Faux conservative David Frum proved his usefulness to the liberal media yet again this afternoon with his calls for more gun control in the wake of the deadly Washington Navy Yard shooting this morning.
The former George W. Bush speechwriter -- he coined the "axis of evil" -- couldn't wait to post his item headlined "Let's Not Wait to Talk About Gun Control." It was published to the Daily Beast's site at 3:10 p.m. Eastern and is item #2 in the lightbox as of time of this blog's publication (see screen capture below).
As David Hemenway notes in his study Private Guns, Public Health, Americans have experienced similar debates in the recent past. “Cars don’t kill people; bad drivers kill people,” could have been the slogan of the auto industry when it resisted safety regulation in the 1960s. The garment industry could have argued: “Flammable pajamas don’t kill children; careless smokers kill children.” And so on. Every accident has many causes, of course, and public safety progresses by addressing each one. To reduce car fatalities, we both installed seat belts and cracked down on drunk driving. Child deaths by fire have been reduced both because pajamas are safer and because adults smoke less.
Likewise, better mental-health provision would contribute to the reduction of gun massacres. But America’s uniquely grisly record of gun death cannot be addressed without addressing guns.
