An Urgent Plea for Bees

You say you’re not a farmer? Well, do you have a lawn? We need to stop killing bees! PLEASE READ ON!

The April 2013 issue of Acres USA magazine (Vol. 43, no. 4), “the Voice of Eco-Agriculture” in this country, has an article by Donald Sutherland entitled “The Silent Spring.” The title should sound familiar: Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, was an indictment of the American attempt to dominate nature with chemistry, poisoning the environment with DDT. It was a wake-up call. Have we gone back to sleep? Looks like it.

Sutherland’s article in Acres focuses on widely used pesticides called neonicotinoids that get their name from their relation to nicotine. They are “in a class of insecticides that attack the central nervous system of insects,” and they are “toxic through the entire growing season.” Corn, soybeans, other vegetables, soil, seeds, timber, animal pests, fruit and nut crops –scarcely anything grown by American farmers is not treated with neonicotinoid, although all fruits, vegetables and trees depend on bees to pollinate their blossoms to produce seeds, vegetables and fruits!

Well, it must be safe, right? If the EPA and USDA allow its use? Think again.

A Purdue University study published in January 2012 concludes that the use of this class of insecticides is killing pollinating bees and can hang around in the soil for years. A study from Harvard School of Public Health links the pesticides with colony collapse disorder (CCD). France, Italy, and Germany have banned their use since 2008, and now the entire European Union is on board with the ban. The company producing the insecticide is a German company, and yet Germany banned the product, which is now banned throughout Europe. Not the U.S., though. While Europe was deciding to institute a continent-wide ban, our own EPA chooses to grant approval of the bee-killing poison.

If you’ve read this far, whether or not you have followed the links – which I urge you to go back and do if you haven’t – you should be getting an inkling of how how bad the situation is, but it’s worse than that, because who more than Americans has such a fetish for perfect lawns? Yes, lawn and garden products also contain neonicotinoids, so if you’re spraying your lawn or hiring a lawn care company that is spraying your lawn, please take time today to look into what you’re doing or having done in your name. Writes Sutherland:

Read the ingredients and look for any of these substances: clothianidin, acetamiprid, dinotefuran, nitenpyram, thiacloprid and thiamethoxam.

Please boycott products containing these toxins and tell everyone you know to do the same. You will be doing what you can at home to safeguard your country’s food supply, and isn’t that more important than a synthetic-looking green carpet around your house? Beyond the boycott, we need to harass our so-called representatives in Congress about this danger.

Water, soil, bees – we're dependent on them for survival. Why is a government agency set up to protect citizens not doing its job? Another five-year study required? Will there be any bees left by then? 

If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem. - Rachel Carson

The Comfort of an Old, Familiar Book

What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past – problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation! He must be kind to them, must treasure them in his mind before their long sleep. - James Hilton, Good-bye, Mr. Chips (1934)

It was another sunny morning on Thursday, with orchards breaking out into first bloom, yellow violets smiling in happy little knots at the edge of the woods, trees dripping with leaves and first flowers and catkins, but temperature dropped in the afternoon, and so, with lawn all mowed and straw bales in place for this year’s garden, and after two days filled with outdoor exertion, I was ready for a slow, quiet, indoor evening and the comfort of a small, old volume.

Old Mr. Chipping! There he was on the shelf, that old retired schoolmaster living in a boarding house across the way from the school where he had taught for so many years, still serving afternoon tea to boys new and old (dismissing them when his energy flagged), remembering the years before and during World War I, marveling at the changes brought by the postwar period, and imagining the memoir he knows he will never write. The fictional Mr. Chips, as they all called him, lived his life for the most part within a small geographical plot, but the area covered contained as much of England as of himself. Maybe this is part of why the book was so popular. The passage above on memory, though, is very personal – universal but necessarily personal, for all that – that sense that every memory, even the least scrap not shared with another living person, is priceless for living on in one’s own mind.

Good-bye, Mr. Chips was a runaway bestseller in 1934. My copy shows that the book was first published in June of that year and reprinted twice the same month, then reprinted twice in July, again in August, twice in September, and then again in October. That’s as far as the printing history opposite the half-title page goes, from which I conclude that my copy is from that October printing. A slight novel, only 125 pages, the main character’s entire life was centered on his students at a second-tier English boys’ school (not the best, but decent) before, during, and following a brief, happy marriage to a beloved bride who died in childbirth, leaving him alone again. It’s a simple story of a simple man who over time made himself irreplaceable in his small world. Reprints continued through 1935, 1936, 1938 and ’39, and there were further printings by Little, Brown (the original American publisher) in1948 and 1959, along with paperback and school editions. It was probably the 1959 issue that my parents had in the house when I was young, and I probably read it then on the front porch on a summer afternoon, lying on my stomach on the day bed, bare feet waving in the air.

A stage play was produced in 1938, and the first film version appeared in 1939, starring Robert Donat in the role that won him that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor, over the heads of Laurence Olivier in “Wuthering Heights,” Clark Gable in “Gone with the Wind and Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith goes to Washington.” The film was remade in 1969 with Peter O’Toole, in 1974 as a television mini-series with Roy Marsdon, and most recently in 2002 with Martin Clunes in a Masterpiece Theatre production. The older he grew, it seems, the more beloved he was.

He had to take care of himself when there were east winds, but autumn and winter were not really so bad; there were warm fires, and books, and you could look forward to summer.

On a cool, overcast spring evening, looking forward to summer myself but not in any hurry for it, I enjoyed having imaginary tea again with Mr. Chips. He is still good company, as he has been to thousands of other readers and viewers over the decades. An old friend.

Friday morning, May 10: Wake to patter of rain. Have proof-reading to do, and I'll be in and out of the bookstore, where Bruce will be working today in my stead. That works. The occasional indoor day is not so bad.

May in Michigan, Michigan in May: Pure Heaven

Woods edge

After a long Michigan winter, nothing calls forth the joy of living like the month of May. In May small buds open to the sun, catkins unfurl, there is a green haze in the forest canopy but leaves are not yet large and thick enough to keep light from the forest floor, where wildflowers are abundant and riotously beautiful. Everyone searches for the first green, that of wild leeks, and then we strain our ears for spring peepers, and then we watch impatiently for the first trillium blooms, but trillium is not the first flower, nor is it the only one deserving of attention, so let's look closer and see what else there is to see. What catches your eye first? The trillium or the trout lily?

Flowery floor

Do you notice all the modest little spring beauties surrounding the showier flowers?

And what about those deeply toothed green leaves? Is there a flower to which these belong? Yes, it is the quiet, easily overlooked cutleaf toothwort, Dentaria laciniata, a member of the mustard family with a nice, sharp, spicy tang to perk up a spring salad. 

Toothwort -- yum!

None of this will last long, and there is raking and mowing and digging and manuring and planting to do, too, besides all the preparation for another bookstore season, not to mention reading and writing and visiting with friends, so it's a good thing the days begin early in May and last well into the evening. 

June is lovely, Will Shakespeare, I grant you that. But for utter Michigan perfection, give me May any time -- although it is probably all the sweeter and more precious for coming only once a year. 

Earlier Experiences of Defeat – and One Memorable Victory

Many people expressed fear at the very idea of a spelling bee the first year I tried to get a team together, and many since have shivered at our team's experiences. There are a lot of memories involved in these fears, so I went back to visit some of my own this morning, memories not having to do with spelling victories.

I was my grade school spelling champion in third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, but that doesn’t mean I escaped the experiences of losing and even of outright humiliation. A fast runner and excellent tree climber, good with addition and multiplication tables, in upper elementary school I started falling behind in math and sports. Story problems made my blood run cold: they were not the kind of stories I checked out of the school library, that’s for sure! Long division required estimating, but who wants to guess? Give me a surefire algorithm, or forget it!

Then there were gym classes and playground sports. Who but the shy, nearsighted, undersized child can understand the fear of a ball coming right at you? In volleyball games, I ducked rather than jumping toward the ball. At home plate, bat on shoulder, I was cringing before the pitcher even threw the ball. In my elementary school days, boys and girls played together on softball teams. Two people would be chosen by the teacher (these eager beavers volunteered to be chosen, of course) to select the rest of the members for their teams. Back and forth, they took turns choosing. Who was always left until last, so that the team whose turn it was to choose last simply got stuck with me? When our team was in the field, I was in the outfield, looking for four-leafed clovers, picking dandelions, and praying the ball would never reach me. Usually it didn’t. (That’s why I had been sent out there.) Sooner or later, though, when our team was up to bat, the turn came around to me, and that was the worst, as the other team would call out jeeringly, “Easy out! Easy out!” They were absolutely right.

Then came junior high and even more nightmarish mathematics, but this was complicated by scheduling. I was in an accelerated homeroom in seventh grade but also in orchestra, with only one other girl from my homeroom, so while the rest of our class was having accelerated math, we were in orchestra, and later in the afternoon we had math with a regular, non-accelerated class. (Fine with me!) Ah, but then the powers that were decided it was unfair for two young violinists to be deprived of accelerated math, and they re-rigged our schedules so we could have math with the rest of our homeroom. For me, this was disaster. The rest of the class had covered two years in one in seventh grade. We violinists, on the other hand, were skipping from seventh to ninth grade. I wouldn’t have minded skipping a year of English, but a year of math? Going straight to algebra? NIGHTMARE!!!

Rather than end this sorry tale in the quagmire of later high school mathematics and my sorry SAT score on the math section, I’ll tell you of one triumph, because it meant so much to me that I’ve never forgotten it.

Freshman year of high school. A combined township high school and junior college population of five thousand students. Freshmen on half-days because of overcrowding. Country mouse dropped into noisy, exciting pushing and shoving of urban life. Classes with complete strangers. And, because of that eighth grade (nightmare) experience with algebra, dropped into a geometry class with sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The only freshman in the class.

But geometry was better than algebra. It was visual. You could look at the problems.

So one day the teacher posed this question to the class: A bicycle tire has some object – I forget, but say it was a piece of chewing gum picked up from the pavement – stuck to it. As the rider proceeds down the street, what figure in space describes the path of the piece of chewing gum? The hands of confident students shot up into the air, and one by one they gave their solutions, but all were wrong.

I thought and thought and could see it in my mind, but was it even possible that I could be right? At last, with everyone else wrong, I raised my hand and gave my answer. The teacher asked me to come up and draw my answer on the blackboard. It was right.

The rest of the class could not keep quiet. “The freshman got it!” one jock exclaimed in disbelief. “The freshman got it!”

A little embarrassing but mostly music to my ears! So much better than “Easy out!”

In Which We Learn the Agony of Defeat

"We'll wake up again."

Cold weather returned, and the pretty little spring beauties and shy trout lilies closed up their petals and went back to sleep. My dreams Friday night kept me busy setting up a straw bale garden and even refinishing old farmhouse floors, and in the morning out came the winter jacket again to keep me warm in the woods with Sarah. 

Friday was the annual spelling competition on Friday afternoon at Gilbert Lodge on (one of the) Twin Lakes west of Traverse City, and once again Marilyn Zimmerman, Trudy Carpenter and I were the the bookstore team. Is it our sixth year? Marilyn and I were by ourselves the first time, and Trudy has been with us ever since.

Well, the Dog Ears Books team did not cover itself with glory this year at the Senior Spelling Bee. Perhaps, as one member remarked, we had become overconfident and needed a little reminder from Fate. Be that as it may, we went down in Round 7 when the three of us agreed to spell ‘vendible’ (the correct spelling) with an ‘a’ in the middle syllable. WRONG! Rather than stretch out the suspense, in case you’re wondering about a rule for –able and –ible words, here and here are links to the answer. We’ll know better next year. Of course, there are many exceptions to the so-called rules....

But oh, the words that appeared when the Bee Master went to his second box! Words no one present had ever encountered in a lifetime, and recall that contestants must be 55 years of age (or is it 50?) to participate! When one team went down on ‘exsert’ (it’s the opposite of ‘insert’), there were only two teams left of the seven who had begun, and when the Bee gets down to the last two teams the rules change. 

Bee Master Michael Sheehan and last two teams

If one team then misses a word, the other team must spell that word correctly and spell a second word correctly to validate their win. If the second team misses either word, it’s on to a new round. This Bee went 35 rounds, due to words such as these: farraginous, aichmophobia, rhonchial, zymurgy, ochlesis, obvallate, oneirodynia, sagittiform, roscid, agrestic, blennoid, and sybotic. How many of those do you think my spell-checking program accepts? It’s entirely possible I’ve made a mistake or two here, but I don’t think all but two are incorrect, as the program is telling me.

Bee Master consults with judges when a challenge is issued

In the end, the father-daughter team took first place this year, and they deserved to win. Second- and third-place teams also put up good, long fights. Maybe next year my friends and I will be back in the top three (where we've always been up to now), but we had a good time despite our loss, and as one team-member whose grandchildren come to watch her spell remarked in e-mail to me this morning, “I had the chance to show my grandchildren that grownups sometimes lose, and they can still go out for ice cream.”  An important lesson, I think we can all agree.

There was irony for me in the word that toppled us, as I have been reading William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, and had noticed his spelling of ‘vendible’ but had thought it must have changed since then. It hasn’t. But did you follow the links above? If you did (and even if you didn't), of the following, which spelling would you choose as correct –

COLLECTABLE

           or

COLLECTIBLE

-- and why?

Come to think of it, I probably got a much better night’s sleep refinishing floors in my dreams than going through another spelling bee. But if you take any little bit of wisdom away from today's blog post, let it be this:

“Grownups sometimes lose, and they can still go out for ice cream.” - Trudy Carpenter

Saturday morning fiddleheads

Red Mullein Now on Waukazoo Street

Locals and visitors who have been familiar with Clare Gengarelly's Red Mullein Arts and Crafts Gallery, housed down at the old Depot until very recently, will recognize the signature red mullein painting in the photo at left. Since buying the old garage building at 106 Waukazoo (home to Dog Ears Books for the past six years), Clare has been busy with remodeling and redecorating and now, at last, beginning to display her wares. The new gallery space will be open "soon," she promises, and eventually, when the outdoor refurbishing is complete, we will have a big open house and invite the whole community. For now, here's a little sneak preview of some of the colorful delights Clare will be offering.

Art hangable and wearable 

I haven't photographed the large gallery space yet, only the small area in front, so this is truly only a first peek. "I like bright colors," Clare remarked the other day, but anyone can see that at a glance.

My new neighbor and I are pleased with the changes we've made on Waukazoo Street. We like being next-door neighbors, too.

Self-portrait with cat

Guest Book Review: BUNKER HILL

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

By Nathaniel Philbrick

Viking, May 2013

$32.95

This is an astonishingly fresh and well-written example of popular history at its best. I highly recommend this splendid book to anyone who has the slightest interest in the genuine revolution that made this country. The book is gripping in its narration of the beginning conflict in a war whose importance nearly everyone “knows,” though aside from George Washington -- who did not enter the picture till Bunker HiIl was over -- few of the major players are known outside specialized classes taught in college. Along with eloquent mini-bios of several movers and shakers, including Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and the traitor Benjamin Church, Philbrick introduces us to the heroic Dr. Joseph Warren, who directs much of the preparation among the patriot “Minute Men,” leading to the staggering outcome that still surprises, though it happened in June of 1775.

As for the “battles” of Lexington and Concord, and the real and terrible battle of Bunker Hill (Breeds Hill), this book is vivid testimony to the author's understanding of the profound influence of the past upon the present.

True, one begins such a book thinking skeptically, “Oh-oh, another book on the legendary battle above Boston,” but as the tale unfolds, the author's ability to engage the reader's interest moves this page-turner from incident to incident, and via his well known mastery of detail (evidenced in Sea of Glory), he actually manages to provide

a telling lesson from history, via his bloody and unflinching chronicle of the battle itself. At the same time, he never loses sight of the human element.

It is impossible here to summarize Philbrick's impressive grasp of the importance of the events he covers, but as he tells the story through decisions made (or not made) by the characters themselves, the core of that “victory” in the Revolutionary War is revealed, as from behind a curtain of myths and fantasy. We see how the physical necessity and violence of war brought out the bravery and self-sacrifice of the patriots who fought there and, in the process, started a national life, forged in the crucible of battle. Bunker Hill names an epic event that made a rebellion into something much greater. Nor are the British dismissed as badly led fools marching into hell: They come across as equally brave, if not equally inspired. 

I warrant that Bunker Hill will land on the short list of books that historians love as much as the general public, since the author spares nothing in his biographical précis of the major actors in the drama. And drama it is. In the end one puts the book down reluctantly, with new understanding of why the “provincials” met the challenge -- and won through in the end, eight years later.

reviewed by Kenneth C. Wylie

Northport, Mi

April 30, 2013

Nathaniel Philbrick’s IN THE HEART OF THE SEA won the National Book Award in 2000, and his MAYFLOWER was a Pulitzer finalist. Among other titles, he is known to some readers of Books in Northport as the author of WHY READ MOBY-DICK?

Kenneth C. Wylie, a freelance writer, received his Ph.D. in African History in 1967 at Michigan State University and his B.A. from Albion College in 1960. He has taught at Wayne State University, Lehman College of CUNY, the Maritime College of SUNY, and Michigan State University. He has published books on Africa, as well as pieces on wildlife and the environment, ranging from the Common Crow to the vanishing legend of Bigfoot. He is also the author of a short collection of poems centered on the magnificent landscape around his rural home near Traverse City.

As Giddy as a Baby on a Swing

Color on the ground

“Calendar” spring arrives annually on March 20 or 21 (depending on the year), regardless of the weather. That’s the spring solstice, the 24-hour period where day and night equal each other in length. “Meteorological” spring, by contrast, is determined by changes in temperature and precipitation, so here in the “mid-latitudes,” March 1 through May 31 is designated as spring by meteorologists. The first of March? Are they kidding?

All that aside, what can we call the kind of spring that bursts forth at last in all its intoxicating glory, the day that daffodils begin opening and peepers go mad in the wetlands and the air is finally warm and everyone wants to be outdoors and the whole world is happy, happy, happy? “Ecological” comes closer to the idea than “calendar” or “meteorological” but still leaves out that all-important feeling component. “Ecological” sounds like something observed and dispassionately recorded, doesn’t it?  Hardly the way we feel. Well, this year, 2013, in Leelanau County, “felt” spring exploded joyously on Saturday, April 27. There were earlier hints and allegations, but no one could doubt Saturday’s evidence. It surged in the blood and sang in the heart, bringing out smiles and laughter.

Sarah in woods

So why on earth would I go to work early, indoors, with spring bursting all around me? Saran and I had gone out even earlier, as soon as the sun was up, and I found one brave little spring beauty blooming among the crowds of wild leeks in the woods (a day later there were too many spring beauty blossoms to count), while Sarah sniffed and sniffed. Besides looking, I listened and listened, scanning the still-bare treetops for the morning’s song-makers. But  there was that big blank space of wall above my new bookstore desk area, crying out to be covered, and I could hardly wait to start rehanging my own personal art wall, a mix of Michigan and Paris scenes. There! Very satisfying! 

Come see the wall "in person"

He's a good worker

Bill Coohon came over in the afternoon to help out with our new door confusion. You see, directly over my new entry door AND the door to my neighbor’s business is a big sign saying LAW OFFICE. The word LAW is actually over the new bookstore door (OFFICE over the office door), and the first couple of people who stopped by on Saturday morning stood in front of the bookstore window looking lost and making questioning gestures at me through the glass. “What? Where? How?” Which way to turn? We hope the big new letters on the new door will help. Bill certainly did a good job with them, don’t you think?

This way in!

Many old friends and a few new ones did eventually find their way inside, and we got a little giddy, what with the warm spring day and the exciting bookstore changes. 

What is she holding forth about this time?

Is Sarah following the plot?

Oh, look! Paintings, too!

By the time we closed up and went home, the first of the old daffodils under the silver maple were open to the sun. It’s really true. It’s really spring. We can feel it at last.

More sunshine yellow

The Future: Gene Logsdon Is Optimistic

April 2013

That’s what I keep reminding myself as I drive along Leelanau County roads this spring, my eye continually drawn to ravaged ash trees. The emerald ash borer only reached us this past year, but now it is clear that large numbers have arrived, with appetites intact. What Fall 2013 will look like without the subtle, varied, yummy colors of ash leaves? Will the species recover? Gene Logsdon, as I say, is optimistic, and while I’ve written about Logsdon and ash trees before, here is his hopeful forecast again, from A Sanctuary of Trees, for those who don’t want to follow my link backwards.

I have enough dead ashes in my woodland to supply all the firewood I will need for the rest of my life. But when foresters and landscapers tell me to kiss the white ash goodby, I lead them by the nose into my woods. Right along the path to the barn, there are two patches of ash seedlings – scores of them. I exchange greetings with them several times a day. They are my good friends. The tallest of them is about five feet now, growing slowly in the partial shade, the top sprig nipped off last winter by a deer, but none the worse for it. It is three years old and still only the diameter of my finger. Obviously it is not yet old enough to interest a borer. It will take six to eight years anyway for these seedlings to reach borer-food size, during which time the borers, running out of bigger ashes, will start to starve. I hope.

Another thing I tell myself over and over and have voiced once or twice to David, also, is that I’m glad I started noticing the fall colors of the ash trees a few years back. What if I’d not been aware of them, if their glory had vanished and I’d never known it?

October 2012

But according to Logsdon, it is not too late. If there are no tall, stately ash trees adding their fall color to October’s landscape, look carefully along the roadsides and around the edges of the woods. Look for the whippersnappers. Those little darlings! In time – we may hope, along with Logsdon – they will be tall, stately trees themselves.

Look to the young of our own species, too, for when we are gone, it will be their world. What kind of world will they inherit from us? Here is the Leelanau Children's Center in Northport, on parade Friday, April 26.

"Day of the Young Child"

The days are getting longer. Morning comes early. It’s spring, and it’s good to be alive. Don't you feel a little younger today, no matter how old you are?

Wild leeks in the woods

Second Amendment Arguments

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. 

- Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

Like most of you, I suppose, I think a lot these days about guns and the arguments advanced by both sides of what passes for a national debate. An article in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis (March 2013, Volume 42, no. 3) adapted from a lecture given at Hillsdale’s Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., is unsurprisingly adamant in support of gun owners’ rights. (Anyone living in Michigan and knowing anything about Hillsdale College, that is, would not be surprised.) Edward J. Erler makes a strong case for the right to bear arms as an individual, not a collective right, though he may overstate it (or perhaps this was an editorial decision at Hillsdale) with a section heading that reads “The Whole People Are the Militia.” Are the whole people "well regulated"? In what way, and how? If the answer is simply that our society is governed by the rule of law, I hardly think that was what the framers had in mind, but there are other aspects of Erler’s overall argument, including but not limited to the defense of semi-automatic weapons, that I find far more troubling – and, I must say, at times confused and even contradictory, and it is those aspects I want to address.

Stolen Guns

Erler states that “most gun crimes are committed with stolen or illegally obtained weapons...” (clear statistics on percentages are difficult to obtain; most crimes are not committed with guns at all) and notes (statistics bear this out) that most of the guns stolen and used in crimes are handguns. (See Bureau of Justice statistics on firearms and crime.)

Stolen guns are a problem. Who would disagree? Erler’s solution is twofold: (1) more responsible, law-abiding citizens should own guns; (2) prosecution and penalties for crimes involving guns should be swift and harsh. He also argues that semi-automatic weapons, “so-called assault rifles,” as he puts it, are seldom used by criminals but are “extremely well-adapted for home defense,” so presumably (3) more law-abiding citizens should, in his view, arm themselves with semi-automatic weapons. That is, he believes there should be more, not fewer, semi-automatic weapons in American homes. He seems to have no quarrel with a ban on fully automatic weapons, which might be ever so slightly reassuring if the line he draws did not seem completely arbitrary: the government may legitimately ban automatic weapons, he seems to think, but a ban on semi-automatic assault rifles he finds a violation of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. It would be interesting to hear how he thinks the framers would have drawn this line or what specific wording in the Second Amendment supports the distinction.

One question about having more guns in American homes seems logical: If there are more guns are in the homes of law-abiding citizens, won’t more guns be stolen? Stolen guns are and must be stolen from their rightful owners. That, after all, is what stealing is. Locking up guns is one proposed solution to not having your guns stolen, but I cannot find that it is Erler’s answer – perhaps because he does not ask the question. (He may have addressed it elsewhere. Anyone wanting to find out is welcome to search his published work more thoroughly than I have done.) His reasoning for semi-automatic weapons in the home is that since “assault rifles are rarely used by criminals, because they are neither easily portable nor easily concealed,” homeowners defending their private citadels with assault weapons (excuse me, “so-called assault weapons; Erler himself objects to and then makes use of the phrase himself without scare quotes) will be better equipped to avoid becoming crime victims. But is this not a dangerous escalation of what we might call the domestic arms race? In light of the fact that most crime is not committed with guns, protecting against it with assault rifles seems extreme.

Guns and Crime

Another logical question is much more difficult to answer: Does gun ownership reduce crime? These seemingly straightforward statistical question is deceptively simple, in that it looks for correlation between two and only two variables. Not surprisingly, the evidence for clear results and a clear direction of causation is murky, and each side picks and chooses among statistics to find numbers supporting its position. For instance, when homicide numbers go down, but homicides by guns goes up, is it fair to credit gun ownership with a drop in violent crime? Here’s a chilling statistic from the same article: "The presence of guns in a home during domestic violence increases the homicide chance for women by 500 percent, according to a 2003 study of domestic violence incidences in 11 cities." But “more guns” is only part of Erler’s solution to the problem of crimes involving guns. The other half, having to do with punishment and prevention. is that we should lock more people up. We should also, he thinks, hand down the death penalty more often and lock some people up before they can commit crimes.

The United States of America, which we like to think of as the freest country in the world, already has a greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world. Is this a solution or a problem? A retired cop who was a guest speaker once in my ethics class told my students, “If you need to draw your gun, you’ve already lost control of the situation.” If we need to lock up so many Americans, if we need the death penalty, it looks to me as if we’ve definitely lost control of the social situation.

Involuntary Incarceration

Erler’s advocacy of involuntary incarceration is totally baffling. Given his staunch support for the Second Amendment, one might expect he would bring the same vigilance guarding the Fourth Amendment, which gives “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure.” It is a strange inversion of priorities that would put the rights of ownership above the rights of personal freedom, freedom in one’s own person being the very basis of all natural rights. The argument from natural law, which Erler at other times is eager to invoke, is passed over silently when he – and others, who defend guns and point to mental illness as the problem – call for involuntary incarceration where no crime has – “yet,” as they say – been committed.

Gun advocates' promotion of involuntary incarceration as a solution to violence is strange not only from a philosophical point of view but also in light of centuries of abuse of those declared mentally ill by governments for political reasons. Totalitarian governments across the political spectrum, from Communist to Fascist, governments elected and those ruling by blood, have never been shy about calling “mad” those who would oppose or even question their power. If the concern of gun advocates is truly that a free citizenry be able to defend itself against excesses by government – Erler points to the “right of revolution, an essential ingredient of the social compact” – their simultaneous advocacy of involuntary incarceration would seem to close the very door they are fighting, with their guns, to keep open. Who is in a better position to provide for himself and his family and defend himself, his family, and his property – the free man without an assault weapon or the man behind bars?

Erler gives a passing nod to the “horrible exceptions – the mass shootings in recent years....” Those shooters, he argues, were mentally ill and should have been incarcerated before they could kill. (We might note that most of them could not be punished afterward since they turned their weapons on themselves before they could be captured and brought to trial.) Here is Erler on his opposition:

But the same progressives who advocate gun control also oppose the involuntary incarceration of mentally ill people who, in the case of these mass shootings, posed obvious dangers to society before they committed their horrendous acts of violence. From the point of view of the progressives who oppose involuntary incarceration of the mentally ill – you can thank the ACLU and like-minded organizations – it is better to disarm the entire population, and deprive them of their constitutional freedoms, than to incarcerate a few mentally ill persons who are prone to engage in violent crimes.

Has a citizen with a legally obtained handgun been “disarmed” if he has no assault rifle? When, in the absence of violence, is the danger of it to society “obvious”? That is, how is someone “prone” to violence identified before he engages in a violent act? Again, I would point to the strange inversion of rights in Erler’s position. He sees gun control advocates seeking to "deprive" a population of (one) constitutional freedom (I see the goal as setting limits, not depriving), whereas his position opens the door to the taking-away of a much more fundamental constitutional right, the freedom of the person.

Americans who break the law are subject to the law and have the right to trial. Those declared mentally ill by government-appointed experts have no such recourse, no way to defend themselves against charges that are not "charges" but "diagnoses." Neither is their incarceration given any time limit. Those locked away for being mentally ill, even if they have committed no crime, can be stripped of all their rights, sometimes for the rest of their lives, and in the current climate of government cost-cutting it is difficult to see that greater numbers of incarcerated mentally ill could receive appropriate treatment in humane living conditions.

Even professionals who would not want to see involuntary incarceration completely abolished warn about its potential for abuse.

In any troubled relationship between the powerful and the less powerful, like the relationship between a repressive totalitarian government and a dissident citizen, or between parents and a gay teenager, or between husband and wife in a patriarchal society, the language and ideas of psychiatry and mental health practice are open to abuse as a form of social control. In these instances, the mechanism of involuntary commitment is also open to abuse as a way to confine those who are threatening to the social or political order. 

- Alicia Curtis, “Involuntary Commitment,” in Bad Subjects, Issue #58, December 2001. (Click here for full article.)

Curtis cites recent abuses in China, as well as common cases within living memory in our own country where parents could commit a gay teenager for being gay or a husband have his wife locked away for not keeping the house clean. It doesn’t require a wild imagination to come up with dystopian possibilities on the current political horizon.

In Summary

How dangerous is our world today? Where are the greatest potential threats? How might these threats be mitigated? How do we want to balance freedom and safety? These are the questions behind the debate, the questions both sides presume to answer with the positions they take.

When gun advocates see danger in stolen guns, it is difficult to see how more guns available to be stolen will solve the problem.

When they point to potential abuses of government as the danger, their advocacy of involuntary incarceration looks paradoxical, contradictory, and extremely problematic.

Their clarion call for the death penalty clearly speaks to emotions of anger and frustration, but as there has never been evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent, this so-called solution would only lock the barn door after the horse had run away or been stolen – or after the barn had been burned down.

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Again, I will remind you that I do not have an editor, so besides comments of a substantive nature, any needed corrections are always welcome.