Guns as the price for freedom?
President Obama’s speech in Newtown on December 17 included this pivotal question: “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” The president is bristling here at the way our political discourse reflexively leaps to claims about individual rights and freedoms. Issues become defined as the tragic clash of competing freedoms: Your freedom to do X is pitted against my freedom to do Y. The “price” of my freedom then is the loss of your freedom.
Rights talk can be an important resource for defending human dignity, but by itself rights talk is often morally obtuse, a way of sidestepping an issue. As Obama suggests, such is the case when it comes to thinking about gun violence and gun laws.
Consider how the discussion changes when the central question is not, “What should I be free to do?” but “What should I do to keep my neighbors safe?” That, of course, is the fundamental ethical question posed in the biblical tradition.
