ASFAR Position Paper-Youths’ Right to Bear Arms
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution ensures that it is our position as Americans for a Society Free from Age Restrictions that “the right to keep and bear arms should not be restricted on the basis of age.” To the individual unfamiliar with the complexity and rational basis of advocacy of various youth rights, this may seem a lunatic proposal. In reality, we draw from historical precedent in our own society, research into other more “primitive” societies, and mere logical analysis to support the view that age restrictions on firearms (and other weapons, for that matter) are arbitrary and ultimately unnecessary, and that those alleged risks that do presently exist are to some extent bred by arbitrary and relative societal conditions that could be altered.
Regardless of what conclusions present analysis yields about the alleged dangers of youth access to firearms, it’s imperative to keep in mind that this analysis is conducted in conditions where youth have been specifically deprived of rights and corresponding responsibilities from early childhood, and there is thus little basis for concluding that there exists some inherent inability of youth to responsibly exercise a right to bear arms as a result. Indeed, as mentioned, research into the practices of more “primitive” societies reveals a substantially different picture of youth access to lethal weapons in daily life. One of the more insightful analyses into this phenomenon was that of Jean Liedloff (1978), who engaged in a fascinating study of the Yequana Indian tribe of South America. She noted this of the access of young children to what weapons the tribe possessed:
“The boys, from about the age of about 18 months, practiced archery with sharp arrows, some enthusiasts carrying their bow and arrows about most of their waking hours. Shooting was not confined to designated places, now were any ‘safety rules’ in effect. In my two and a half years there I saw only one arrow wound.”
No doubt many will be greatly skeptical (to put it very lightly) of the prospect of 18 month old children handling dangerous or lethal weapons. To be clear, that is not the precise nature of our proposal here. We expect that the majority of very young children will not be capable of independently using lethal weapons, but neither do we see a need to establish an age restriction to prevent them from doing so, and instead propose that an alternate means of competence measurement be used, as with our proposals in regards to other age restrictions. We do not imagine that we can establish an injury-free utopia in an environment that differs substantially in various social arrangements from that of the Yequana, and readily acknowledge that there will certainly be youth who irresponsibly handle weapons, and will inevitably injure or kill themselves or others. However, if appropriate measures of cautious training are established from an early time in a youth’s life, this problem will likely not be so pervasive as to warrant a general rule that prohibits youth access to or ownership of firearms or other weapons.
That said, we must acknowledge that presently existing concerns about youth and firearms are limited not only to fears of them accidentally injuring or killing themselves or others due to ineptness, but fears of them deliberately injuring or killing others due to emotional immaturity or volatility, regardless of their actual competence to handle firearms, or worse yet, fears exacerbated by their ability to competently handle firearms and thus increase the abundance and lethality of their attacks. This concern seems to us similarly misguided for several reasons. Firstly, the alleged risks of youth violence seem greatly exaggerated to begin with. While media reports perpetuate popular sentiments that youth crime levels are skyrocketing and constitute a savage bloodbath on the part of the young, a Department of Justice Report instead notes that “[t]he growth and decline in violent crime by juveniles between 1980 and 2003 are documented by both victim reports and arrests” (Snyder and Sickmund 2006).
Secondly, it’s again imperative to note that whatever pattern of youth violent behavior does exist exists in an environment in which youth are subject to deliberate infantilization and authoritarian restrictions that likely play a role in the development of personality disorders or other deficiencies among many. It’s certainly not the case that all forms of youth violence are caused merely by this environment; even in far preferable settings, it seems likely that many youth (and adults) would continue to assault, injure, kill, and generally brutalize others for one reason or another, or perhaps for no conceivable reason at all. But alongside this persistent pattern exists the reality that sharp increases in youth violence or emergence of different varieties that did not previously exist seems to be interestingly correlated with the emergence of parallel restrictions that may reasonably be expected to inhibit certain developmental capacities.
For example, school violence is widely feared as a terrible epidemic of youth dysfunction generated through exposure to unsavory entertainment media, and worse, under-restricted youth access to firearms. The topic is intensely focused on by tabloidist media sources (which typically include the majority of the television and print media in the case of youth) as an example of the inherent recklessness and volatility of the young, with the 1999 Columbine High School shootings having provoked a national fervor about youth access to vice, and the entire American political spectrum almost unanimously adopting an anti-youth position of some sort, with liberals consequently favoring more draconian restrictions on Second Amendment rights and conservatives consequently favoring more draconian restrictions on First Amendment rights in the aftermath of that incident. And yet, the origins of school violence are far more complex and thus, the potential solutions consequently far more nuanced than any mere prohibitive restriction on youth freedoms. Gordon Crews (1997) offers interesting insights into the nature of those origins.
“Throughout the Middle Ages and as late as the seventeenth century, children participated in acts that, if committed in modern times, would result in not only their being defined as delinquent but also in requiring their parents and other adults to be charged with contributing to their delinquency. As soon as they could talk, most children learned and used obscene language and gestures; many engaged in sexual activity at an early age, willingly or otherwise; they drank freely in taverns, if not at home; few of them ever went to school, and when they did, they wore sidearms, participated in brawls, and fought duels (Newman 1980).*
As a socially accepted concept of childhood grew and expanded, the meanings attached to it significantly altered. The acts of children that in previous centuries were not seen as particularly deviant suddenly became unique problems. New norms and expectations developed as childhood became a special phase in the life cycle (Newman 1980). In this phase, school violence would find its origin.”
On the one hand, it’s apparent that during an era in which age boundaries were not clearly set and age restrictions themselves were minimal and/or unenforced, youth still “wore sidearms, participated in brawls, and fought duels.” This can obviously by no means be called a utopia in which youth violence was nonexistent thanks to the absence of those age boundaries. And yet, the comment that “the acts of children that in previous centuries were not seen as particularly deviant suddenly became unique problems” suggests that modern perceptions of youth misbehavior (including youth violence) are regarded as more problematic today than is reasonable. There are, for instance, many who hold the impossibly rigid position that a single person injured or killed because of youth access to weapons is grounds for denying them all such access, while few would presume to adopt such an extremist stance in the case of adults. The earlier comment that “there will certainly be youth who handle weapons irresponsibly, and will inevitably injure or kill themselves or others” may be regarded by some as a sufficient basis for adopting even more draconian policies as they relate to youth and weapons. However, we must acknowledge that though such problems will indeed occur, there’s no basis for believing that youth established as competent will somehow be more endangered than similarly competent adults to any significant extent.
But more than that, the last sentence of that excerpt is of particular interest because of the claim that the emergence of school violence was caused by or at least related to the fact that “childhood became a special phase in the life cycle.” This is a curious comment, and one that indicates that the establishment of more rigid age restrictions and more correspondingly paternalistic legislation did not have the effect of creating or maintaining peace and stability in the schoolhouse, the institution wherein the rigid hierarchies and age-based boundaries that govern the lives of the young manifest themselves more plainly than in all other contexts. Instead, it had the effect of perpetuating and intensifying previously existing violent conditions, as well as creating new forms of violence where they had not previously existed. While broad correlation of the emergence of school violence with the expansive process of the development of childhood as a firmly defined phase of the life cycle may not be (and indeed, probably is not) sufficient evidence of some causative link between the two, there is more specific evidence that the expansion of school violence is connected to the parallel establishment of compulsory schooling. As put by Elizabeth Midlarsky and Helen Marie Klain (2005):
“School violence appeared to be particularly widespread during periods wherein education became compulsory for previously unschooled students. Neither the students nor their teachers had any positive attachment to one another nor to the schools. Disciplinary problems were rampant and were addressed through corporal punishment. In contrast to the opinion that leniency leads to chaos, the harsh discipline found in earlier times led, quite literally, to chaos.”
We thus again see the pattern of coercive and authoritarian restrictions and disciplinary methods having the effect not of ending problems, but instead of producing a greater amount and more intense form of the very behavior that its application was intended to stymie. This is due to the fact that legitimately harmonious relations cannot be bred by coercion or force, and must instead be produced by voluntary association. Utilization of coercion or force will have the effect of producing contentious and hostile relations rather than peaceable ones, a reality acknowledged by the authors’ quotation of an astute observer's comment that “[t]here is as little disposition on the part of American children to obey the uncontrovertible will of their masters as on the part of their fathers to submit to the mandates of kings.”
As Midlarsky and Klain note, openly authoritarian methods were among those detailed in pamphlets circulated by those favoring authoritarian approaches to childrearing and education. They included the following advisories:
“(1) Never permit children to be alone, since they are not fit to govern themselves.
(2) Discipline, do not pamper children.
(3) Teach modesty.
(4)Train children to work; teach them diligence in some lawful trade.
(5) Above all teach respect and obedience to authority. Disobedience leads inevitably to dishonor, disease, and death.”
While many laud these methods even today, it’s apparent that their consequences were not those of preserving order and discipline, but instead of provoking hostile and openly violent reactions from those who regarded them as excessively restrictive. And it’s necessary to point out that such restrictions are not merely present in schools and nowhere else, but are facets of the daily lives of the majority of American children and adolescents.
The psychologist Robert Epstein (2007) has conducted an analysis of the degree to which adolescent youth are infantilized and subject to authoritarian restrictions compared to other regular adults and heavily restricted groups of adults (specifically prisoners and active-duty military personnel), the list of restrictions having included such items as compulsory schooling, confiscation of private property, corporal punishment, forced medication and medical treatment, allowance cutoffs, and grounding. As he notes:
“To find out how adults score on the infantilization scale, I administered it recently to twenty-five noninstitutionalized adults in the San Diego area, twenty-four United States Marines on active duty (at Camp Pendleton in Southern California), and thirty-two incarcerated felons (at a county prison in the San Diego area). One would think that military personnel-obligated to follow orders without question-and prisoners-stripped of most of their rights by the criminal justice system-would be far more encumbered than noninstitutionalized teens.
But that’s not what I found. Noninstitutionalized adults indeed scored near zero on the scale (2.3 out of a possible 42), but teens outscored prisoners and soldiers by a large margin (26.6 for teens vs. 14.6 for prisoners and 10.9 for soldiers). Even with these small samples, the differences in these scores were, from a statistical standpoint, highly significant. In other words, teens appear to be subject to about twice as many restrictions as are prisoners and soldiers, and to more than ten times as many restrictions as are everyday adults” (italics his (I had to use boldface to distinguish here)).
Troubling though this is by itself, we also must recall that our focus is not only on individuals fully competent to possess full rights of self-determination (almost all adolescent youth would be included in that category), but those other, likely younger persons whose development of such abilities may be inhibited by excessive restrictions. As noted by John Darling (1992):
“[There is a] common-sense perception, endemic in our culture, of children as rather silly and immature, unfit to be given responsibility. Yet such a view is clearly in danger of being self-confirming; for where children are seen as silly and immature, they will not be given responsibility, and where they are not given responsibility, they are likely to remain silly and immature.”
This idea has and continues to form a cornerstone of our philosophy. With not only this age restriction on youth but every other, we attempt to emphasize the reality that we’re confronted with a vicious cycle of the medicine causing the illness, an ailment for which the same medicine of a greater amount and stronger intensity is prescribed. Hence, though we’ve acknowledged that media reports into youth violence are ridiculously exaggerated and designed to capture higher ratings at the costs of fairness and objectivity, we also have cause to believe that what abnormally elevated levels of youth armed violence and youth violence in general do exist are in fact intensified and exacerbated by the very authoritarian restrictions intended to curtail them. The legitimate solution is hinted at by Liedloff:
“The operative factor seems to be placement of responsibility. The machinery for looking after themselves, in most Western children, is in only partial use, a great deal of the burden having been assumed by adult caretakers. With its characteristic abhorrence of redundancy, the continuum withdraws as much self-guardianship as is being taken over by others. The result is diminished efficiency because no one can be as constantly or as thoroughly alert to anyone’s circumstances as he is to his own. It is another instance of trying to better nature; another example of mistrust of faculties not intellectually controlled, and usurpation of their functions by the intellect, which does not have the capacity to take all relevant information into consideration.
Besides causing civilized children to have more accidents, this propensity of ours to interfere with nature’s placement of responsibility where it works best also gives rise to innumerable other hazards.”
Our ultimate goal does not involve withdrawing all influence from youth and naively hoping that they’ll stumble down the right path, but in withdrawing authoritarian and coercive influence, and instead maximizing voluntary influence through reduced restrictions and more “libertarian” training (or self-training) methods. Lest this course of action seem too intangible to even comprehend, we must again emphasize that we favor the specific policy objective of the abolition of age restrictions on firearm and weapon ownership, as well as the imposition of additional restrictions upon youth that do not exist in the case of adults. Parallel to this must exist a more freely structured means of learning about firearms that would ensure general knowledge, but that would not collapse into a rigid and authoritarian means of compulsion that mirrored our current state of affairs. Keeping in mind Darling’s warning about the withdrawal of responsibility playing a significant role in keeping children “silly and immature” and Liedloff’s declaration that placement of responsibility is “the operative factor,” implementation of such policies can hopefully function as a facet of maximizing youth responsibility and autonomy, and in conjunction with the reduction and ultimate abolition of other age restrictions, nurturing capacities for self-governance in all areas of life.
*To clarify further, we do not wish to infer that we support the prospect of children and adolescents engaging in the sort of irresponsible or reckless activity described in the first section of that excerpt, but rather to indicate that they generally possess a toughness and an ability to cope not typically attributed to them by adults, and indeed, their peers. Our purpose is thus not to plague youth with burdensome and dangerous living conditions, but rather to create conditions in which they can use their toughness and durability when they encounter the difficulties of modern life, which may be substantially reduced in danger but substantially more complex also.
References
Crews, Gordon A. The Evolution of School Disturbance in America: Colonial Times to Modern Day. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1997
Darling, John. “A. S. Neill on Democratic Authority: A Lesson from Summerhill?” Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1992), pp. 45-57
Epstein, Robert. The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen. New York: Quill Driver Books, 2007
Liedloff, Jean. The Continuum Concept: Allowing Human Nature to Work Successfully. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1985.
Midlarsky, Elizabeth and Klain, Helen Marie. “A History of Violence in the Schools.” In Violence in Schools: Cross-National and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Florence Denmark. New York: Springer, 2005.
Snyder, Howard N., and Sickmund, Melissa. 2006. Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
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