Fixated on false choices

The American aversion to gun restriction stems from fear, circular reasoning, politics, economics and a professed intolerance for inevitable imperfection.

For decades Americans have been running scared from other skin colors or integrated schools or poorly performing schools or urban decay or inner-city violence or declining property values or the mentally ill or the drug trade.

They've fled behind gates into homes with reinforced doors and bars on windows, all wired to set off an alarm upon intrusion.

Americans arm themselves in these homes, and on their persons, because, in a society they love but fear, they know there are bad people out there with guns.

When some liberal politician suggests that our nation leads the world in firearm killing because we dare not regulate or restrict guns in any of the ways common in other countries, Americans deplore the folly of unilateral disarmament against the bad guys.

Even so, Americans seem to accept generally and logically that the Second Amendment can't possibly mean that one may keep and deploy any conceivable weapon, maybe a nuclear bomb. So they're not really opposed to the concept of restricting personal weaponry.

They're arguing only about where to draw the line.


What some Americans have long said is that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

You could say the same circular thing about any law: When speeding is made a traffic infraction, only speeders will speed. But that's no reason not to require driver's licenses or give tickets.

No one is talking about outlawing guns altogether. Some are talking about banning certain kinds of automatic weapons as well as screening and restricting gun-buyers more vigorously.

Hillary Clinton proposed Monday the transcendentally reasonable notions that gun-show sales shouldn't be exempted from regulation and that a shooter such as the one in Charleston shouldn't have been able to get a gun while his background check was pending.

That a kid flunked out of military training after a month and was in the process of legally acquiring a sophisticated arsenal--that ought to be a red flag worthy of delay, investigation and perhaps denial of gun rights, though, admittedly, it's challenging to set a fair standard.

But that's no reason not to try.

Some Americans will say, as a Republican congressman declared on a Sunday talk show, that the problem of gun use by the mentally ill is based on what is in one's mind, not hand.

But in the vast majority of cases, mental illness is a condition to be treated, not a mass murder waiting to happen. What we're really looking for are outcasts and loners and misfits and weirdos--young white males, it seems, though that might be profiling.

It's more pragmatic to restrict the types of guns that can be sold. But it's still worth applying our legal best minds to defining in a way both more broad and more specific what it is that is disqualifying in a background check.

It's a political challenge, and politics as currently practiced in our country is largely fear by another name.

Through friendly biennial reapportionment, Republican congressmen have installed themselves in safe and self-perpetuating conservative districts. They face only one threat to their permanent re-elections. It is that the National Rifle Association might get mad at them for lapsed allegiance to unrestricted firearms and support a challenger in a Republican primary.

Economics also can be fear by another name.

The NRA is a trade association of the gun industry. It fears the lost bonanza that might result from any restriction on firearm sales.

That goes for direct restrictions or those that are smartly indirect in the thoroughly logical modern way that some have suggested: Requiring smartphone-type and smartphone-caliber technological restrictions on gun activation, providing that your gun would fire only for you.

The NRA opposes smart-gun technology because ... well, it just does. I guess it's that somebody trying to activate a smart gun might get shot by a bad guy whose weapon was dumb but ever-ready.

Finally, there is the issue of inevitable imperfection.

Opponents of gun restriction argue that Chicago has strict gun ordinances and yet collects on a nightly basis a nation-leading tally of dead bodies from the shootings of the inner-city drug and gang culture.

We keep constructing false choices.

Chicago poses a pervasive sociological, economic and criminal problem. Oregon was about a calm little community college and one messed-up guy.

We could more easily deny guns to one messed-up guy, and save nine lives, than end a gangland war.

The human tragedy that many get killed in Chicago is no good reason not to try to keep nine people--or one person--from getting killed in Oregon, or anywhere.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 10/06/2015

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