Aiming at the Wrong Target

In the public discussion on the tragedy at Newtown, Ct. I’ve heard a phrase delivered several times, and it makes me grimace.  It’s not new, used after similar, albeit less horrific, heartbreaking events.  It calls for action so this “will never happen again”. This goal or target not only holds within it instant and prolong failure, it causes the corrective action, whatever that might be, to point us in the wrong direction.  It does more harm than good. I use a target or shooting metaphor here because this particular problem is a paradoxical truth about guns in America: that the collective ownership of these weapons is not bad, but how we as a society feel about them is.

Once again the argument that guns don’t kill, people kill is trotted out.  On a national evening radio talk show I even heard, to my astonished ears, the featured guest suggest the massacre was part of an ongoing left-wing conspiracy (without challenge from the radio host).  We will also hear the proposed solution that if most everybody was “packing” such nut cases as (the now temporarily infamous) Adam Lanza could not have carried out his plans, or at least not with the same carnage. The fact that there are countries that have higher per capita gun ownership than the US yet effectively no such large scale incidents (such as Canada or Switzerland) are also given to bolster the only people kill argument.  There are parts to many such arguments which are valid, but it is also a fact that it is bullets, not ill will, which are passing through the bodies of the victims.

What is different about today regarding mass gun killings than in prior generations?  Conservative columnist David Brooks argues in the New York Times that at least since the beginning of the 1900s such gun killing sprees have appeared with regularity worldwide, if not in some cyclical fashion. He essentially says that we might be experiencing an uptick in such events now, but such variations have precedent going back a century or more.  Given that the US population today is 4 times that of 1900 there is argument to be made for consistency, even if the raw numbers have accelerated. What Brooks doesn’t clearly address is the nature of the shootings, which with the death of 20 children under the age of 7 is so devastatingly demonstrated.  It also doesn’t address the bigger issues, which are 1) the countless smaller gun killings which make news, but quickly vanish from the public memory, and 2) that in recent decades the vast majority of such major massacres in the world, almost 2/3, occur in the United States.

A 101 years ago last March, 143 women were killed in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City.  This was a pivotal event, which is why it has retained its historical significance.  It tipped the scale on what had been an ongoing problem; workplace conditions.  There had been many incidents of injury and death in the workplace throughout the Nation over many decades but little accomplished as a society to deal with it. There was a high level of resigned acceptance. The “injury” from workplace regulations, such as restricted freedom of the employer or compromising free and competitive enterprise kept even common sensible actions from taking place.  The Triangle fire altered the landscape.  The changes, which included new regulations, didn’t eliminate workplace disasters small or large. It did start something new though; a change in attitude on a national scale regarding working conditions by employees and employers alike.  The impact was far reaching even if the actual number of people whose lives were saved or improved over the years cannot be known.

The target in trying to curb wholesale gun violence is our national attitude about it and our inability to address it in a demonstrable way.  This nation, federally and locally, needs to enact a series of gun regulations, not because we expect that the inhabitants of the lunatic fringe will no longer unleash their insanity from time to time on the innocent, with guns or other means.  We need to do it to generate a different national consensus about guns that will affect new generations and subsequently shrink the size of the lunatic fringe - at least as it relates to gun violence.  Unfortunately, not only will the full extent of such regulations not immediately be felt, but the positive impact (how many killings avoided) will never be known. However, that is no excuse for not beginning the process. Perhaps these 20 children, like the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, will help start it.

The wrong course is to aim at the tragedy itself by elevating national fear, fear which is grossly disproportionate to the actual danger - thank our new informational age for that. We cannot build walls high enough, alarms loud enough, guards numerous enough, or personal intrusion deep enough to stop all Adam Lanzas from carrying out their sadistic fantasies or frustrations.  Those efforts only create a different, more invasive insanity for many, many more people.  We can only attempt to produce less Adam Lanzas by making the use of guns less acceptable to subsequent generations. If Adam and his mother had grown up with different attitudes toward guns, how might things have been different? We start by restricting gun availability, which is simply a social statement of where we want to be.