Taking the guns out of gun violence

It’s past time to look gun violence in this country in the face and concede that ‘guns’ are a big part of ‘gun violence.’

I’m not interested in repeating talking points. Everybody already knows their side’s sound bytes and slogans and use them as bludgeons to raise a din so loud they don’t have to pay any attention to the other guy’s shouted recitations of his canned rhetoric.

The pure fact is that the problem of gun-spree killings has at least three major ‘enabling’ components, two of which aren’t immediately solvable, which makes addressing the remaining fixable component so absolutely imperative.

First, let’s throw out component one: Crazy people. We are stuck with them. Some of them just can’t be made better. And you never know who is going to snap and when; lots of crazy people look just you and me. Crazy people are our x factor.

Since we can’t eliminate this part of the problem, what can we do to ameliorate it?

This brings us directly to the second intractable part of the problem: The media, who invariably spend days in the aftermath of these horrible crimes making a celebrity out of the killer. Who is he? Why did he do it? What did his hair look like? Let’s ask Dr. Oz what he thinks about the killer’s childhood… It’s already begun.

Lionizing these murderous creeps is the most contemptible kind of irresponsibility. People should have to search court records to discover their names. Considering most of these criminals are suicidal loner-types looking for attention in the worst way possible, robbing them of the posthumous notoriety they crave would eliminate at least some of their motivation to kill.

But because of the First Amendment—a very fine amendment indeed—we can’t require the media to be responsible. They will continue to run with “If it bleeds, it leads,” as they always have, at least until somebody finds a way to make money out of exercising responsible restraint.

All that’s left, all that can be addressed legislatively and enforced legally, is component three: Guns. Not their existence or even their proliferation, but their firepower. A very reasonable argument could be made that while the government has a responsibility to ensure the protections of the Second Amendment, that responsibility comes along with an obligation to limit private citizens’ access to weapons appropriate to hunting or home protection, not urban crowd pacification.

On the same day as the Connecticut shooting, someone in China went on an eerily similar rampage, resulting in 23 injuries. This person was as obviously unbalanced as the attacker in America, so why only injuries but no deaths? Because the Chinese assailant was armed with a knife, not a duffel bag of automatic weaponry and hundred-round clips.

As I’ve written in the past, I am all for an Originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment, ie: All citizens of legal age who pass a background check and aren’t felons ought to be able to own a gun of the sort available in 1791, when the amendment was added to the Constitution. Single-loading rifles and pistols. Weapons appropriate for hunting, or home defense.

If I can’t own a nuke or a bazooka, why can I own an AK47? Some restrictions are already in place and the Second Amendment remains solid as a rock. This slope is not so slippery as we have been led to believe.

People are already scolding me, “Don’t turn this into a political thing!”

But it is a political thing. It is uniquely and precisely a political thing.

Because gun laws are made and enacted by politicians. And politicians, especially members of the House of Representatives—because they have to run for reelection every two years and are perpetually in fear for their jobs—are in the thrall of a single lobbying organization, the National Rifle Association.

The NRA not only has an apparently inexhaustible cash reserve to funnel to the campaigns of lawmakers in their favor, but even more importantly, can legitimately impact voter turnout in the gerrymandered warrens of rural America. If guns are on the ballot, you can bet your life the NRA is going to motivate bodies to the polls.

The NRA accomplishes this at a grass-roots level by convincing gun owners that even the mere discussion of gun policy will necessarily represent the first step off the slippery slope I mentioned earlier that will inevitably, they assert, end in the government’s seizure of all our guns.

That’s an awful lot of a lot of certainty for a theory that remains—at 230+ years and counting—the purest speculation. The government is barely even going after stoners’ stashes anymore, they’re not about to arm up and try to relieve antsy gun owners of their heavy artillery.

Recently, in the face of national financial catastrophe, a few pragmatic politicians on both sides of the aisle have broken ranks and begun to distance themselves from anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist’s non-binding ‘pledge’ to never raise taxes.

And by heaven, the Union stands! The skies didn’t open up and weep blood, the mountains didn’t split asunder… The only danger their actions created was the danger that something might actually get done in Washington.

Compromise isn’t the end of democracy, it’s the glue that holds it together.

There doesn’t appear to be much anyone can do to eliminate the escalating occurrences of mass gun violence, but with more/some/any media restraint and a little bit of sensible guns-and-ammo regulations, we could definitely lower the killers’ profiles and decrease their body count.

Instead of trying to take the ‘gun’ out of ‘gun violence,’ let’s change the conversation to ways of taking the guns out of gun violence.