Tag: mass shootings

Take All the Guns

This column won’t follow the usual pattern of analysis and a plea for gun “control” following yet another mass shooting, except to state the obvious: United States policies regarding gun ownership are deranged. In terms of analysis, the facts have been out there for a very long time. This country simply has more guns, and more gun owners, than is sane; more guns equate to more gun deaths (see the obligatory chart below, click to enlarge).

Gun deaths and gun ownership by population.

There is, at this point, no plausible way to enact meaningful gun control. If we couldn’t do this after Newtown, then we’re not going to do it at all. Anything Congress might manage to do now—and the odds against Congress doing anything at all are very high—will make very little difference in terms of everyday outcomes. Why? Because there are already some 400 million guns floating around the country, a great many of them in unstable hands. For those guns, and for the people who own them, any unlikely new law (universal background checks?—it’s a bit late for that) would be meaningless.

What needs to happen is the removal of those 400 million “loose” guns. To be absolutely clear, the guns need to be removed from their owners (they would be compensated for their value), and their owners need to be prevented from acquiring replacements. The Holy Second Amendment, which has been grossly distorted by Republicans and their conservative courts, needs to be scrapped. Nothing less than these measures will solve the current problem.

The right will scream in outrage at this—if I had a larger right-leaning audience for this blog, one or more readers might well try to shoot me (a common impulse among problematic gun lovers). The left will say what I am proposing is impossible, and these people would be right. Under our current United States government, the solution I’ve described is impossible.

So what can be done? The answer, as for so many other intractable American problems, is secession: rational people joining together to create a rational new state (the Democratic Federation of America, let’s call it). A state where individual gun ownership would be permitted only under the most tightly controlled circumstances. A state where long-standing American myths—manifest destiny, rising by one’s own bootstraps, the inalienable right to shoot oneself or others—would no longer hold sway. A democratic socialist state on the Nordic model where crime would still occur, but rarely and on a much smaller scale. Where people would have more equality, where there would be far less poverty and deprivation. A state where life seemed meaningful again.

Jettison the crazies. Start over. Don’t “build back better.” Build something new, and better.

The American Emergency

Of all the many spectacular failings our country has experienced over the past year, the ongoing gun crisis is both the most visible and the most illogical. What other country would tolerate so many mass shooting episodes? What other country—or what other country’s leader—would claim, with a straight face, that arming still more of its citizens is the solution? If you can picture America as a person, then that person is in the back of an ambulance, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds and speeding to the emergency room with sirens blaring.

A Baptist church in south Texas, scene of the latest American carnage. Photo: Nick Wagner/AP.
A Baptist church in south Texas, scene of the latest American carnage. Photo: Nick Wagner/AP.

 

 

 

 

 

The patient may not make it. And if the country does manage to survive, it is not likely to be in its current two-party, 50-state form. The U.S. is too divided, and too sick, to bounce back into its younger state of health.

I and others have written about the country’s new kakistocracy, which is almost entirely Republican. Today’s Republican party is a vicious fungal infection that is pushing America into an ever more perilous condition. On virtually every issue, including the gun issue, the Republicans are not merely wrong—they are unbelievably wrong. Some of this is self-interest and cynicism, of course. But most of it is simply mind-boggling stupidity, especially among the party’s base. President Trump is a glaring, throbbing, dangerous manifestation of this. If he doesn’t manage to plunge a steadily weakening America into some sort of nuclear exchange he still stands to promote the dissolution of the country’s most important institutions, including democracy itself.

Where the gun issue is concerned, the Democratic Party is also to blame—it has displayed unforgivable cowardice. For every Democratic politician like Connecticut’s Senator Chris Murphy (who represented Newtown in Congress at the time of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre) urging Congress to “get off its ass and do something,” many other Democrats stay silent. And advocacy groups for gun control also fall sadly short. Groups such as Americans for Responsible Solutions, founded by Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly, do not go nearly far enough in their proposals and remain hamstrung in their deference to the wildly misinterpreted Second Amendment.

The Supreme Court’s disastrous, conservative-led 5-4 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller that “the Second Amendment protects a personal right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense within the home” has somehow morphed into the right for anyone to bear arms anywhere for any purpose, which of course is the NRA’s and now our so-called President’s stance. This is quite insane yet it is the law of the land, a land currently led by “a fucking moron” as our Secretary of State has said.

As we contemplate that ambulance speeding toward a hospital with a dying democracy inside, it’s important to note that guns are only one of America’s deadly symptoms. A dysfunctional federal government, a chaotic health care system, and the rollback of almost every ethical, social and scientific advance made over the past century are others. But if we can’t address the gun issue it’s likely we can’t cure any of our other serious illnesses, either.

Can we address the gun violence emergency in this country? Not with our currently divided political system. As British journalist Dan Hodges wrote about Sandy Hook, “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

I hope you’ve noticed I haven’t used the words “Sutherland Springs” in this post. What difference would they make? That little Texas town is just the latest in a long procession, the latest recipient of America’s thoughts and prayers. We’ll soon move on to the next locale.

My thought, or rather my hope, is that both of our national parties will fragment into their constituent parts and we will, sooner rather than later, be able to put together a government representing a coalition of the sane. Multiple political parties would break the gerrymandered stranglehold that Republicans hold over so much of America and enable a coalition government, say between a new progressive party and the remaining Democrats, to have a decent shot at power. That coalition would then be able to enact laws resembling those in Britain and Australia, where personal gun ownership is very tightly controlled. How those laws would then be enforced is a subject for another post.