Betsy DeVos, Guns, and Picking the Right Tools For a Job

You can do a lot with a gun.

You can compete in the Olympics. You can, in a pinch, use one as a hammer. You can make a husband into a widower. Or you can melt the thing into a serviceable plowshare. And, if you watched the confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary, you know that you might be able to use a gun to stop, um, a grizzly bear, erm, from attacking your school.

Guns are tools. They’re useful for getting things done. But they can’t do everything. You can’t use a gun to, say, repair a flat tire, make chili, or mend a broken heart. Heck — you can’t even use the same gun for every job. The best gun for destroying a building isn’t necessarily the best gun for stopping a curious, unexpected bear. The best tools are specialized. Some problems can be solved (however poorly) with a gun. Others can be best solved with a hammer. Others need soap, an apology, a stepladder, or a hug.

Of course, Senator Chris Murphy didn’t bring up the question of guns on campuses at DeVos’ hearing because he was interested in her thoughts on controlling American megafauna. As the junior senator from Connecticut, the state that suffered the tragic 2012 shooting of twenty elementary school students at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, Murphy is particularly focused on gun violence in schools. (Note: before becoming a U.S. senator, Murphy served in the House of Representatives as Newtown’s member of Congress.)

So when Murphy raised the issue with DeVos, “Do you think guns have any place in or around schools?” his implication was clear enough. If we’re trying to solve the problem of mass shootings of students, more guns might not be the right tools. Guns are almost always used as the central tools of instances of mass murder of children in U.S. schools. Is it obvious that we should bring more of them onto school grounds?

DeVos turned to grizzly bears to avoid that part of the conversation. Rather than address whether or not there are dangers to allowing guns in and around U.S. classrooms, she offered an idiosyncratic example for why we should leave that decision to local authorities. No matter whether or not bear attacks are vanishingly uncommon in U.S. schools — you can imagine that a gun might be a serviceable (though not ideal) tool for stopping one. But as an actual answer to the challenges Murphy is raising, it’s laboratory-grade obtuse. DeVos suggests that because guns can be (marginally) useful for solving an infinitesimally unlikely ursine-educational problem, we ought not accept — or make policies to ensure — that they have no place in schools.

DeVos’ answer reveals the problem with the standard conservative position on guns in public places. In the Republican mind, the best answer to the threat of gun violence is escalation: the presence of more guns. Boiled down to a talking point, it comes out as: “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

But remember, guns aren’t magic. They’re tools, which means that they can do some tasks better than others. Guns can do the job of defending a school against mass shootings. Violence can balance violence. The threat of killing can forestall slaughter.

Can they do it well? No.

While it might seem a simple matter to bend evil to our will through our own willingness to inflict violence, this approach is anything but straightforward. Human violence is complicated because humans are complicated. This is an old insight from Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and a host of other spiritual and intellectual traditions. Indeed, at its core, the term “good guy” is an oxymoron. There are good acts, sure, but the rare hero who shoots a would-be killer is still a human herself, fickle and prone to selfishness. 

The Bible called it “original sin,” the fracturing pride that contorts human hearts. But you need not worship the God of Abraham to know that a trained security guard who intends to safeguard his school may simultaneously be distracted by troubles at home, tormented by addictions, or simply short on sleep. Like all of us, he is under an array of stresses and pulled in different directions.

Think of it this way: humans are too complex to be only good or bad. In any given day, we’re angels and sinners, trolls and saints. What’s more, even when we do our best, we’re prone to mistakes, accidents, and a variety of quotidian errors. We’re not automatons. We’re not tools. We’re limitless in our capacities to do both good and bad things, intentionally or not.

That unreliability is our default operating mode. It shapes the run of our usual lives. It’s normal. It’s also the prime reason to be wary of any efforts to make our schools safer through the increased presence of firearms. Even the best guys are going to come up short. These failures could be accidents, or they could be the far worse consequences of life’s pressures clouding a “good” guy’s judgment. And when guys are heavily armed — around children — those mistakes could well be lethal. That’s why guns — whatever else they’re good for — aren’t the right tools for this particular job. 

Will any of this matter for Ms. DeVos' confirmation vote tomorrow? Assuredly not. But with a school shooting happening almost once a week in the United States these days, it's sure to matter for kids, families, and educators. 

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@ConorPWilliams