Minimum age limits to own certain firearms might work

Four years ago, essayist Helen Andrews wrote a critique for the religious journal First Things of what she described as “bloodless moralism” — meaning the decay of public moral arguments into a kind of a vulgar empiricism, a mode of debate so cringingly utilitarian that it can’t advance the most basic ethical claim (“Do not steal”) without a regression analysis to back it up (“... because bicycle thieves were 4 percent less likely to obtain gainful employment within two years of swiping their neighbor’s Schwinn”).

I’ve tried to keep her critique in mind ever since. In last week’s column, for instance, which argued that the #MeToo movement should turn its ire against pornography, I decided not to bore my readers with research papers and simply appealed to moral intuition and recent cultural experience, which make as strong a case as any study for the viciousness of porn.

But now that the massacre in Florida has made mass murder the week’s pressing subject, Andrews’ essay also offers a useful way of thinking about some of the problems with the gun control debate — on both sides, but particularly among conservatives like myself, who often pick apart specific weaknesses in liberal gun control proposals, relying on studies and experiments that show the limits of prohibition, taking a clinical and somewhat bloodless approach to an issue that rouses liberal zeal.

There is value in clinical critiques. But technical issues and practical concerns are not the heart of the gun debate. The reason that mass shootings aren’t leading to legislative action is that we have a chasm between two sweeping moral visions, one pro-gun and one antigun, that is now too wide to be easily bridged by incrementalism.

The pro-gun moral vision links arms and the citizen, treating self-defense as an essential civic good.

A fetishization of guns and violence is also a real American cultural phenomenon, perhaps especially among alienated, isolated young men. And for them and for others (including the NRA these days), the guns-and-citizenship ideal can curdle into a crude myself-alone libertarianism for an age of polarization and mistrust.

Which leaves me wondering if there’s a way to adapt a high-minded vision of guns and citizenship to our era of extended adolescence and young-male anomie.

We could consider limits that are imposed on youth and removed with age. After all, the fullness of adult citizenship is not bestowed at once: Driving precedes voting precedes drinking, and the right to stand for certain offices is granted only in your 30s.

Perhaps the self-arming of citizens could be similarly staggered. Let 18-year-olds own hunting rifles. Make revolvers available at 21. Semi-automatic pistols, at 25. And semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 could be sold to 30-year-olds but no one younger.

This proposal is more specifically targeted to the plague of school shootings, whose perpetrators are almost always young men.

And it offers a kind of moral bridge between the civic vision of Second Amendment advocates and the insights of their critics — by treating bearing arms as a right but also a responsibility, the full exercise of which might come only with maturity and age.