The Gun Problem that Isn’t
Again the calls for action peal out following yet another tragedy: Do something! Stop our kids from dying! It’s for the kids!
If only the “gun problem” was so expediently solved. But the “gun problem” isn’t a gun problem at all, any more than the “opioid crisis” is about drugs, or this year’s flu season is a “fever problem.”
I offer to you a simple assertion: all of societal problems today or tomorrow are nothing more than individual problems writ large. And at their core, each of these problems has one common root: we have lost the internal restraints of individual character, and are looking to the wholly inadequate substitute of external restraints in the law.
Perhaps the first activist movement in the US for a “social problem” was the temperance movement. In the later 1800s, the massive social problem of alcoholism was causing especially women and children to suffer the consequences when men decided to self-medicate or otherwise indulge alcohol to excess. All manner of social problems emerged from this rampant alcohol abuse; women were assaulted by drunk husbands, children were beaten and often neglected. Kids went hungry because Dad wouldn’t hold a job and Mom often wasn’t allowed to work. Kids ended up in orphanages, wards of the (usually religious) private social safety net that was in place before the public social safety net displaced it.
After decades of political activism that included strange political bedfellows (giving rise to the expression “bootleggers and Baptists” as shorthand for unlikely common-interest partnerships), the activists succeeded in gaining women the right to vote, and in banning alcohol. Demon Rum! If only alcohol could be made illegal, all manner of social problems that stemmed from alcohol abuse could be addressed.
Instead of ending social problems, Prohibition gave us organized crime, speakeasies, and a new development in American lawlessness. Previously, in rough-and-tumble frontier towns like Dodge City and Abilene, the lawlessness was due to the absence of effective institutions to promulgate law. Lawlessness there was the absence of law. Prohibition gave us not the absence of law, but the absence of respect for the law; the law was present but popularly flouted. The rule of law — a foundational element of Western progress — was undermined and degraded.
Prohibition is widely acknowledged to have been a disastrous social policy. Indeed, it is the only Constitutional Amendment that has been repealed. And it took less than 15 years to so do, a truly impressive speed achieved by the otherwise glacial American political system.
The question of course is why was Prohibition a disastrous policy? The short answers are surprisingly simple: it criminalized a behavior many people had no problem with. And more significantly, it failed to address the actual cause of alcoholism. Access to alcohol wasn’t the reason people abused it.
The gun control movement in America today is the New Temperance. It wants to ban guns as countermeasure to the “gun problem.” It believes that it alone really, truly cares about the victims of “gun crimes” and that nobody else cares about children or savings lives. Just as the opponents of Temperance were dismissed as moral inferiors by the devout and pious activists, today’s Gun Control lobby asserts an unquestioned — and unquestionable — moral superiority.
But that exquisite sensitivity to violence involving guns will do nothing to reduce violence. The fact that gun control is not crime control has never been seen as relevant to the issue. And the very real likelihood that any serious gun ban efforts are likely to produce terrible lawlessness if not outright civil war? If given any thought at all, it is only enough to dismiss it. It’s for the kids! Why do you hate kids so much that you won’t ban guns?
If it only saves one life, we are told, it would totally be worth it. Putting aside the childish view of humanity and of life (it would save more than one life to ban all manner of things: Jolly Rancher candies, ladders, or crossing the street), consider the internal inconsistency of the New Temperance gun controllers. They tell us that if it would save just one life, gun control is worth it. But they then tell us that they don’t want to ban all guns, they just want to ban the AR-15, an evil “assault rifle.” Nobody needs a “military style weapon” like an AR15.
But why would you not ban all guns? If it’s worth it to save just one life, what logic says it’s OK if a guy uses a bolt action rifle to kill people? Charles Whitman, the infamous University of Texas sniper, used a Remington model 700 bolt-action rifle to kill 14 people and injure 31 others. Is this acceptable because he didn’t use an “assault rifle”?
These are the deeper questions that the New Temperance types can’t or won’t consider, and it is partly why so many Americans who also love children refuse to accept the childish reasoning they employ.
Broken people from broken homes, more than anything else, explains America’s violence problem. Banning guns cannot solve it. Even highly regulating guns cannot solve the problem, as the evidence overwhelmingly shows. This will not change, regardless how sincerely the New Temperance movement wants us to think it might.
It’s is time for a serious conversation about American social problems. It’s long past time for a conversation about illegitimacy and a national narcissism that is conceiving kids people won’t parent well and breaking home after home. It’s time we stopped looking to Washington or the statehouse to solve problems that are caused by that person in our bathroom mirror.
Until and unless we understand the phenomenon of school shootings as representative of the larger moral decay of American culture, no serious discussion can take place, nor can any real solutions be identified.
