The unspeakable elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas has once again raised the question of what we are going to do about our mass shooting problem. The United States does indeed seem to have a unique and pressing problem with mass shootings, and Tuesday's nightmarish tragedy—the horrific killing of nearly 20 young children inside their own elementary school—is as stark a reminder of that as any.
The killing brought with it a fresh wave of demands from progressive politicians, activists and commentators, all of them demanding that we do something about the shootings. Little was offered in the way of what, specifically, we should do about them—merely that something be done.
This is not, technically speaking, wrong: Something must indeed be done about this. But what? What are we to do?
The progressive response largely runs the gamut from "universal background checks" to full-blown gun confiscation and prohibition throughout the country. The former would obviously accomplish nothing; the latter, in a country with more guns than citizens, would likely result in another civil war in which the body count might number in the many tens or hundreds of thousands from armed conflict alone. Neither is a serious suggestion and both should be ignored.
Nor is gun prohibition philosophically tenable, even among progressives themselves. Recall that the American Left spent about five years insisting that Trump was literally a wannabe-dictator on the verge of seizing dictatorial control of the entire United States. Even when he refused to seize that power at a time when he could have effortlessly done so—at the outset of the pandemic—progressives have gone on believing that Trump represents a legitimate existential threat to every civil liberty imaginable.
You cannot reconcile that fervent belief in a burgeoning U.S. dictatorship with an equally fervent desire for gun prohibition. No sane person would insist on the reality of a looming autocracy while demanding the people be stripped of their arms. It is unserious nonsense and you can safely ignore the things those people say.
Nor is major gun control tenable from a broader political perspective. Not only does disarming Americans help no one but cartels and criminals that can easily source and use all sorts of weapons that are illegal under current gun laws, but the great modern governments of the world spent the last two years shutting down their economies, throwing people in prison for running their businesses, outlawing free speech, banning gatherings, sending people to literal camps, and paramilitarizing their police forces in order to keep everyone in line.
The implications for the future are stark and obvious; we are entering in a new era of relentless government surveillance, oversight and oppression. No law-abiding, civic-minded citizen should feel comfortable surrendering his weapons in such a time as this. You do not disarm at the precise moment the government has signaled its full intent to permanently subjugate you.
If gun control is either broadly useless and/or practically impossible (and it is), and if it would be foolish to surrender our weapons in the first place (and it would be), then we are back to square one: What to do about this problem?
There is obviously a workable solution. It must exist. This problem is not intractable because no problem is. The difficult aspect is that most mass shootings are different in critical and mutually exclusive ways. Some are committed by mentally ill loners, others by disaffected psychopaths looking for a bit of infamy, others by religious zealots, and others by people whose motives remain unclear. You cannot, for the most part, nail down a common pathological thread among these killings outside the general spiritual brokenness that affects us all.
Nor can you nail down a common denominator of gun acquisition. Some purchased their guns legally, some illegally, and some obtained them by killing others to get them. Trying to close off the routes of gun acquisition to dangerous, determined individuals is not a self-evident proposal.
What, then, to do?
We know this much: The solutions being bandied about in our discourse right now seem useless and idiotic, the sorts of things people say when they have no ideas and are not interested in thinking of any.
To find solutions, we must discard the worthless proposals before us and do the genuinely hard work of thinking of something that works.
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