend that has only been accelerating in the aftermath and uncertainty of 9/11. Since the drinking age has been set at 21, there has been this sort of pervasive idea that you’re not “really an adult” or “officially legal” until you reach 21. With this proposal to raise the minimum gun age, that infantilization finds comfort.
I for one, find no comfort in this infantilization.
Should we examine the way we treat guns in the wake of Parkland? Absolutely. But using a one-size-fits-all approach like a national age minimum for gun purchase and ownership will fix nothing. It will only drive the heart of the problem to deeper, harder-to-reach depths, all while disenfranchising millions of legal adults across the country.
