Maybe it’s time to talk about guns
We now know them simply by their name.
Columbine. Aurora. Newtown. Fort Hood. Charleston. San Bernardino. Orlando. Now we can stick another pin in the map. Las Vegas. During an outdoor country music concert on the Las Vegas Strip, a lunatic holed up in his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel broke out a window and started raining bullets down on the crowd below.
Before he was done, Stephen Craig Paddock, a 64-year-old retired accountant from Mesquite, Nevada, had killed 59 people and wounded another 521.
It is the single deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
We are convulsed by the same horror we felt after each of these instances of mass carnage.
We recoil at that singular sound, that non-stop “pop-poppop” of bullets exiting an automatic weapon.
But maybe we should be convulsed by something else. Maybe we should be convulsed by the knowledge that these things keep happening, and we do nothing to stop them.
This isn’t about the Second Amendment. That battle is over. No one is going to take away anyone’s right to own a firearm.
It simply is not going to happen. And maybe it shouldn’t. That’s an argument for another time.
What is not is a question that will haunt us – at least until the next mass shooting.
What exactly is the purpose of anyone being in possession of the kind of firepower Paddock had stockpiled in that hotel room. After he was discovered dead in his room of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police found 17 guns, ranging from .223 to .308 caliber, some with scopes. At least one was believed to be an AK-47, with a stand.
Why are we still talking about whether anyone needs to possess either a semi-automatic or automatic weapon capable of delivering the kind of mayhem rained down on people who had gathered for a Jason Aldean concert to close out the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival?
So where does all of this leave us? Maybe it’s time to talk. In the wake of the devastating horror that played out in Las Vegas, Americans should stop and consider the world in which we live today, where violence and acrimony seem ever more prevalent and intense.
Maybe this time, this latest mass shooting, could be the galvanizing moment that transcends our polarized politics to provoke a deep, critical and thoughtful discourse on what ails our great nation.
The bizarre and horrific details of the massacre rightly inspire immediate revulsion at the destructive power more and more of us live in terror of facing at random. They also lead us to question more broadly how to achieve true security in a disillusioned technological age, when enemies at home and abroad know all too well how to hit us in the easiest, most damaging way.
The biggest horror is the hardest to answer. Throughout history we have been shown how hard it is to prevent the dedicated from achieving the bloodshed they seek. Reasonable laws that keep weapons of mass murder out of public hands have a powerful track record of sustained, but not uninterrupted, success. The U.S. has successfully imposed stringent restrictions, for instance, on fully automatic weapons, driving the number of crimes involving such firearms to impressive lows. But technology is making it easier to fabricate illegal guns or to modify guns for short-term use as tools of mass murder.
Another difficulty involves the great variance in gun culture across the country, not only a function of competing ideals and habits but of the practicalities of space and population density. As the Supreme Court acknowledged in the Heller decision, the right to bear arms does not mean that gun laws must be the same in a major metro area as they are in the countryside. The mobility and dedication of today’s killers — whether or not they are associated with or inspired by terrorist organizations — makes a mockery of the common-sense assumptions about public order that have historically shaped the laws of a free society.
Of course, perhaps the biggest impediment to reasonable progress is the entrenched political polarization that plagues us today.
Under pressure to fight every battle and exploit any advantage, activists for and against bearing arms are too quick to set aside pragmatism to score symbolic ideological victories.
While amassing private collections of firearms may be consistent with the spirit and the letter of the Second Amendment, it is hard to accept that anyone has a protected right to appear in the time and place of their choosing bearing more than 10 rifles.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that human nature and today’s technology will occasionally frustrate even the most stringent of laws.
Gun rights are protected by the Second Amendment, but there are no rights to own weapons of mass destruction.
There has to be a middle ground upon which we can all agree in the interest of ensuring the safety of our society.
Then again, if the slaughter of innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary School did not move us to demand action, it’s doubtful another mass shooting – even the worst ever recorded on U.S. soil – will have a different outcome.
What we cannot – and should not – do is surrender to the notion that such homicidal lunacy should in any way be considered “the new normal.”
There is nothing normal about it.
Maybe that should be our first admission.
So let’s talk.