On Wednesday, the President used whatever we ought to call what he’s got about as well as he could. The words he used in introducing his plan for some sanity on guns were wise and non-inflammatory on an inflamed subject. They were also forthright and free in ways that suggests that his admirable dream that reason might yet prevail even among the manifestly unreasonable has been replaced by at least a little realism about the need to act first and hope that others listen later. As much as Obama can aggravate the Paul Krugmans of the world with his desire to ascribe to his opponents a good will that they do not always seem to posses—and as much as he can, with his constant, unrelenting search for common ground with those who seem to see in common ground only an unending battlefield, seem willfully naïve—still, his desire to bend over backwards, to be fair and “inclusive,” remains admirable, and democratic-minded. Even when he accepted, as a constitutional truth, an individual right to own guns that, historically, has only very recently been discovered, he was doing the right thing: allowing the other side the benefit of every doubt they have coming to them.
And so those of us—(like that radical, Michael Bloomberg) who are further along on this than the President is, and wish to see America make minimal gestures toward doing about guns what every other civilized country has already done with no diminishment to their liberty—may finally feel some hope. The emergence of Bloomberg as the leader on this issue is in itself stirring: where laissez-faire billionaires with solid records on civic safety go, how many moderates can stay behind?
Two clarifying points, at the risk of repetition: one, that we know, as certainly as one can know anything in the social sphere, that gun control works to reduce and eventually eliminate gun violence. Common sense tells us that this is so; we need only look at the world outside America and see how other countries, at least as “rugged” as our own, with histories just as frontier-filled, have dealt with gun violence by legislating to control guns—and how little gun violence they have as a result. (The right-wing Australian politician John Howard contributed a piece to the Times this morning outlining just this truth.) We have thousands of gun deaths—eighty-four teens and children are among the nine hundred slaughtered by guns in the blink of an eye since the Newtown massacre—while the other countries that most closely resemble our own, from Australia to Canada to Britain, have something close to none. All that separates us from other lands is our guns and the deaths they cause.
And, despite the attempts of the death lobby to silence them, the American social sciences speak just as clearly to the issue. As the social scientist Matthew Miller was quoted as saying in Slate, “Our firearm homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher than in these other countries. Our rates of homicides with non-gun mechanisms—knives, bats, whatever—is pretty much right where they are in other high income countries.” And the work of Harvard’s David Hemenway is the one to cite, if only for its lapidary conclusions: “Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide.” “Across states, more guns = more homicide.” These are as robust as any correlations in all of the social sciences. All the absurd attempts to use statistics to lie about this truth can’t change that fact. (My mordantly favorite bit of misdirection is the claim that since Scotland, post-Dunblane, essentially banned private ownership of guns, gun homicide has increased. Why, it’s almost doubled in the past two years alone! What does this mean? Oh, yes: guns were involved in five killings in all of Scotland in a span from 2011 to 2012, compared with three in the previous year.)
Anyone who says that there is anything unsettled or unknown or unclear about the relation between gun control and gun violence is either lying or ignorant, or both. Many things in our social life are complicated and multivalent; this one is not. Guns do not protect people, or families. Any anecdote that can be mined to claim that they do—and many of those stories evaporate on probing—is overwhelmed hundreds of times over by the number of well-documented accidents, suicides, and domestic disputes turned into murderous occasions produced by the presence of a gun at homes. A gun turns a drunken dispute into a bloody death. As Arthur Kellermann writes in the New England Journal of Medicine
Given the number of victims allegedly being saved with guns, it would seem natural to conclude that owning a gun substantially reduces your chances of being murdered. Yet a careful, case-control study of homicide in the home found that a gun in the home was associated with an increased rather than a reduced risk of homicide.
Then there is the claim that we need guns to fight an encroaching, tyrannical government. There has not once been a tyrannical government demanding armed opposition since we got rid of the British. There was, however, a rather famous occasion when armed radicals used their guns to attempt to destroy the democratically elected government in order to preserve their right to treat their fellow humans as property. The right to keep weapons in order to commit violent sedition has not, since 1865, really been widely regarded as a central American liberty.
The acts that the President outlined may have been small, and, of course, the assault-weapons ban, leaky and hobbled and inadequate even as the last one was, may not even be renewed. But in certain sense it doesn’t matter: we know now that even the smallest barriers can have big results. Every act we attempt that lames and hobbles the easy availability of guns helps. The aim, after all, is not perfection; it is simply to make it very hard, rather than very easy, for crazy people bent on homicide to get their hands on weapons that make mass killing trivial for them. Making violence hard makes it rare.
If one needs more hope, one can find it in the history of the parallel fight against drunk driving. When that began, using alcohol and then driving was regarded as a trivial or a forgivable offense. Thanks to the efforts of MADD and the other groups, drunk driving became socially verboten, and then highly regulated, with some states now having strong “ignition interlock” laws that keep drunks from even turning the key. Drunk driving has diminished, we’re told, by as much as ten per cent per year in some recent years. Along with the necessary, and liberty-limiting, changes in seat-belt enforcement and the like, car culture altered. The result? The number of roadway fatalities in 2011 was the lowest since 1949. If we can do with maniacs and guns what we have already done with drunks and cars, we’d be doing fine. These are hard fights, but they can be won.
In the end, the President didn’t speak from the bully pulpit. He didn’t even speak from an elevated post. He just spoke from the mind, and from the heart, and he raised spirits still haunted by the image of twenty small, terrified children, heaped up in a pile of death, whose last breaths were spent in a state of terror because a madman got his hands on a military weapon that no one in a free country should ever be allowed to hold. Good and great causes don’t advance without resistance. First the thing is impossible, then improbable, then unsatisfactorily achieved, then quietly improved, until one day it is actual and uncontroversial. So it was with putting military weapons into the hands of openly homosexual soldiers, and so it shall be with taking military weapons out of the hands of crazy people. It starts off impossible and it ends up done. The arc of the universe may be long, but the advance of common sense actually can take place very quickly. And if it bends toward justice, or simple sanity, it is because people bend it. What we are seeing may be the first signs of a nation deciding, at last, to bend back.
Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Adam Gopnik
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