The Strange Values of President Bush

Responding to suggestions that ballistic fingerprinting would aid police in catching the DC sniper, the White House recently said that

the real issue is values, and that's what is at stake here. These are the acts of a depraved killer who has broken and will continue to break laws. And so the question is not new laws; the question is the actions here represent values in our society.

Let's take the Bush Administration at its word and ask some hard questions about values. First, what values does Bush espouse when he refuses to support ballistic fingerprinting? Second, what values does Bush's inconsistent defense of civil liberties reflect?

First, President Bush's opposition to ballistic fingerprinting suggests that he values public safety less than other things. A ballistic fingerprinting law would require every new gun to be test-fired before it's sold, presumably by the manufacturer or by some federal or state agency, so that its unique characteristics -- how the gun marks both the shell casing and the slug -- and its provenance can be stored in a federal or state database. When a crime is committed and shell casings or slugs are recovered, their unique characteristics can be searched against the database. Even without tracking every sale of the gun after the initial sale, having some place to start would assist police. That database search could lead either to the present owner of the gun or give police a place to start in finding its present owner.

The White House has offered two objections to ballistic fingerprinting. The first is that ballistic fingerprinting isn't accurate. If that is really the case, someone should tell all the ballistic experts who testify in state courts around the country every day as to the identifying marks left by a particular gun on particular shell casings or slugs. We can set aside the White House's accuracy objection without further comment.

The second objection, one which is more vague than the first, is that ballistic fingerprinting violates the rights of gun owners. This objection amounts to the claim that people have a right to own guns secretly -- that the government has no right to associate a gun with its owner.

As the White House put it,

There are law-abiding Americans and then there are criminals. And just as if you were to fingerprint every single law-abiding American, it might give you a helpful clue to determine who engaged in a robbery or in a theft. Do you want to apply that across the board for every instance?

The analogy between one's right of privacy and one's right to own a gun privately fails miserably. People can avoid having their (sense of) privacy violated under a ballistic fingerprinting schema by not buying a gun. In the White House's attempt to analogize to a human fingerprinting scheme, there is no way to opt out; the violation is unavoidable.

People have a presumptive, but not absolute right of privacy. We often voluntarily reconfigure our privacy expectations and demands in exchange for concessions from the state. For example, in order to maintain public safety, we're expected to relinquish some privacy by allowing the state to associate us with vehicle ownership, track our address, physical characteristics, identity, and so on. Very few people make a principled objection to this tradeoff. And even fewer people suggest that this tradeoff is impermissible because it constitutes a step on the slope toward vehicle confiscation, despite the fact that motor vehicles kill more people every year than guns. The obvious objection to the analogy between guns and cars is that the Constitution establishes an individual right to own guns, not to own cars. But the meaning of the 2nd amendment is a disputed question; that it establishes an absolute right to gun ownership is not. The argument is about the boundaries of a disputed, relative right.

Either Bush is unwilling or afraid to oppose the NRA, particularly its power to influence races in the "red states", or he is simply a right-wing ideologue, prioritizing the rights of a small special interest group over the safety of everyone else.

Bush's disdain for public safety becomes obvious when you recall that he is willing to trade civil liberties for public safety of a sort. Bush's administration has suggested since September 2001 that citizens have to be prepared to trade rights for safety. And the rights which are being violated include those at the core of democratic citizenship: free expression and assembly, habeas corpus, the right to counsel, the right to avoid self-incrimination, the right to a fair and speedy trial. And the likelihood that diminishing these rights will result in increased safety against future terrorist attacks is very low. It's unclear that the full implementation of the US Patriot Act, for example, will increase the safety of a single American from terrorist attack.

Why is Bush willing to trade the undisputed core of civil liberties for an uncertain increase in safety, but unwilling to trade the disputed individual right to own a gun for a much more likely increase in safety? Even if ballistic fingerprinting were a violation of one's right to own a gun, it would have a reasonably high chance of reducing the epidemic of gun violence in the US. It's a better bet than trading core civil liberties for dubious safety from terrorists. He has no grounds upon which to insist that citizens cannot be forced to trade civil liberties, even the sacred right-wing cow of gun ownership, for enhanced public safety. I reject the tradeoff between civil liberties and public safety. But it is Bush's game, and that he plays it hypocritically should be clear to all.

One set of facts is undisputed. According to the Centers for Disease Control, during the period 1993 to 1998, about 115,000 firearm-related injuries occurred every year. Of those 115,000 about 32,000 were firearm deaths. That's equal to one WTC terrorist attack every month for six years. Sixty times more people were killed by firearms during that period than were killed by terrorists on September 11th. Ballistic fingerprinting wouldn't be relevant to all of these deaths, but it would be to many. The majority of deaths in the age range 15 to 44 were the result of interpersonal violence.

Are we sure Bush understands or even cares which is the greater threat to public safety? The White House was right when it said that social values matter. But it had the wrong set of values in mind. Bush's hypocrisy is more dangerous to more Americans than any crazy sniper will ever be.