People were shot in Los Vegas. Accept it. Welcome to America.
I realize this sounds cold. Let me explain.
Americans will have no better luck banning guns than we have banning marijuana or alcohol. People like their guns, people like their marijuana, people like their alcohol.
The scene in Los Vegas makes us heartsick. We can imagine the horror of it for the people there in the crowd, all of a sudden being shot at randomly. We can imagine the grief for the the families involved.
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| Yes. You are stuck. Internalize and accept that. |
People whose opinions I value and share are nearly unanimous in saying we have to do something, that easy access to guns, especially high powered ones, is ridiculous and dangerous. I agree that it is dangerous. But there is nothing to be done. It is one of the risks of being an American.
You have a small chance of being killed at random by a person with a gun. You have a small chance of being killed driving on the freeway. You have a small chance of being killed by lightening, You have a small chance of having a bit of arterial plaque flake off and travel to your heart, lungs, or brain, and being killed. There is nothing much you can do about it other than to use some prudence and foresight to lower your percentages, but accept the potential of sudden death.
Prohibition did not work because enforcement was worse than the problem. The culmination of the era of Progressive reform brought us women's right to vote, the progressive income tax, direct election of senators, and Prohibition. Alcohol use was dangerous. Everyone knew it. People were killed by accidents caused by drunks. Families were destroyed. There was a constituency for prohibition: Anti-immigrant Protestants thought Catholics drank too much, white southerners were afraid of black drunkenness, rich people thought they would control the bad habits of the poor. It seemed like a good-enough idea, because in the backs of people's minds they themselves would be able to drink, but would keep others--the wrong kind of others--from drinking.
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| A noble idea that did not work. |
Rich people had "social clubs", where alcohol was present with a wink. People could possess alcohol at home, so rich people stocked up. Farmers could make all the hard cider they wanted--to preserve apples, of course. Jews could have sacramental wine. People could make alcohol for home use, so there would be a big market in sending dry grapes. People bought, sold, and drank in semi-secret: speakeasies and private sales of liquor. Prohibition did not work. Alcohol was everywhere, and drinkers liked to drink. Enforcement caused more problems than it solved. It was better to accept the hazards of drinking than the hazards of enforcement.
Same thing with marijuana and guns. I link the three because all are ubiquitous, easily hidden, and desired by some people. And each of them cause social problems, including the random deaths of the innocent.
I link marijuana and guns for a second reason, to clarify the problem and expose the inconsistency and hypocrisy. The kinds of people who want to restrict gun ownership are politically the same people who want to end criminalization of marijuana. The kind of people who want to outlaw marijuana tend to be people who want maximum freedom for gun ownership.
A reader of this blog sent me testimony his clients offered a state legislative hearing, testimony opposing de-criminalizing marijuana. They spoke of the hazards of marijuana to the user, how really strong marijuana was nowadays, and how it would be hard to know in advance if people were impaired or would misuse it, so we should be safe rather than sorry. The testimony sounded so familiar. One could substitute the word "marijuana" with the words "guns", and the testimony would sound just like something Hillary Clinton might say after the Sandy Hook or now Los Vegas shootings. Hillary would protest the gun violence, she would note that "assault rifles" are so much stronger than the muskets used at the time the 2nd Amendment was written. Except it seemed likely to me that those people testifying--political conservatives--would actually have the opposite view on guns. Guns were a right. Good guys with guns used guns for good purposes. Sure, they are more powerful now, but what makes them dangerous or safe is the personal responsibility of the user, not the gun itself. And besides, guns are ubiquitous, and if they are not bought and sold legally, they will be bought and sold illegally.
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| Random harm due to marijuana |
Just as, of course, marijuana is sold today, sometimes strong stuff, openly and legally in some states and illegally in others, openly in stores or out of trunks of cars. Marijuana and guns, both.
I have political advice for Democrats: give up on guns. Let Republicans have their way on this issue. Accept the fact that some of our fellow Americans will die from the criminal use or careless use of guns. If the slaughter gets great enough there will be a change in the politics of the issue, but for now gun owners and gun supporters have huge blocks of America in their camp. Accept that. Rural America is gun country.
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| People with guns sometimes kill the innocent |
Isn't that just awful? Isn't that giving up?
Yes, it is giving up, but it is only as awful as concurring that the war on drugs and mass incarceration of marijuana possession is unjust and counter-productive. Marijuana legalization will cause some problems, which marijuana supporters cannot help but acknowledge, but the problems are less severe than the problems caused by enforcement against people doing what they want to do, smoke marijuana and get sleepy, pain relief, or a high.
A few people will get killed by buzzed drivers, perhaps as many in a year as will be killed by mass shooters. Both are tragic. There is equivalence. Guns and marijuana are dangerous, but they are both risks that Americans have no practical choice but to accept.
10 comments:
Actually, the reverse is true.
Those who would ban abortions, gut environmental regulations, end Medicaid, kick out immigrants and restrict other personal freedoms advocate for guns.
They need them to enforce their uncivilized hypocrisy.
The carnage in America, which is ours alone, is the result of the gun/military lobby subverting the will of the people. The rest of the world sees us armed to the teeth and are uneasy. It makes all foreign policy one sided. Democrats need to "stick to their guns" and keep pushing for sensible controls. Whether they lose on this issue or not, it's an important principle to hold true. Your point about a tipping point that will catalyze the debate is well taken and when it inevitably happens Democrats will hold the high ground.
Telling the left to give up on gun control is as productive as telling the right to give up their guns. This is politics, it's culture and religion, it's an inning, a round and a match. It's leagues, congregations and caucuses.
The left loves some mass shootings if we get to be holier than thou, unless its Islamic terror, which we don't like because that makes us defensive on diversity. The right loves it when the gunman is a brown Muslim, the left loves it when the gunman is a white Chrisian.
Both sides are in suspense on Las Vegas right now because we don't yet know whether there is an ISIS or Christian connection. The worst will if it's a draw, neither Christian nor Muslim, neither a supremacist nor leftist, not a mental case, not a gun nut. What a waste if he's just not someone who hurts either side. That would render the 60 LV dead as useless as the 60 Chicago dead each month. They'd really just not be much use to anyone then.
We are the only Western industrialized country with such libertarian gun laws, just as we were the only such country, during Prohibition, with such restrictive laws on alcohol. The booze ban did not work, everyone agrees; but gun restrictions seem to work okay in other such countries. I agree guns are a deep cultural aspect of American culture, uniquely (as was slavery for a couple of centuries). As with slavery, I believe the gun issue is a long game, with many decades of conflict ahead about how to safely manage their private ownership. Personally, I believe guns are too dangerous for private ownership. It was once unconstitutional to drink Bud Light; it was once constitutional to own a black human being as property. So, I don't look to the constitution, as fair-minded scholars disagree on its meaning on this topic. I just am concerned about public safety, and think the models of Australia, Japan and the U.K. are good guidance for what we might do. But nothing will change soon, and certainly not in the wake of events like Las Vegas.
It's only political because the gun lobby pays off congressmen and gives them talking points about liberty and the constitution. This absurd issue is about weapons that are designed to kill people and elephants. No one needs one and certainly no one needs 50. The sales of these weapons, if not banned, needs to be regulated to a greater degree than others, with strict penalties for both sellers and buyers.
A simple truth is that if one owns a weapon the likelihood of it being used goes up dramatically. 6000 children are killed or injured "accidentally" every year, but never mind the statistics, this is about money, not principles.
BTW the politics of the shooters are irrelevant. Whatever the motive, they are severely mentally ill, and should have been identified, monitored and never allowed near a gun. One thing would be to make mental health eval part of a routine physical. The CDC has deemed these shootings a public health crisis, but Congress won't fund research. Both parties are guilty.
"After the Newtown massacre of schoolchildren in 2012, President Obama issued an executive order instructing the CDC to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it.” But the agency has refused unless it receives a specific appropriation to cover the research. Congress played its obligatory role in acting as the NRA’s cat’s-paw by repeatedly rejecting bills to provide $10 million for the work." (LA TIMES)
I have this crazy idea. Fight fire with fire. Since the NRA seems to own Congress by lavishing money to their campaigns, why not do the same. Start a GoFundMe fund to raise money. Lots of it. Anyone who hates our gun culture can contribute. Raise millions. Then hand it out to Congressmen like the NRA does. Whatever the NRA is giving, double it. Outspend the NRA. I think there are enough people in the country who would contribute to the fund to make the NRA moot. If someone like Mark Cuban were to start it, people would jump in and get a real fight going. Like I said, fight fire with fire.
Great discussion, and I would only add to Tony Farrels piece about some of the countries with much more restrictive gun laws than the US. Tony, you forgot to add Canada to Japan, UK and Australia, which have virtually eliminated mass shootings such as Las Vegas or the Sandy Hook tragedy. Will we ever totally eliminate this kind of thing ? Probably not, but lets not let the pursuit of perfection be the enemy of "good enough" and anything we can do now is better than nothing.
One of the very few times I find myself disagreeing with Peter.
"A few people will get killed by buzzed drivers, perhaps as many in a year as will be killed by mass shooters. Both are tragic. There is equivalence. Guns and marijuana are dangerous, but they are both risks that Americans have no practical choice but to accept. "
NO....we regulate buzzed drivers.
Yes. After the fact of an incident. Just like with shooters. We don’t require prior authorization to grow and smoke and get buzzed. If there is an accident they investigate and prosecute. Just like with guns.
"With liberty and justice for all." Here's one of the major threads of the problem I haven't seen discussed. With mass shootings there is no justice. This kind of crime is usually framed as an eye-for-an-eye equivalency -- either deprive the shooter of liberty or life but it's understood these were taken from him because of his actions. The shooter may kill himself or is so broken he spends a lifetime behind bars being treated without every having been convicted and sentenced, perhaps without ever coming to a rational understanding of the act, the consequences. So those outcomes deprive us of justice. And mass murder is not very easily scalable. Suppose as with Timothy McVay, who killed 168 people by blowing up the Murrah Building with a truck bomb, a mass shooter were caught, tried and executed. The consequences of the verdict, for the shooter, seems unequal still to his taking lives while leaving such pain. Suppose we amplify the scale to ethnic cleansing and genocidal episodes. No war crimes tribunal is going to be able to do more than provide show trials and life in the slammer if not actual execution to the few they can bring to court. Whether in the end we regulate gun ownership, gun use, kinds of guns available, even as we are awash in them, I don't know of a way to resolve what for me is at the heart of the outrage, which is that the loss is too great to bear without exacting that eye, bringing justice to bear. I would prefer to see gun ownership require a license with insurance for malpractice of at least $1M and that would be the end of it.
It's me again one last time. So just to sum it up, one side has liberty (to bear arms), the other side has _no_ justice. My inclination is to identify the policies that will lead to addressing the justice part of this equation if you will although it's hardly a mathematical construct to lose a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a girlfriend to a random act of violence, and the thought that a loved one might have joined a crowd of deceased in a public setting outside any powers of intervention available to the loved ones robs us of the power to defend their mortality. So what do the readers of this blog say to refocusing the moral outrage we feel at these acts into
looking into a much more thorough pursuit of justice for victims of these outrages?
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