Jim Morrison advised, “when the music’s over, turn out the light.” This would seem to be simple good sense, with an encore of Elsa telling us to “let it go,” but in American politics, admitting that something has come to an end, but for great costs in money and lives, is wisdom we are rarely able to achieve. We repented of the error of Prohibition, only to transfer the wasted effort into controlling marijuana and other interesting substances. We spent decades killing ourselves and the peoples of small nations in a pointed insistence that we were not at war with the Soviets, and all we got for it was a T-shirt that says, “If I’m not with Osama, I’m with Xi.” And we have cut taxes since Reagan as an act of faith that if only the rich can accumulate enough wealth, they will allow some of it to be propelled through the economy.
But running in circles is so much fun, if not all that productive. Another political path whose perimeter is a doubled irrationality multiplied by a short walk has been our fascination with gun control, a notion arising out of the violence of urban gangs—Irish and Italian, primarily, in those days—rum runners, and the economic desperation of the working class. This belief, expressing itself in the Sullivan Act of 1911 in New York and then the National Firearms Act of 1934, to be followed by many a law, state and federal, in the decades since, is a statement that if only we place enough restrictions on legal access to firearms, we could control violent crime. And yet, the homicide rate, for example, rose and fell over the course of the twentieth century with no clear evidence to show that any new gun law changed anything.
But faith is the evidence of things not seen, the writer of Hebrews tells us, and gun control advocates will keep the faith.
Or perhaps not, at least in the case of Brynn Tannehill, writing in The New Republic. Her article, “The Grim Truth: The War on Guns Is Lost,” is a case of the contents being labeled on the tin. She acknowledges that with states in chronic gerrymandering, with what seems to be a permanently half-divided Congress, and with the Supreme Court having made it clear in the Bruen decision—which struck down a key aspect of the Sullivan Act—that if gun control advocates cannot show a parallel legal restriction from the time that the Bill of Rights entered the Constitution, any new law is likely unconstitutional, gun control is effectively comatose for the next twenty to thirty years.
She does not bring herself to say that the movement is finished and holds out that bit of hope that in a generation, the law will change, but for now, she concludes, we are condemned to increasing internal violence.
I specify the domestic nature of her prediction since she is a former naval aviator and current columnist and defense analyst, which is an interesting road to travel to the tourneys of gun politics. She is concerned about the subject of rights generally, given the assaults on trans people and women in recent years, and about the rise of fascism in America. If she has surveyed the field and come to the conclusion that at least gun rights are unassailable, I hesitate to challenge her position.
That being said, I do have to suggest that she should not settle for the dismal answer of a war of all against all until such youthful survivors of the carnage can take over—about the time that fusion reactors become commercially viable.
From a brief view of her positions, I imagine Tannehill to be a fairly typical Democrat. If that is accurate, she ought to consider the effect that control has on the party. Ever since 1994, there has been the view that the Assault Weapons Ban and other restrictions cost Democrats control of Congress, for example. While that is a disputed explanation, some variant of it hangs around in each election, with the party’s big names continually worried that support for gun control will cost them votes. In my own observation, time and time again, when I propose some leftist solution—more on that in a moment—I am told that the Democrats are communists who want to take our guns away so they can impose sharia and Das Kapital on us, whatever that combination might be.
And yet, if we look back over the history of rates of violence, both in the United States and in actually developed nations, what the data do in fact show is that those leftist solutions that I have discussed in the past—policy choices such as universal healthcare, higher education, and living wages, along with a real social safety net and an admission that we certainly have lost the war on drugs and should stop fighting and start healing its victims—are what reduce violence.
Here, then, is what I can offer to Tannehill and those like her who can bring themselves to see that pushing new restrictions on firearms is a failed project: Drop gun control permanently and gather the left together to fight for things that we can achieve. Support for Medicare for All, one example of the agenda I have in mind, is consistently high, with even forty-six percent of Republicans surveyed favoring that as a solution to our healthcare crisis. Sixty-two percent of Americans would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, though Republicans strongly oppose that, but how many workers would stay with the party of their bosses if they knew about the divergence in the pay of executives versus ordinary employees over the last thirty years? And, of course, there are the seventy-one percent of Americans who support abortion rights.
And on and on. Now imagine that we say to the people that we will respect all rights—in the classic formula, a gay couple’s ability to protect their marriage and their pot farm with AR-15s—and will make life better for each of us. Could we make a deal to protect access to mifepristone and thirty-round magazines? Could we agree that hormone therapies and semiautomatic rifles are both things that a person ought to be able to choose? Would it be possible to allow Breonna Taylor to sleep peacefully in her home and instead of smashing in her door and engaging in a gunfight when no drugs were present, to treat addiction as a medical, not a criminal problem? And what if in lieu of attacking the Second Amendment, we were to make the Equal Rights Amendment number Twenty-eight?
Rather than ending in despair that the war on guns is lost, how about we see this as an opportunity to get genuine progress done. Were we to do that, were we to create a structurally peaceful society, the possession of guns would no longer be a menace to some and a refuge for others, and the exercise of gun rights would stand with all other rights as simply a part of the just society we have built.
it is not a perfect match, but the suicide rate closely tracks rises and falls of the unemployment rate, too. in other words, violence to self somewhat tracks the economic security.