Gun-control idealism needs practicality

Do you think a person planning a mass murder would be unable or unwilling to acquire a “bump stock” if they were banned? And would you want to face them with only your fists, or a rock?

If so, join the children’s crusade. You will be a Good Person in, as Mark Twain once said, the worst sense of that word. Otherwise we need to talk.

After a tragedy like the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gun massacre, I try to let some time pass before making polemical points, unlike some. But now I have three news stories for you, all from Monday.

First, CFRA reports Ottawa’s 24th shooting of 2018. So which police unit is investigating this attempted murder? “Guns and gangs.” Criminals don’t obey gun laws either.

Second, from the National Post, people marched in over a dozen Canadian cities “to call for stricter gun- control laws in both Canada and the United States, adding their voices to a global movement calling for change.” It’s a bit sanctimonious to chant to change other people’s laws, or exploit foreign tragedy to leverage unrelated domestic policy. But what really struck me was this claim, at a big Washington, D.C., rally, by a Stoneman Douglas student: “They say the young are insignificant. Well, Joan of Arc fought back English forces when she was 17 years old. Mozart was eight when he wrote his first symphony.”

OK, I’ ll bite. Not “which of you thinks they are Mozart?” But “who says the young are insignificant?” Haven’t we been hearing about, and from, the voice of youth nonstop since the 1960s? Sometimes young people have valid points to make. But like The New York Times’ breathless 1968-out-there coverage, this claim is hackneyed and misleading.

The Post also quoted Martin Luther King Jr.’s nineyear- old granddaughter: “I have a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun- free world.” Really. No armed police or soldiers? Is that something any adult wants, or believes possible? Should the first bad guy to make a gun be the only person with one? Even politicians who want civilians disarmed insist on armed guards for themselves.

Now to story three, also from the Post: “Criminals are using the darker corners of the internet, hard-to-track digital currency and creative shipping techniques to sell illicit guns to Canadians, the RCMP warns.” Even worse, “The firearms are sold alongside opioids, heroin, cocaine, malware, stolen data, fraud tools, ransomware, pilfered credit cards and even depleted uranium, radioactive Polonium-210 and deadly poisons like ricin.” This criminals-committing-crimes story should remind even Justin Trudeau of John Lott’s frequent observation that American gun violence is heavily concentrated in a few small areas where the same thugs who sell drugs also sell, carry and frequently use guns. Further annoying the law- abiding won’t help.

As for the superficially appealing idea that guns cause crime, some parts of the U.S. have very high gun ownership and very little gun crime; others have had effective handgun bans and sky-high gun murder rates ( notably Chicago and D. C.). Internationally, too, gun ownership doesn’t correlate with murder or even gun murder rates. Canadians are heavily armed by world standards, just behind the French. Yet, just as we and Britons did before gun control, we have low murder and gun murder rates today.

“Evidence-based decisionmaking” looks before it leaps, at Israel and Switzerland ( many guns, few gun murders), Honduras ( nearly 20 times America’s gun murder rate with about one- twentieth its gun ownership rate) or Russia ( low gun possession, high murder rate). The U. S. is not even an outlier in mass public shootings per capita. They just get more publicity.

There is an obvious and legitimate appeal to kids not wanting to be shot in school, especially those whose school just experienced a mass murder. It will not do to sneer at them or their desire for a better world. But adults do still have some role to play in channelling the idealism of the young into practical channels rather than cheering them on as though they’d just invented virtue.

Is there any reason to suppose anything the marchers want can be done, or would help? Including repealing the Second Amendment? As for changing America’s “gun culture,” normal people aren’t causing the problem, so it wouldn’t help if you did, which you probably can’t.

If total disarmament is your goal, it partly excuses proposing ineffective interim moves, as a start down the slippery slope. But be honest, like Allan Rock, that your ideal is that only the government has guns.

Well, it and criminals, terrorists and lunatics. As for the law- abiding, one American school district (Pennsylvania’s Blue Mountain) has put buckets of rocks in classrooms.

Imagine adults applauding these idealistic young marchers, then giving them a stone and saying good luck against a gun.