Just because the law says you can ...

... doesn't mean it's a good idea.  Gail Collins's New York Times column yesterday described, in typical Collinsesque tongue-in-cheek fashion, a list of recent incidents involving people openly carrying firearms in inappropriate places.  (By people, of course, I mean men, more specifically white men.  As Collins points out, open carry these days seems to be the nearly exclusive province of Caucasian males.  Back in the '60s, when it was the Black Panthers who advocated open carry, it was a bit harder to find votes for those laws in the state legislatures.  It will be interesting to see what happens when, say, Islamic fundamentalists start wearing pistols into the local Walmart.  But I digress.)

One such incident caught my particular interest because it happened in my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Alarmed librarians called police when the 31-year-old owner of a lawn-care business toted his holstered 9-mm pistol to a summer reading party for kids at the Kalamazoo public library.  There was nothing the cops could do, as it turns out openly carrying a gun in a public library is perfectly legal in Michigan.  The man in question, Mike Warren, said he wore the gun "to protect my family. God forbid there was a person who decided to shoot the place up, but I'd be the only one there who could do something about it."  When asked by the Kalamazoo Gazette "how other library patrons would know that he was not dangerous, Warren paused.  'Let me think about that for a minute,' he said."

So, two quick points to be made about this charming story and its growing number of counterparts.  The first is that regardless of what the NRA (or, I suspect, Mr. Warren) might claim, these open-carry confrontations have nothing to do with the Second Amendment.  There is no constitutional right to carry a gun into a public library, or a school, or a private business, or indeed anywhere outside the home of the person who owns the gun.

In District of Columbia v. Heller, its 2008 decision interpreting the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court held that the Amendment protects an individual's right, not to carry a gun wherever he pleases, but simply to possess a working handgun in his home for purposes of self-defense.  Writing for the Court, Justice Scalia explicitly stated that this right, "[l]ike most rights ... is not unlimited. ... [N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the sale of arms."  This list of "presumptively lawful regulatory measures," he went on to note, "does not purport to be exhaustive."

Mr. Warren, then, wasn't asserting his Second Amendment rights when he showed off his pistol to the kids at the Kalamazoo library, any more than the proverbial jokester is invoking the First Amendment when he falsely shouts "fire" in the crowded theater.  He was simply taking advantage of Michigan lawmakers' failure to prohibit that particular use of a gun -- a failure that appears to be more the product of happenstance than of considered public policy.  He had a legal right to carry his gun in the library, yes, but only a contingent one that exists through the grace (or passivity) of the state legislature.  No deeply cherished constitutional values were at stake.

Which leads me to my second point.  There are lots of things that the law (even the Constitution) allows us to do that we really shouldn't be doing.  In 1971, the Court upheld a man's First Amendment right to wear a jacket reading "Fuck the Draft" in the hallway of a California courthouse; as a result, the use of profanity in public places is a constitutionally protected right (again, with some reasonable qualifications -- "like most rights," to paraphrase Justice Scalia, the freedom of speech is "not unlimited").  Does that mean it's a good idea for grown men and women to swear loudly in public when there are children within earshot?  Though drunken fans in sports arenas throughout the country might disagree, the answer is no.  Just because the law allows it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

The American Constitution is justly celebrated around the world for its explicit protections of individual liberty against the danger of an overreaching government (or an overbearing majority).  One negative side effect of our collective veneration of individual rights, however, is a cultural tendency to smuggle our own notions of morality into our understandings of constitutional rights -- to equate our legal rights with our personal moral views.  If we believe in a God-given right to armed self-defense, then by golly the Second Amendment must protect such a right!  And as the Kalamazoo incident and many others like it demonstrate, this identification of the law with morality runs both ways.  If the law allows it, it must be a good thing!  If it's legal, it must be moral.

But of course this is wrong.  The great value of our constitutional protection of individual liberty is that it leaves most things in life to individual choice.  We can decide for ourselves whether to keep a handgun in our homes for self-protection or whether to express our anti-military sentiments with vulgarities displayed on our clothing.  The law says it's legal, but we get to judge for ourselves whether it's ethical or moral.  And with that freedom of choice comes moral responsibility.  We have to take the consequences of our conduct seriously, including giving thoughtful consideration to how that conduct might affect others.

On the subject of carrying guns in public, as on other questions of ethics, there probably is room for reasonable disagreement.  There are some circumstances, however, in which it's hard to imagine that brandishing a weapon can be a good idea, and it seems to me that a kids' party at the local public library is one of them.  According to the Kalamazoo Gazette, "Warren finally said he understands if others are unnerved when they see his gun, but 'I value my family's safety above their feelings.'"  That is, to put it mildly, a problematic weighing of the relevant costs and benefits.  Small-town midwestern libraries are not typically high-crime areas, and more than "feelings" are at stake when children are put in close proximity to a loaded firearm.

I can't shake the impression that for many open-carriers, flaunting a gun in public is about something very different from defense of self and family.  I doubt familial safety was what motivated the man who walked into the Atlanta airport with a loaded assault rifle, then YouTubed the inevitable encounter with police and threatened to sue if they arrested him.  Or the guy -- another Georgian -- who, according to Collins, interrupted a kids' baseball game in a public park by loudly declaring "I've got a gun" and daring the police to arrest him.  (They couldn't; his conduct was legal under Georgia law.)  Many of these incidents strike me as the sort of in-your-face, touchdown-dance acts of attention-grabbing that are the quintessence of twenty-first-century American culture.  They reflect, at bottom, a fundamental narcissism, and a corresponding lack of regard for the feelings and well-being of others.  Warren, our library gunslinger, told the Gazette that "an armed society is a polite society."  But all too often, ostentatious open carry is about pugnacity, not politeness.

There is a real irony here.  The self-defense motives claimed by gun-rights advocates like Warren presuppose a government that is unable to defend its citizens; they assume a breakdown in the rule of law.  But in a democracy, an essential aspect of the rule of law is respect for the views and interests of others.  Without that mutual respect, we lose our central reason for obeying laws with which we happen to disagree.  And it is precisely this value of respect for others that open-carriers reject when they bring loaded weapons into libraries, airports, and school parking lots.  If gun advocates want to preserve law and order, the first place they should look is in the mirror.