Imagine three out of every 10 Americans owned a grizzly bear.
Not as pets. As protection.
We’d share sidewalks with grim-faced men leading their bears by a leash. Stores would have signs reminding patrons not to bring bears inside. Those that didn’t would have many frightened customers trying to evade the enormous beast blocking the aisles.
Of course, this would be normalized like any other male paranoia. Movies would feature cops staring down criminals, their cold gazes intercut with their bears’ faces. There would be bear sections at sporting goods stores, with staff available to describe the reach and quality of each grizzly on sale. Your Facebook page would be flooded with AI-generated images showing Good Guys with a bear stopping Bad Guys with a bear.
This isn’t a world you would want to live in. Grizzly bears weigh 800 to 1,200 pounds, have terrifyingly powerful bites, and can outrun human beings with surprising speed.
But what would that matter? In this world, as in ours, the ability of some to legally commit violence against others is the only “freedom” not subject to judicial veto. People always have reasons to justify bear ownership. And when one reason fails, they grab another. Any ursine restriction is viewed with abhorrence. Licensing? Authoritarian. Training to handle bears? An insult to our intelligence. Bear storage? Nanny state intrusion.
Cable news would perpetually defer to bear wrangling experts, perpetually annoyed about the media getting details about claws and fur incorrect.
Meanwhile, bears would be attacking people. Because that’s what happens when inexperience confronts wild animals.
I thought about this as I was reading the latest butcher bill from Alabama’s guns-for-everyone approach to public safety. A Johns Hopkins University study released last month found the state in 2023 had a gun suicide death rate of 12.1 per 100,000 residents.
That’s much higher than the national average (7.6 per 100,000) and bad even for the gun-choked South. Only Arkansas and Tennessee had worse numbers.
This is what happens in a state with a lot of guns, a lot of despair, and comparatively little access to mental health care.
Improving that system would be great, and improve the well-being of anyone in a crisis, whether life-threatening or otherwise. But a fully-funded, fully accessible mental health care network would still struggle to contain the damage from a society deluged with firearms. In a city where everyone carries lighters and oily rags, you can’t expect a fire department to prevent an inferno.
The Johns Hopkins report has good solutions, even transparently obvious ones: laws requiring gun owners to safely store their weapons; gun licenses as a prerequisite to purchasing a gun, and laws allowing the confiscation of the weapons of people who may be a danger to themselves and others.
In the past, these proposals have died quick deaths in the Alabama Legislature. Republican lawmakers never want to face attacks from the right on gun access. So we have little oversight of firearms, a policy only a party extremist could love.
And maybe – maybe – legislators are starting to see the issues with that. The legislature this year voted to make possession of Glock switches, which can turn handguns into automatic weapons, a state crime. It’s already a federal crime, but the hope is that the new law will make it easier to get these devices off the streets.
Lawmakers also passed a bill that will allow people to voluntarily surrender their firearms to a licensed arms dealer if they think they might be a threat to themselves or their loved ones. It’s a step, though not one that would save as many lives as allowing family members to ask a judge to do that.
But safe storage laws, about as common-sense an approach as you can get in a state that claims to love common sense, have struggled to get anywhere in this legislature. And gun licenses? We all but abolished those for concealed carry in 2022.
Roughly half of Alabamians own guns. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to own them, particularly rifles for hunting.
But many Alabamians have a terrible idea that a gun is the only thing that will ensure our safety. A lot of people here marinate in a media environment that encourages fear and suspicion. One that suggests everyone has the ability to properly handle a firearm.
So we get hyped into believing that nothing must block the path to owning one. Not law; not personal responsibility; not concern for the safety of others.
This is madness. And it’s hard to tell how any of this is different from letting people run wild with bears. Alabama has nation-leading rates of firearm suicide and homicide, all in the name of “freedom.”
And what freedom is that? The freedom to fire a gun into a world that frightens you.
If we want a safe Alabama, we can’t allow this attitude to govern public safety. The stubborn defense of the freedom to kill is killing us.
This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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