Racial issues, not gun issues, understandably have been at the forefront of most media coverage of the Charleston massacre, but The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik suggests that in any such mass shooting, the firearm is the salient factor.
“Mental health, the enduring structures of racism—these are issues that we have to deal with, too,” wrote Gopnik in a Tuesday column. “But they are not at the heart of the tragedy. Gun massacres happen for no reason at all, as well as for crazy reasons. Every country has people who come into the grip of delusions...Most countries keep lethal weapons out of their hands. After a mass killing, grief is supported by wisdom; laws change, and killings stop.”
Gopnik asserted that “on most public issues, there are two reasonable views…But on gun control there aren’t. All the facts are in; all the social science is long settled; the constitutional positions are clear, if contested, and the wiser way known and shared by mankind. On one side are facts, truth, and common sense. On the other, an obsession with dark fantasies of individual autonomy and power—the sheer fetishistic thrill of owning lethal weapons.”
From Gopnik’s piece (bolding added):
In the areas of gun crime where there has been extended study, we know for certain that serious gun control works to end, or at least limit, gun violence. It is as robust a correlation as any in the social sciences, as sure a thing, as I’ve written before, as knowing that antibiotics act to limit and end infections…Guns don’t protect anyone from anything. Their presence simply increases the odds of domestic tragedy, of a domestic altercation turning into a homicide (or a suicide)…
…As Gar[r]y Wills showed in a masterly dissection, twenty years ago, the Second Amendment, and the arguments that led to it, uses military language to talk about military questions…It was never intended to guarantee anything like unlimited private rights to private weapons…There is nothing but our own choices—and, to be blunt, a vote or two on the Supreme Court—to keep us from circumscribing weapons, and their availability, exactly as we think most wise…No society that regulates firearms suffers from the absence of any liberty at all, save the liberty of lunatics to murder their neighbors as they choose…
…Not all sensational events are significant events. America has indeed become a less violent nation, but it is still one that is hideously and uniquely needlessly blemished by gun violence. It may well be true that, unlike the Birmingham bombers of fifty years ago, who sat within a shadowy network of support from the respectable white establishment, Dylann Roof acted largely and crazily alone in Charleston, without that network. But he didn’t need it. He had a gun, and the gun was, reportedly, not bought for him by Klansmen or neo-Nazis but with birthday money from his parents…
Mental health, the enduring structures of racism—these are issues that we have to deal with, too. But they are not at the heart of the tragedy. Gun massacres happen for no reason at all, as well as for crazy reasons. Every country has people who come into the grip of delusions. Even peaceful Norway produced its lunatic. Most countries keep lethal weapons out of their hands. After a mass killing, grief is supported by wisdom; laws change, and killings stop.
On most public issues, there are two reasonable views, even when one view seems, to put it mildly, cruel—the view, say, that poor people should be left without medical insurance. But on gun control there aren’t. All the facts are in; all the social science is long settled; the constitutional positions are clear, if contested, and the wiser way known and shared by mankind. On one side are facts, truth, and common sense. On the other, an obsession with dark fantasies of individual autonomy and power—the sheer fetishistic thrill of owning lethal weapons. On one side is the sanity and common sense shared by the entire world; on the other, murder and madness and a strange ongoing American mania.
