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| Nikolas Cruz, accused mass murderer. (Photo: Jennifer Tintner/Twitter) |
It happens every time there’s a mass murder: The bodies have barely been cleared from the crime scene when news of the event is suddenly overwhelmed by the screaming and counter-screaming of The Thing That Used to Be the Gun-Control Debate. You don’t even have time to mourn the senseless loss of lives. And heaven forfend you should mention praying for the souls of the victims and their families.
Making what philosopher Michael Liccione has called in a Facebook comment the “political kabuki theater” of the gun-control debate worse: the conviction we’ve developed over the last couple decades or so that the best way to effect change is to scream, shame, and bully the other side in an orgy of moral posturing and offensive language. It’s not enough just to say “you’re wrong;” people have to say “you’re wrong and you’re evil, so f**k you and the horse you rode in on.”
Great; you’ve expressed your anger and your righteousness. Now — how many hearts and minds did you change? If you just wrote the opposition off as too stupid and evil to be worth reaching, then you’ve done your part to guarantee that the kabuki theater goes on and on. You’re part of the problem.
Having said that, amidst the shaming and sneering, both sides have some valid points which need to be considered. If the various screamers would just stop acting like the opposition’s stereotype of them, those points might get a hearing.
The right seems to have a problem understanding the current issue. The left wants semiautomatic rifles out of the hands of home-grown terrorists and mass murderers. The right responds that “if you make guns criminal, only criminals will have guns,” and tries to draw causal correlations between tough gun laws and high gun-crime rates. It’s as if the right can’t process the fact that what happened at Parkland, Florida Wednesday was not a home burglary or a drive-by committed with a 9mm Glock. If you’re not talking about the same thing, it’s not a debate — it’s simply dueling monologues.
The average citizen does not need an assault weapon. Certainly not one with a “bump stock”; certainly not one that has the capacity to load 50- or 100-round magazines. Bump stocks help simulate full-automatic firing, but even the military fires only three-round bursts; the DoD found that “rock ’n roll” mode only wastes ammo. If you can’t distinguish between what’s necessary and what’s “kinda nice to have,” you, my friend, are the kind of sucker Madison Avenue loves to exploit for Corporate America.
Hunting? The only advantage a semiautomatic rifle gives a hunter is a quick follow-up shot when hunting in a space-constricted area. But this advantage doesn’t cross the line between necessary and desirable.
Target shooting? Not needed. If you can’t hit the bulls-eye with a bolt-action .22, what makes you think you can hit it with a 5.56mm semiautomatic?
Home/personal defense? Unless your house is regularly attacked by platoons of weapon-toting thugs, I have to call B.S. … and if it is, might I suggest moving elsewhere? There’s nothing an AR-15 can do for you that a 9mm Sig Sauer or Beretta can’t do as well, and a pistol is much easier to carry concealed or stow in your glove box.
A “well-regulated militia” (cf. Second Amendment)? Militias were ever poor substitutes for a standing, professional army, as was demonstrated in every American war up to the Civil War. Such need as still exists for state militias — mainly disaster-relief work — has since been taken up by state National Guard units. A bunch of disaffected, socially marginalized civilians pretending they’re the last bastion of white civilization or the “real” America of the Founding Fathers doesn’t deserve to be called a militia. Especially if they resist government regulation from sheer principle.
I’ve conceded — at least for argument’s sake — that there are legitimate reasons to own firearms. But to admit that such uses are legitimate isn’t the same as to grant that all firearms are therefore licit, or that the State has no valid interest in regulating their purchase, ownership, possession, or use. On the contrary, the people most likely to scream about an assault weapons ban are the same ones who, when the issue concerns immigration or Islamic terrorists, would agree with Cicero that salus populi suprema lex esto: “The safety of the people [is] the highest law” (On Laws, 3:3:8).
An assault-weapons ban is by no means the radical disarmament of the American people or their immediate and full reduction to helplessness in the face of criminals. No, it won’t get completely rid of the problem; but if we applied such an absurd all-or-nothing standard consistently, we would have no laws whatsoever. The law has yet to be written that no one has broken. Let the right-wing hyperventilation cease.
But why won’t it completely fix the problem? Doubtless, you’ve heard the right say “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” more times than you can stand to think. And yeah, it sounds like a cheap excuse to go on selling guns. For what it’s worth, I wholeheartedly support an assault weapons ban. But there is a truth behind the “guns don’t kill people” trope that the left is reluctant to face: taking guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable doesn’t cure mental instability.
The U.S. has had a mental health care crisis for many years, with disorders going undiagnosed or untreated due to the absence of trained observers and inadequate insurance coverage. Furthermore, a few years ago, researchers found that fewer medical school graduates were opting for psychiatry and that fewer practicing psychiatrists were accepting health insurance. As many as one in five children under 18 suffers from undiagnosed or untreated disorders; however, most teachers are untrained to deal with mental health problems and most school systems have too few mental health professionals on staff.
However, neither the left nor the right is interested in the mental health care crisis, save insofar as they can use it to advance their agendas. The left has even gone so far as to normalize certain pathologies, or at least deny that there is a norm by which those traits can be judged unhealthy. The right, on the other hand, acknowledges the problem but is content to throw the mental health care crisis on the pile of social epidemics for which they expect the market to provide a solution. The market, which by its very nature doesn’t give a tinker’s dam for the common good, has so far failed to address it.
Meanwhile, the crisis has been going on long enough that it explains why our politics are so polarized. It explains why much of our public discourse consists of shrill, abusive rants. It explains why such tirades proceed from the explicit assumption that the people on the other side are malicious fools. It explains why neither side can concede validity to any point the other side offers. It explains why the two dominant parties no longer try to compromise with one another.
It explains why the kabuki theater goes on and on: a substantial number of our fellow citizens suffer from undiagnosed, untreated personality disorders. Very few of them will go on to commit mass murder. But they don’t all turn into homeless vagrants; they’re present on all levels and in all sectors of society. Many of them now occupy positions of social, political, and economic influence, which means we’re committing the future of this country to their hands. Think about that.
