Advocates of gun control missing the point.
DOZENS DIED IN SUTHERLAND SPRINGS BECAUSE OF EVIL
Once again attention is fixed on a mass public shooting in America. Once again all the usual things are being said and not said. And once again they miss the point, and sometimes the facts as well.
Starting with the New York Times wondering why the United States has so many mass public shootings compared to other countries. Which is an odd question because it doesn’t. As John Lott has noted, many European countries have more killed and wounded per capita in such shootings than the U. S. As do many Third World countries where these things don’t get reported.
Then we get calls f or stricter gun control. Which is also odd because those European countries, including France, have strict gun control. So if it doesn’t help there, why would it help in the United States? Arguably many Third World countries lack effective enforcement of these or other laws. But not France or Germany.
I was especially struck by how the Times initially omitted and later downplayed two salient points about the shooter while predictably calling his weapon an “assault” rifle, which its writers must know conjures up mistaken images of automatic fire capability. First, he was already legally banned from owning firearms due to a conviction for domestic abuse, including cracking his toddler stepson’s skull.
Second, he hated religion. The shooting stemmed partly from yet another family dispute occasioned by the murderer’s vindictive loathsomeness; his in- laws attended this church. But he was notorious for belligerent online atheism.
So one dramatic, accurate headline would have been, “Militant atheist massacres Christians.” But it’s not the story the Times was looking for and thus not the story it saw. As Jonathan Robinson says in The Mass and Modernity: “Ideas matter; but the ideas that matter most are taken for granted.”
Many liberals take for granted that guns dramati cally i ncrease domestic violence, and people who uphold the right of effect- ive self- defence, a. k. a. “gun nuts,” are redneck losers prone to hate and instability. Hence Barack Obama’s scornful remarks at a tony 2008 San Francisco fundraiser that “bitter” people “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them … as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Of course we all have “confirmation bias,” a pa- tronizing sociological way of saying that, over time, we develop theories about how the world works that we believe deal satisfactorily with the bulk of the evidence, and tend to view new developments f rom that perspective. As Goethe said, “Every fact is already a theory.” But to say so is not, and must not be, to lapse into relativism of the touchyfeely amorphous or belliger- ent post-truth variety.
We are obliged to compare our theories to a range of evidence, and at the least to take note when the fit is uncomfortable. If it remains uncomfortable for long, or gets more uncomfortable, honesty and honour require us to re- evaluate our views. It’s not fun, but neither is the alternative of becoming a rigid moron.
The New York Times is itself frustrated; its editorial board sighed wearily, “If now is too soon to debate gun control, how long must Americans wait?” But what have they to add to the debate?
For instance, what is the point of forbidding people like this maniac from owning guns when he was already forbidden from owning guns because of a violent felony court- martial conviction that led to his Bad Conduct Discharge from the Air Force? And how much confidence can a rational person have in government gun control measures when the Air Force inexplicably failed to enter his conviction into a federal database that might have prevented him from buying his lethal weapons? Even so, he was turned down for a concealed carry permit in Texas, making the usual calls for background checks especially fatuous.
It is also noteworthy that the killer, who I refuse to name, left a long trail of red flags including previous gun offences, repeated domestic violence, an animal cruelty conviction and text-message threats against the motheri n- l aw who attended the church where he carried out his massacre, though she was not there at the time. And that he was fi nally stopped, far too late, because an armed citizen confronted and shot him, and, aided by a courageous bystander, pursued him until the police could arrive and find him dead.
Gun control might have disarmed that hero. But not the killer who, it soon emerged, had once broken out of a mental hospital, which also should have set off alarm bells.
What happened here is not that guns killed people. A bad man with a history of violence was allowed to roam free, warning signs were ignored and government bungled. But fundamentally, dozens of people died in Sutherland Springs because of evil, not because inanimate objects turn normal people into psycho killers.
WARNING SIGNS WERE IGNORED AND GOVERNMENT BUNGLED.