The Sami question – dealing with Sweden’s colonial past

(Author’s note: this post does not attempt to in any way deal with all the violations of human rights of the Sami in Sweden.)

“Who here has ever studied about the Sami?” – that was the question a classmate asked in a history class during my 2^nd year in high school. In a class of 32, from many different secondary schools around the Gothenburg area, not one of us raised our hand. I remember thinking that maybe it was a bit odd, but I didn’t give it any more thought at the time. But in the last few years this memory has bothered me more and more.

During my LLM I took a class on the Inter-American system of human rights. It was the first time I had studied anything about Latin America and the first time I learned about indigenous rights and the many different indigenous people of the Americas – how their rights have been violated and how the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has repeatedly held states accountable. I remember coming to the realization that if Sweden were in the Americas, we would’ve had our wrists slapped hard for our treatment of the Sami. I also remember talking to one of my best friends once about how much I liked the class and she asked me, “well what are the Sami like?”. She assumed I had something to offer since they are the indigenous people my home country Sweden. “I don’t know”, I answered, feeling slightly stupid and uncomfortable. “Well what’s their culture and faith and stuff?” she asked. Once again I had to reply with “I don’t know.”

Of course I knew that the Sami come from the north of Sweden and that some are reindeer herders and I also knew sort of what their traditional costumes look like and that there had been some past abuses on the part of the Swedish State. This I had learned from a children’s news program when I was a child. But that was the extent of my education about the Sami growing up in Sweden – and none of it came from my 12 years in school. It was then that I started to ask around: had my friends, family members, younger brother, or nieces ever studied the Sami in school? I have continued to ask this question of colleagues and other Swedish people when the topic comes up and the answer has always been “no”. This made me start wondering about the silence on this topic in Swedish society. There has been much more about the Sami in the news and media lately but growing up I was never confronted about my country’s history regarding the colonization of Sami lands and oppression of our indigenous people. I personally feel robbed by my government of this very important knowledge and feel incensed that my government not only won’t guarantee the Sami their rights, but won’t even apologize for what happened in the past. I am also appalled at the non-existence of political discussion and debate about the Sami question. 

Sweden’s colonization of Sami lands and historic violations of Sami rights

The Sami are the indigenous people of the North of Europe. I often compare Sápmi, the land inhabited by the Sami, to a Swedish Kurdistan. Sápmi covers about half of Sweden and Norway, as well as parts of Finland and Russia. It is claimed that the Sami came to inhabit the land at least 2,000 years ago, and the first written document believed to speak about the Sami dates from 98 AD.

It is unclear how many Sami people still inhabit the area, but one estimate claims that there are 80,000-100,000 Sami in Sápmi (about 20,000-40,000 in Sweden, 50,000-60,000 in Norway, 8,000 in Finland, and 2,000 in Russia). However, it is worth noting that the Swedish census no longer notes ethnicity so the estimate of some 20,000 Sami in Sweden dates back to 1975. Therefore we don’t even know how many Sami actually live in Sweden!

Sweden’s colonization of Sápmi started during the 14^th century when Swedish kings began claiming rights to territory in the north. During the 16^th century the Sami were forced to pay taxes to the Swedish State and in 1542 King Gustav Vasa proclaimed that uninhabited land, or land without settlements belonged to “God, the Swedish crown, and no one else”. The king also tried to make Swedes move to the vast lands in the north, but without much success. Thus, colonization of Sápmi began in earnest in the 17^th century when silver was discovered (in 1634). Ever since the Sami have been subjected to various forms of oppression at the hands of the State.

From an early stage, the Church was instrumental in the oppression and discrimination of the Sami. The Sami were forced to convert to Christianity and to attend Church, where their language wasn’t allowed to be spoken and the traditional joik was forbidden. The Church also used a number of punishments to force Sami to convert, including fines, imprisonment, and the death penalty. Holy Sami sites were defaced and drums used in traditional ceremonies were destroyed.

In 1913 a new system of nomad schools was introduced, which was in place until 1962. The school system was developed by the Church, as ordered by the State, and was heavily influenced by thoughts of eugenics. There was also a Swedish policy notion that the “lapp shall be a lapp”. The word ‘lapp’ stems from the word Lappland, a province in Sweden which contains Sápmi, and is what the Sami used to be called (the term is now considered derogatory). The policy established that the reindeer herding Sami should live according to what was considered their native way of living, whereas the settled Sami were supposed to be assimilated into the majority Swedish population. Therefore, the children of reindeer herding Sami didn’t get an education that was on par with other State schools. They were sent to special boarding schools, so-called nomad schools, where Swedish was the only language of instruction despite the fact that they didn’t speak the language. These schools also taught fewer subjects than State schools. The system of segregated schools has been said to have created divisions among the Sami.

Because of the State’s policies in the 19^th and 20^th century many Sami have lost both their traditional religion and their language and today less than half of the Swedish Sami are believed to speak their native language.

The State and the Church of Sweden were also involved in other racist policies towards the Sami. As was all the rage in the first half of the 20^th century, Sweden was interested in eugenics. In 1922 a man called Herman Lundborg became the director of the State Institute for Eugenics. He argued that the idea of equal worth among people was an illusion and that humans were made up of different races, whose worth was determined by heritage; lowest were the racially mixed and best were the racially pure (as can be guessed here, Lundborg became an important inspiration for a group of German eugenics researchers whose work was the foundation for the Nazis’ ideas about race).

Herman Lundborg’s research into the people of Sápmi led to widespread violations of human rights against the Sami. Lundborg traveled north, measuring skulls and faces of Sami and collecting information about the color of their hair and eyes. He photographed each person, and the pictures were catalogued in an archive that is still kept by the government. Government representatives made judgments about whether the Sami in question was intelligent, lazy or insane, making conclusions about the person’s worth from her physical appearance. Priests of the Church of Sweden were instrumental in giving Lundborg and his researchers access to Sami families.

A catalogue of pictures of Sami people is still being kept by the library at University of Uppsala. They include 12,000 headshots, full body pictures and even nudes of Sami men, women and children.  

Other institutions, such as national historical museums, also keep Sami remains and objects. In 2007, the Sami Parliament, Sametinget, requested a complete identification of all Sami skeletal remains held in all national collections and the repatriation of the human remains to where they belong. The Sami Parliament also wanted to know how museums and institutions acquired the remains, i.e. if done by way of opening burial grounds or other. However it appears not much has happened since then.

Towards public apologies and reconciliation?

Despite the historical struggles of the Swedish State to recognize and apologize for its treatment of the Sami and for the violation of their human rights, there have been some positive recent developments that may constitute the beginning of a slow change.

While the Church is no longer part of the State, it has taken a lead in redressing the past, recently making overtures towards the Sami. It finally seems ready to accept responsibility for its part in the historic violations the human rights of the Sami

In March 2001 there was a reconciliation service at the church in Undersåker, which is in southern Sápmi. This was part of a reconciliation process initiated by the Church. The south Sami language and the joik were used during the service. The bishop of Härnösand recognized the Church’s responsibility for what happened in the past and asked the Sami for forgiveness.

The Archbishop of Sweden, Antje Jackelén, has repeatedly made public comments about the Church’s involvement in the violations of human rights against the Sami. The Church is working on a White Paper, which includes examples of the Church’s participation in violations against the Sami: forced Christianization, destruction and desecration of Sami cultural sites and objects, active participation in the looting of graves in the pursuit of Sami remains, deprivation and oppression of Sami identity and culture, etc. According to the Archbishop the Church “delivered theological models of thinking that could justify the colonial system.”

The Church’s recent recognition of responsibility and its work on reconciliation is a good start. The Archbishop has also called on the State to create a truth commission, which has been suggested by the Sami parliament Sametinget (which is confusingly also a State agency), and the Ombudsman for discrimination. Unfortunately the State doesn’t seem to be getting on the reconciliation bandwagon anytime soon. In 1998 the then minister for Sami affairs, Annika Åhnberg, apologized for the State’s treatment of the Sami in the past. However, an official apology from a Prime Minister hasn’t happened yet, nor do I believe is it likely to happen anytime soon since the ‘Sami issue’ is rarely debated in public and Swedish governments have always been hesitant to admit wrongdoing against minorities in Sweden (such as Jews, Roma, etc. but those are for another post, another time). The current government appears no different than those of the past when it comes to the Sami; no official apology has been issued by the State for the treatment of the Sami people – and none appears in sight.

Current violations of Sami rights

The lack of respect for Sami rights has long been one of the human rights issues for which Sweden has been criticized. For example, the Swedish Minerals Act has been criticized by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples because the law does not respect Sami special interests and rights.

Human rights experts argue that the Swedish law and its application run contrary to UN human rights conventions and the ILO Convention no 169 in regard to Sami self-determination and the Sami’s right to own and possess the land they traditionally occupy (Sweden has consistently refused to ratify the Convention). The rights of indigenous peoples to approve or veto the use of natural resources within their traditional territories is one of the key principles of international indigenous rights. Furthermore, the realization of Sami cultural and linguistic rights, strongly connected with their land rights, is a central obligation of states under core human rights conventions. However, these internationally accepted principles are not reflected in Swedish law or practice.

First of all, the right of Sami to self-determination and decision-making is limited in Swedish law to reindeer husbandry. However around 90% of the Sami primarily make their living from other activities than reindeer husbandry. Thus, Sweden violates international indigenous law, which applies to the all the member of the indigenous people and which gives all who are affected by a decision the right of influence.

In February this year the Sami scored a huge victory against the State in a 30 year long battle for land rights when the district court of Gällivare granted the small Sami village of Girjas exclusive rights to control hunting and fishing in the area. However, the arguments in the case show how the Swedish State still has serious trouble recognizing the rights of the Sami. Lawyers for the State claimed that the indigenous status of the Sami was irrelevant to the case and that “Sweden has in this matter no international obligations to recognize special rights of the Sami people, whether they are indigenous or not.”

Secondly, the Sami don’t have any independent protection of their traditional land or any real possibility to influence decisions on, for example, mining and excavation. In Sweden, the relationship between the Sami and the land is ignored, as well as the importance of use of the land for the survival of the Sami and their culture. For example, reindeer husbandry is weighed and considered like any other economic interest and more often than not comes second to other interests.

The Swedish State has during the last few years worked to increase the mineral exploitation in Sápmi. According to Sweden’s new mineral strategy, the number of mines in Sweden is set to double by 2020 and triple by 2030 as the government embarks on making Sweden “the world’s leading mining nation.” In this process, Sami representatives claim that they are routinely silenced and marginalized.

For example, the Swedish government has wanted to give British mining company Beowulf Mining (whose CEO Clive Sinclair-Poulton famously replied “what local people?” to the question of what the locals thought of the mining project) access to develop an iron ore mine in Kallak, close to the northern town Jokkmokk above the Arctic Circle, which is definitely part of Sápmi. In 2014 the project sparked protests from local Sami and environmental activists. The government argues that the mine would produce much-needed jobs for the area and prevent de-population. However, the Sami argue that the mining operations would destroy their livelihood since it would destroy the land and thus the possibility for reindeer herding. The issue is yet to be resolved but similar conflicts between government interest in extraction industries and local Sami populations exist all over Sápmi and the sense is often that the government cares about short term income revenue rather than the respect for Sami rights, and the destruction of land and subsequent loss of Sami culture.

Thus, while things may have improved for the Sami since the 20^th century, the rights of the Sami are still not completely respected in Sweden and many conflicts between the Sami and the State, and the Sami and Swedish society, still exist.

Conclusion

Sweden is a country considered, by the international community and by itself, to be a great champion of human rights. Swedish governments have a history of standing with oppressed peoples in the world and have often been critical of how other countries have treated their minorities and indigenous people. At the same, Sweden has a long history of oppressing it’s own indigenous people. While the Sami now have the right to speak their own language and have their own parliament, the Sami are still subject to discrimination and racism and the Sami question remains infected. Schools often fail to teach anything about the Sami and many Swedish people only have a vague idea that they even exist.

If Sweden wants to be taken seriously as a champion of human rights, we need to look inward and actually deal with our own past and current treatment of our indigenous people instead of always pointing the finger at other countries. We need to educate our population about the Sami and to be honest about the oppression and human rights violations they have faced at the hands of the State and its institutions and the continuing denial of their rights as indigenous people.

Sweden should offer an official apology for the human rights violations committed by the State against the Sami and should create a truth and reconciliation commission, as well as undertake other transitional justice measures, in order to bring forward the full truth about the past and in order to educate the country about what has happened. Only once the truth has been publicly recognized can a public apology be appropriate and only then can reconciliation begin.

The government should also immediately ratify ILO Convention 169, which would put the Swedish state under clear obligation to guarantee certain rights to the Sami, including the right to land (article 14), to natural resources pertaining to the land (article 15), to require the State to obtain informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their land, territories and other resources (article 30), and to be consulted in matters that would directly affect them (article 6). The Convention would therefore serve as an important tool for the protection of Sami rights to their land and from the exploitation of natural resources on their land without their consultation or consent.

In the meantime I can only offer my own apology to the Sami population of my country: I am sorry that it took me so long to learn about what my State did to your people; I am sorry that I never questioned why I never studied about your people in school; and I am sorry that it has taken me this long to speak up.

Police Shootings, Property Damage, and the Responsibility of Bystanders

Imagine you get lost walking in the woods. You are starving, unable to find food, and you realize a winter storm is starting. You happen across a cabin in the woods. While clearly it is someone’s cabin, when you knock no one answers the door. There are no lights, no shadows. Everything indicates they are not home. You wait an hour and they do not return home. You call out asking for help. No one answers. You fear for your safety. You suspect – based on the few things you can see through the windows – that there might be food or supplies inside. To save yourself, you’ll have to break a window and take someone else’s supplies. Do you do it?

The question was raised my first day of law school. It’s been over a decade, but every now and then I come back to it – and the responses of my classmates. Every single one of us said we would break the window and take the supplies.

Would we feel guilty about it? No.

Do we think we should be prosecuted for property damage? Of course not.

Why? Because sometimes the need to survive trumps other rights and interests.

It’s why no one watches Les Miserables and actually thinks Jean Valjean should go to prison.

I’ve had cause to again reflect on this issue this week as I listened to friends lament the property damage occurring during protests in Charlotte, North Carolina. The protests are in response to another police killing of a potentially unarmed black man. Whether Keith Lamont Scott had a weapon or not, and whether he pointed it at police or not, is currently disputed. The police chief has refused to release the videotape, which he admits “does not give . . . absolute, definitive visual evidence” to support police claims that Mr. Scott was pointing a gun.

It’s important to note that North Carolina is both an “open carry” state, meaning there is an individualized right to openly have a gun, and a “concealed carry” state, meaning that there is an individualized right to carry the gun on your person without having to actively show the gun in public. Collectively, these laws suggests that the police have even less reason to shoot someone for carrying a weapon; openly doing so should not be regarded as a suspicious behavior if there is a recognized legal right to do so. Unless he was actively, absolutely, and definitively pointing the weapon, there is no reason he should be considered suspect or dangerous for having a gun (and that’s assuming he did, in fact, have a gun, which is a disputed fact).

But Mr. Scott’s death is not surprising. Statistical evidence suggests black men are 2.5 to 3 times more likely than white to be killed by police. According to data collected by the Washington Post, about 13% of all black men killed by police since January 2015 were unarmed; only 7% of white men were. And based on available data, “[t]he only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police  was unarmed was whether or not they were black. … Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”

Mr. Scott was killed the same week as Terrance Crutcher, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, man shot in the back while his hands were in the air and he was walking away from police. The video released by the police also incudes an officer in a helicopter claiming Crutcher “looks like a bad dude.” And clearly from a helicopter, he could tell tons of relevant things about Crutcher. Like his race and his height and his weight and his … well, that’s about it. 

The officer in that case has been charged with manslaughter, which is a rarity in US police shootings. Had the video not been released, I’m not certain this would have happened. Particularly since the female officer who shot him claims she was “never so scared in my life as in that moment right then.” She was referring to when Crutcher “reached” into his car, which videotapes and blood splatter suggests was a hell of a magic trick since the window appears to have been closed throughout the incident – as was the car door. Without clear video, her word would likely be enough to exonerate her.

Without any videotape of Mr. Scott’s shooting, people in Charlotte are left to imagine their own ending, and when you’ve experienced a series of injustices – from the killings of Tamir Rice and John Crawford III, neither of which were prosecuted, to the exoneration of the officers involved in the death of Eric Gardner and Jonathan Ferrell – the ending seems clear-cut.

For those who are unable to keep up, Tamir Rice was the 12 year old with a toy gun supposedly tucked into his waistband who was killed outside a park gazebo in Cleveland, Ohio, and John Crawford was the father killed for walking around an Ohio Wal-Mart with an air rifle he was intending to purchase from the store. Like North Carolina, Ohio is both an open-carry and a concealed-carry state, so unless an individual is posing an active threat, there is even less reason for the police to suspect they are dangerous. Eric Gardner was the man choked to death by police for selling cigarettes in New York City, and Jonathan Ferrell was a former college football player who was shot in 2013 when he went to a house to ask for help after crashing his car and injuring himself. Technically, the officer in Ferrell’s killing was not exonerated; instead, a mistrial was declared and prosecutors chose not to re-file charges. The officer in that case remained employed by the Charlotte police department until October 2015, approximately six weeks after the court declared a mistrial.

Now, there is a lot to write about in regards to these cases and more generally the use of force by police and racial inequality in the U.S. But today, I want to talk about the response and responsibility of white Americans as bystanders to this violence. This is not a legal analysis piece, but one discussing moral and philosophical responsibilities when it comes to witnessing human rights violations.

When black people get a little too loud and demanding in their calls for justice – whenever protests get disruptive to white lives – I watch as white American friends post Facebook statuses calling for quiet and rest, pointing out that there are ways to protest but this just isn’t it.

Of course, those friends also criticized American football player Colin Kaepernick for choosing to sit or kneel during the playing of the national anthem. That was deemed disrespectful to the U.S. and to American military vets. (The shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice apparently was not as disrespectful to American values…)

Kaepernick responded to the criticisms:

“You deplore the demonstrations taking place. But your statements, I am sorry to say, fail to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Charlotte and around the country, but it is even more unfortunate that the country’s power structure left the black community with no alternative.”

Actually, that wasn’t Kaepernick. Sorry, I got my inappropriate protests confused. That’s an edited version of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

To me, it’s not surprising that protests over police killings sometimes result in property damage. The peaceful ones rarely make the news and black people – desperate for survival in a country that has a long history of failing to protect them – have knocked on the door, they’ve checked the windows, they’ve cried for help, they waited in silence, and now they are desperate to be let in.

What surprises me is the silent complicity of white Americans – and it is silent complicity. When bystanders – those with no particular interest in an outcome – watch oppression with silence, they become complicit.

“In a situation of oppression, silence does not support the oppressed, it reinforces the position of the oppressor.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said it, but history proves its truth.

It proves its truth in the silence of Thomas Jefferson on the issue of slavery. A slave-owner himself, he had reservations about the institution and its premise of racial superiority (reservations one can only hope increased when his own enslaved children were born). But he did not speak these reservations publicly, and his failure to do so has forever tarnished his legacy.

History proves the complicity of silence in those who failed to speak out against anti-Semitism in the 1930s, allowing it to become an accepted social standard. In the silent majority of white South Africans. In the Hutus listening to radio messages calling the Tutsis “cockroaches” without challenging the dogma.

In such situations, it is not a responsibility on those who are protesting -- standing up for their lives and their survival -- to make those watching feel better about the protest or their silent complicity. Or as the activist (and actor) Jesse Williams put it earlier this year: "The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, alright – stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression." 

If you want to complain about property damage in Charlotte, you better have taken a stand against the racism that led to those protests. Otherwise, you are doing nothing to make the situation better.

So when I think back to that first day of law school, I think the question stopped too soon. The relevant questions of responsibility do not start and end with the prioritization of human suffering over property, but about the prioritization of human comfort over lives. The question must be this:

Imagine the cabin is not empty, but rather people are inside. You knock on the door and they look out at you, from the comfort of their dining room where they feast on a roast clearly too big for only themselves. You beg for assistance and they turn away. You call and pound on the door and on the window, you tell them you have been lost for a week and will surely die if they do not let you in. Could they at least call the police or a rescue agency? They simply respond, “You are not our problem.”

If you die, are they at fault? 

I think, regardless of legal liability, the answer is clearly yes.

An Open Letter to my Gun-Advocating Friends & Family: Is the Second Amendment Really More Important than the First Amendment?

Dear Friend / Family Member,

I get it. You love guns. You grew up around them. You use them responsibly … or at least you think you do … or you know you don’t but you won’t admit that publicly and think it’ll never be a problem. I respect that you like shooting things. I understand that you’ve never killed anyone yourself. You don’t think you should be punished for other people’s actions.

And I know you have an inalienable second amendment right to own any gun you want.

via wikipedia

But, here’s my question to you: is your Second Amendment right to own a gun more fundamental or absolute than your First Amendment right to free speech?  Just a quick reminder, this is our first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Free speech is the right to both say and not say things, and that language seems to be pretty absolutist. At its extreme it would mean that you could not be forced to say anything against your will, and that you can say anything you wish. That’s what an unlimited right to free speech looks like.

So, if you think your Second Amendment right is absolute, I dare you to walk into a crowded shopping mall and yell one of these three things:

A)  There’s a crazy person with a chainsaw coming to kill you! 

B) [Your boss / your neighbor / your ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend] is a child-raping pedophile!

C) That guy over there is a racist! Kill him!

Actually, I don’t dare you to do that because if you do, there will be legal repercussions.

While we seem to have absolutist language in the First Amendment, we recognize – and have always recognized – that there are inherent limitations.

People are forced to tell you stuff all the time. Particularly when it relates to things that impact your life and health.

You know that bottle of coke / diet coke / pepsi / whatever else you drank today? Did you turn it over to see where the ingredients section was? They didn’t do that voluntarily. It’s required. Despite their free speech right to not tell you stuff.

Same with those disclaimers at the end of the Viagra commercials you watch every day (or would if you watched normal TV and not Netflix).

And those health and safety notices at your work.

When you buy a new car, the company has to tell you the miles per gallon [of petrol, for non-Americans] you get on that car. When they lie, it’s fraud and a serious legal issue.

I can’t give you my car and say “Don’t worry, the brakes are fine” when I know that they aren’t fine. When you’re injured, I’ll probably be in jail and you’ll get to sue me (but I’ll be in jail, so I won’t be able to pay so good luck with that).

People are also forced to not say stuff all the time.

Wouldn’t it suck if I went into your work and told everyone you were a child molester?  It would suck even if it’s true, but it sucks extra when it’s not true. And luckily for you, it’s not protected speech. Because my First Amendment right to say anything I want doesn’t include the right to defame you.

I’m not allowed to go on television at 6:00pm and say “fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck.” We have restrictions on that and I’d have to pay a fine.

I can’t tell you that the carrot juice from my garden will cure your cancer or herpes or common cold for the low, low price of just $19.99 a bottle.

If I produce mouth wash, I can tell you “this is the best mouthwash in the world,” but I can’t tell you “Using this mouthwash is just as good as flossing.”

As a lawyer, I’m not allowed to tell my clients’ secrets. As a military officer, my sister isn’t allowed to disclose the nation’s.

I’m not allowed to pass on instructions between two criminals for the purpose of helping them plan or carry out or escape from a crime.

I don’t get to walk into a theatre – or a gay nightclub – and yell “fire!” unless there’s actually a fire and I’m trying to get people to evacuate. Because the misuse of my words in a public place presents a threat to public health and safety, so we restrict the absolute nature of that right.

And while I might be allowed to be an ignorant racist (hi, Donald), I’m not allowed to say things that are likely to incite imminent violence. So I can’t stand on a street and say “That’s Donald Trump! He’s a racist! Everyone go kill him!”  That’s incitement to violence. And when it’s against a presidential candidate (seriously… why did you people let that happen?), then it’s a particular kind of crime whereby the Secret Service picks me up. I don’t get to do that because it puts Donald’s life in danger, and no matter how much I look forward to his demise, I’m not allowed to use or instigate violence for the purpose of bringing that demise about (and, of course, I only seek his political demise, not his death.).

In spite of all those restrictions, we still enjoy a robust right to free speech (unless you’re a Washington Post reporter trying to cover DonaldTrump, and then you enjoy a slightly more restricted right to free speech because, after all, why would a presidential candidate be expected to allow people to cover him, even negatively in an constitutional democracy?).  We have allowed those reasonable restrictions to develop without falling into the abyss of authoritarianism.

How do I know this? Because you compared Obama to Hitler. You don’t get to do that in authoritarian regimes. Just ask my friends who live in places like ISIS-controlled Syria,* North Korea,** Egypt and Myanmar and Equatorial Guinea*** and the Gambia.***

*Actually, don’t ask them. For starters, because of how communication systems are set up right now, they can’t answer you, but also just sending them the question is likely to get them into trouble.

**You’re right – I don’t have any friends in North Korea. Why? Because it’s a dictatorial regime and no one inside is allowed to communicate with me.

***Again, don’t ask them for real. They have better modes of communication than ISIS-controlled Syria, but asking the question can get them into trouble.

While I focused on the First Amendment, the same is true of all the other rights.* Right to trial by a jury of your peers? Only in certain circumstances; and the number of people required to convict you, let alone how unanimous they must be, varies by state. Right to freedom from search and seizure?  Well, unless you go on an airplane or into a federal building, or if the police think there’s an emergency situation, etc.** 

*Except, possibly, the Third, but that’s never been tried and it’s a rather silly right to be discussing in today’s day and age.

** Please don’t make me go through every right to prove this point. It’s true. I can do it. It will waste my time but I can do it.

So, when you to tell me that it’s “unconstitutional” to put restrictions on your Second Amendment rights, I’m stuck with this question: why?  Why is it acceptable to have restrictions on literally every other right in the Bill of Rights but not on the Second Amendment? 

When did your right to own a gun – a machine principally designed to kill and destroy things – become more fundamental to you than your right to free speech, which, as every child knows won’t even break any bones?

Don’t say it’s because your Second Amendment secures the First. The inverse is true, too. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion and any public debate on this could be quashed simply by sending the military to pick up your guns. You do realize they can bring their tanks and airplanes and ships to do that, right?  Do you really think your AR-15 is going to stop a battalion of military members?*  So your First Amendment is pretty damn important.

*Also, can we talk about how insulting it is to the military to think they’d carry out such an order? They’ve already said they won’t follow unlawful orders no matter who gives it to them. Do you really so thoroughly distrust the people you claim to ‘support’ on your bumper stickers and honor every July 4th and November 11th? (No, you can’t distrust the guys you honour in May; they’re dead. Wrong holiday.)

I’m not arguing that we should take all the guns away. I’m saying that we should have legitimate regulations about who can buy what kind of a gun, when, and how. I’m saying that the AR-15 has been used in three terribly public mass shootings so we should ask why shooters are choosing that weapon and introduce reasonable restrictions that limit the effectiveness of that choice in those situations. I’m saying that a guy on a terrorist watch list shouldn’t be able to walk into a shop and buy a gun without first challenging his designation before a court to justify his removal from the watch list.

Now, I know you’re about to say, “but restrictions aren’t necessary because it’s not the guns; it’s the humans who operate them…” No shit, Sherlock. No one is saying that the guns get up and shoot people on their own. They are inanimate objects. But we put restrictions on all kinds of things because humans are too stupid or too psychopathic to use them properly and not endanger people‘s lives.

You know that meme you keep sharing about how McVeigh used fertilizer and therefore we don’t need gun control?  Remember how he used that fertilizer to blow up a federal building? Now, do you also remember how we introduced restrictions to the sale of fertilizer and also on who can access a federal building and how?  Because that happened. 

And you know how that same meme says the 9/11 terrorists used box cutters and planes?  Now, do you remember how we introduced new cock-pit doors and restricted what you can take on planes? 

Because that happened.

And remember how cars used to be horribly bad and we introduced seatbelt restrictions to stop people from dying?  Because that happened.

Usually, when there’s a causal connection to human misuse and death, we act.  It won’t eliminate all violence or all murder, but it will reduce them. And if it saves even 1 life, or 5 lives, or 50 lives… isn’t that worth some minor inconveniences?

That brings me to the thing I don’t really understand about your position. You often say things like “it’s not the guns’ fault,” as if the gun has feelings that justify not “punishing it.” You do know they don’t have feelings, right?  You need to know that because the reality is that the people the guns shoot do have feelings. As do their family members. And their friends. A gun never only wounds a single person; it always harms entire groups of people. And those people have feelings and shouldn’t be asked to suffer. Your gun has no feelings and won’t suffer one bit if we limit who can play with it because it’s unsafe.

Now, I know you want to say that “it’s the gun free zones that are the problem. They draw the shooters to them.” But, you know what’s a gun-free zone?  Airports. Airports are gun-free zones. Like many schools and churches, the only people allowed to have guns in airports are the police and military. And even then, there’s relatively few of them. Do you know how unusual it is to have a shooting at an airport? 

They happen, but – given the scale of gun violence in the US – they are rare. Between 2001 and 2013, I could only find 9 documented cases of shootings at airports, compiled helpfully by NBC Los Angeles after and LAX shooting, only 5 of them involved active shooters in the US. One was in Germany, one was in Honduras, and the final two instances involve police shooting people for dangerous, but not gun-related, actions (a guy claiming to have a bomb and a guy who rammed police cars).

You know why that gun-free zone remains gun-free for the most part?  It’s not because the shooters are afraid of the long lines. It’s because it’s not a convenient place for shooters to go. 

Mass shootings happen in people’s neighborhoods and areas that the shooter knows. They happen in gun-free zones because those gun-free zones happen to be where lots of people tend to gather. Things like churches and schools are easy targets not because they’re gun free – let’s be clear half these assholes are prepared to die as soon as they start shooting. They just want to take out as many people as they can first. So they go to places in their neighborhood where lots of people gather, like churches and schools.

Columbine High School had an armed guard, but when two teenagers* wanted to shoot a bunch of people, they went to the place in their neighborhood where their classmates gathered. The San Bernadino shooters wanted to kill a bunch of people so they went to a work event where they knew a bunch of people were gathered. The Aurora movie shooter wanted to kill a bunch of people, so he went to a theatre near his home where he knew a bunch of people would be gathered. And the Orlando shooter, with what seems to clearly be an issue of self-hatred because of his own attraction to men, chose a club he frequented where he knew that Latin night was in full swing. That club had an off-duty police officer as an armed guard.

*I intentionally chose not to name any of the shooters as glory was often a part of their motivation.

The common theme there isn’t “gun free zones.” It’s “close and with a lot of people, easy access, and easy to do damage with.”    

People shoot where they live. That includes those who commit suicide, those who kill their spouses or children, and those who go to their neighborhood school or club or church.

I know you think more guns = greater safety. Statistically, that’s not true. No, seriously – statistically, that’s not true.  Also, studies show that if you aren’t training specifically to engage in active-shooter situations, you won’t actually be able to respond in a helpful way to active-shooter situations. Watch the video I first found under point 2 of this article.  Then, read the article.

I’m not making this up.  Guns don’t increase your safety. And you won’t be the one exception to the rule in that active-shooter situation unless you’re actually a police officer or a veteran with extensive real world experience.

So, in conclusion: yes, you have a right to guns. No, it is not an unlimited right unless somehow you think the Second Amendment got extra super special constitutional protection that none of the rest of the Bill of Rights enjoys (and let’s be clear: nothing in the text of the Constitution suggests that is the case). There can constitutionally be reasonable restrictions and there’s no reason to believe – based on the interpretation of and reaction to literally every other Constitutional amendment – that those reasonable restrictions are “just the start” of taking away all you guns. 

Now, finally: you often say you need a gun to “protect your family,” and that your right to conceal carried weapons in public is an extension of that. But do you realize that your insistence on a right to have unimpeded absolute access to guns is the reason the Orlando shooter could get his?  I know that case is complex, but in the end, it shows that you that by so ferociously protecting you right to own a gun that you probably won’t be able to shoot in an emergency active-shooter situation, that you are securing the right of every other person in the US gets unimpeded access to a weapon, regardless of how good they are at using it. So you might trust yourself, but do you really trust everyone else? Do you trust them with your life? With your child’s?

You might think you need a gun to protect your family, but unless you are with them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with your gun holstered and the training necessary to respond in an active shooter situation – unless all those elements are present – by blocking reasonable gun reform, you are essentially saying you trust your life, and that of your child’s, to every other person in the US who wants to own a gun and may not be able or willing to use it responsibly. To every sexually- and politically-confused man hell-bent on making a name for himself while shouting an allegiance to ISIS or the KKK. To every other person in the US who puts their gun in their purse and then accidentally fires through it (and, of course, in that situation your gun offers no protection to your child whatsoever). To every man who feels spurned by your daughter’s refusal to have sex with him. To every guy on the street feeling a little too in need of extra cash or a little too desirous of your son’s shoes. To the man so unable to control his temper that he’ll kill someone over seating arrangements at church or over his right to a parking space.   

You are trusting each of those people – each of those groups of people – with your child’s life. You are doing this so that you can enjoy your Second Amendment right in an absolutist way that exceeds you enjoyment of any other right. 

If that’s the choice you are making, you need to be honest about it. You need to accept that you are privileging your Second Amendment right over both you First Amendment right and your child’s security when she or he is out in the world without you. Otherwise, it’s time you join the call for reasonable gun reform.

With appreciation to Michael Hackfort and Ebba for helpful comments and suggestions.