Breasts or guns: Which is ok to bear?

The topless march held earlier this month saw men and women strolling through Maine’s largest city to protest the societal taboo of female nudity.

Now one USM student is organizing a similar demonstration to celebrate his state-afforded right to openly carry a firearm and has planned an open carry get-together for next Saturday at Portland’s Back Cove. (see story on page one)

The events are a means of demonstrating a citizen’s right to bear breasts and arms, respectively, but there is a distinct difference between the rights that are being enshrined here.

In 2006, over 30,000 deaths per 100,000 were caused by firearms. Every day, 90 Americans die from gun wounds, according to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

Breasts, on the other hands, draw far fewer complaints and have yet to hurt anyone but the person they are attached to.

For some background, open carry is perfectly legal in Maine under Article I, Section 16 of the state Constitution. Only those carrying concealed weapons must apply for a permit. Maine is one of 24 states which prohibits concealed carry on college campuses by people with a valid concealed handgun license or permit. At USM open carry falls under the same purvey.

While it might be legal, Portland is not known as a particularly “gun-friendly” part of the state. In 2008, police arrested 23 year old Norman Hamann of Lyman after he was seen with a gun in a holster on his hip near Payson Park – a hip-holstered firearm is the very definition of open carry, and the police action against Hamann was a violation of his rights.

Toplessness is also legal in Maine for both men and women, but has faced similar scrutiny from local law enforcement. In 2002, two University of Maine students were charged with violating the state’s indecent-conduct law after jogging topless down the street in Orono. The women were later found not guilty in Bangor Superior Court.

Drawing a distinction between these two rights might seem ambiguous, and critics of both public demonstrations sound eerily similar in expressing their opposition to the two issues.

Portland resident Colleena Burns was quoted by WCSH 6 as saying the topless event was “disgusting” and not appropriate for her ten-year-old niece. Cathie Whittenburg, Director of the New England Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence said the open carry event is “trying to normalize abnormal behavior.”

While these two issues of individuals protecting their state-afforded rights might seem equally valid, we need to stop playing the maddening game of political correctness and recognize the large chasm of logic that separate these two examples. Both events test the public’s tolerance for polarizing issues, but the push toward acceptance of female toplessness is as progressive as the laws regarding gun ownership are outdated.

The right to bear arms is often cited by gun advocates as a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights as a safeguard so that citizens can protect themselves. However, this antiquated amendment seems dangerous when removed from it’s historical context.

The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, at a time in American history when, fresh off the American Revolution, there was an understandable culture of self-defense and armament that precipitated the granting of such rights. The muddled language used in the amendment has only been trouble since it’s writing, with the American Bar Association noting that there is more disagreement and less understanding about this right than of any other current issue regarding the Constitution.

When in doubt over the specific meanings our our government’s founding document, we should give it a closer look before letting our citizens arm themselves to the teeth with weapons only ever designed for battlefield use. The Bush-era Department of Homeland Security’s oft-mocked “plastic sheeting and duct tape” would be a more effective means of self-defense from any sort of attack we would realistically be faced with than a suburban machine gun outpost.

The Amendment was created as a means of protecting a country that was without an official standing army, and reads “a well regulatd Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

But a lot has changed in 200-plus years. The U.S. now spends more on it’s military than any other country in the world – $604 billion, seven times as much as the second largest spender – according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The U.S. has a myriad of government and state organizations tasked with protecting the public from foreign and domestic threats, effectively demolishing the need for our individual citizens to carry around firearms.

We have long-ignored the reality of our present day security situation to pander to those for whom a gun is seen as some sort of unassailable right. Firearms are actually just brutal weapons that should only be used and carried by trained perfessionals who are employed to protect the public.

For some, the open-carried firearm might be some sort of sign of one’s patriotism and a celebration of their rights on par with voting. But for too many, it is a sort of security blanket – a totem of one’s own xenophobia that erodes any sense of trust within our communities.

Threats to our life and liberty can no longer be effectively deterred by individual citizens, and allowing citizens to carry guns in the supermarket creates far more problems than it solves. The only reason the right still exists is because of how firmly ingrained into our social fabric it has become. But historical precedent does not justify everything, and this “right” should be thoroughly examined.