There are no quick fi xes for racism, gun violence

Half a loaf isn’t always better than none. After last week’s massacre in Las Vegas, deeply committed Second Amendment Republicans, as well as the National Rifle Association, began to voice tepid support for the idea of banning the so-called “bump stock,” the ingenious device that shooter Stephen Paddock used to make his semiautomatic weapons function more or less as automatics.

With a bump stock, Paddock was able to unleash an appalling barrage of bullets with a single pull of the trigger.

Banning bump stocks is probably a good idea; without them, a few more lives might have been spared in Las Vegas.

But it’s a less-than-half measure that will do very little to resolve the problem of gun violence in our country. And it gives Republicans and the NRA cover for disingenuous claims that they are open to the notion of sensible gun control.

We have a tendency to do this in our nation — to embrace solutions that are intended to accommodate or placate the disaffected; we often temporize rather than make serious, good-faith attempts to resolve important issues.

This was the feeling I had when the Dallas Cowboys recently strode as a team to mid-field, clasped arms and knelt before the playing of the national anthem, during which the team later stood on the sidelines, as usual.

President Trump had put the NFL, the owners and the players in an awkward position by demanding that the owners fire any player who declines to stand for the national anthem. The Cowboys were, evidently, attempting to placate Trump, the fans and the players with an accommodative, middle-ground gesture.

But it does no more to address those issues than banning bump stocks will solve the curse of gun violence in our country.

In fact, half-hearted, feel-good responses like these encourage us to draw a complacent veil over bigger, more important concerns.

For example, the original anthem protester, Colin Kaepernick, has apparently been blacklisted by the owners, and other protesters could be fired. Trump, some owners and the NFL are demanding that players behave in a particular way — that is, stand up whenever the anthem is played — or they lose their jobs.

There’s a big difference between punishing someone for what he says or does and punishing him because his sense of allegiance to the flag doesn’t match ours. The essence of free speech is that the speaker doesn’t have to have a good reason for declining to perform the haphazard rote ritual that we go through before each football game.

The athletes’ message is that racism is not dead in our country, and in fact it shows signs of resurgence. If they choose to point this out in a public forum in a way that makes us uncomfortable, well, that’s our problem, not theirs.

So I hope protesters won’t be taken in by accommodative, feel-good solutions, and I suspect that they won’t be. Nor should citizens concerned about gun violence be placated by lukewarm measures focused on bump stocks, any more than we should imagine that the problem of climate change will be resolved by recycling.