Kendall Stanley: A safer society? At what cost?
The Art on the Lake art fair was held recently in Sahuarita just up the road a piece, a gathering of artists, kid entertainers, the Tucson Concert Band and other musicians and families with dogs and kids galore.
And one guy packing a gun on his hip.
I’m not squeamish around guns. I got my first .22 when I was 13 or 14 and, at one time I was a firearm safety instructor for all those youngsters back then needing a gun safety course to get a license.
But the guy with the gun at the art show bothered me for some reason. Was there really a need to be packing at a family affair? Does his gun go on his hip first thing in the morning like you’d put on a watch or nicely knot your tie? Has he been hassled at public gatherings in the past?
Who knows, and in fact there may have been others there with a gun because anyone can carry concealed in Arizona so you never know who is carrying and who isn’t.
But the next day, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie had a thoughtful piece titled “Guns everywhere mean democracy nowhere.”
Bouie said a popular refrain among those seeking unlimited rights to own and carry firearms is that “an armed society is a polite society.”
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this belief is right. That firearms work to tame rather than inflame the passions. That, the evidence of our eyes and ears notwithstanding, guns do more to resolve disputes than escalate them.
“But even if that were true, which it manifestly isn’t, peace is not the absence of conflict. And social peace in a democratic society cannot simply be a perpetual standoff among armed individuals. The reason is that democracy rests on a measure of trust and respect among citizens, what the philosopher Danielle Allen calls “political friendship.”
“‘Political friendship,” Allen writes in “Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education,” “is not mainly (or not only) a sentiment of fellow feeling for other citizens.” It is, instead, a way of “acting in respect to them.”
“‘A polity will never reach a point where all its citizens have intimate friendships with each other, nor would we want it to,” she continues. “The best one can hope for, and all one should desire, is that political friendship can help citizens to resist the disintegration of trust and achieve a community where trust is a renewable resource.’”
Even if we don’t like one another to govern, weapons shift the balance.
As Bouie notes, “Guns, when carried as totems through public space, make this impossible. Whether they are carted to a restaurant or a grocery store, a park or a library, they send a clear message: that a disagreement might turn deadly, and that I, the gun wielder, do not respect you enough to refrain from the threat of lethal violence. This is especially true when guns are used to confront and intimidate protesters, as happened again and again during the racial justice protests and demonstrations of 2020 and 2021, according to Everytown, a gun safety organization.”
Thus getting back to my gun-toting art fair goer. What is he saying by carrying a weapon to a family-oriented event? What do the kids — who have probably practiced lockdowns and active shooter drills in school — think about a person with a gun just walking around with them?
What, ultimately, was the point?
You can claim that a good guy with a gun is better than a bad guy with a gun, but who is to tell if the person with a gun is a good person with a gun or a bad person with a gun? One shouldn’t have to wonder but with many states making it legal for just about anybody to carry guns in public it’s a question we silently ask and answer.
A cornerstone of downtown
Downtown Petoskey won’t be the same without Lynn Duse, who died Jan. 11.
Fellow writer Gerry Donnelly recalled in a recent column enjoying the times he’d spent with Lynn, who along with her mother and later her daughter ran The Circus Shop.
Lynn and Marnie had decided to close the shop at the end of the year but not because Lynn was ill; it was just time to retire and close the business.
And what a business it was! For nearly 77 years the store offered the finest children’s clothing and many a grandma spent way too much on the little ones once inside the door.
Lynn grew up downtown above Brown Motors. She was a fount of local history who knew everyone growing up.
It was sad enough to learn of the closing of the shop and even more sadness with the loss of Lynn.
A major piece of Petoskey is now missing.
— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Kendall Stanley: A safer society? At what cost?
