A tourist, lost in the Irish countryside, once asked a local farmer how to get to Dublin.
The grizzled old man’s reply: “I wouldn’t start from here, if I were you.”
Irish pessimism aside, we recount this tale to make a point. One cannot set abstract goals without considering the real-world starting point from which they must be reached.
This is the problem for the many dreamers who, seeing Wednesday’s on-air slaying of two journalists by a disgruntled colleague, look across the Atlantic today. They ask aloud why America cannot enjoy the astoundingly low rates of gun violence that exist in Western European countries, where guns are less widely available.
They are wrong in more than one way — for example, those European rates are not directly comparable to American ones, and not quite as low as they think. But their most important error is their failure to consider the starting point from which they would have to reach the utopia they imagine.
There are nearly 300 million privately owned firearms in the United States today. This fact, all on its own — without considering any constitutional or political obstacles — means that the ship sailed on gun control long ago, never to return.
No gun control measure short of universal confiscation would do anything to curb shootings in this lifetime. And the prospect of rounding up 300 million guns from some 60 million households makes the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants seem like a simple matter of arranging a field trip.
The gun-control proposals made in the real world are all proven failures whose only result is to hassle innocent people who would never shoot anyone. Yet these proposals are recycled over and over again as silver-bullets for curbing gun violence. It is telling that the first target after each mass shooting is the so-called “assault rifle,” even though all rifles — “assault” and otherwise — account for fewer than 300 shootings in the U.S. annually.
Background checks — the reform of which seems more reasonable — already cover nearly all gun transactions, one bad piece of data to the contrary notwithstanding. Moreover, shootings happen even when background checks work. A background check prevented the Sandy Hook shooter from buying guns, so he stole them instead. And in this week’s shooting, the perpetrator, Vester Flanagan, had nothing on his record to stop a gun purchase.
Gun-control advocates have been losing the political and cultural battle over this issue, but they still cannot accept that their cause is a waste of time and money. In the real world, the spot where their agenda is dead and buried is the starting point for the discussion of preventing mass shootings.
If Americans seek practical ways of reducing the likelihood of future Flanagans and Adam Lanzas and even common shooters on street corners, they can make much more productive use of their time and money. They can work to reform the way America deals with drug addiction (the root cause of many, many murders). They can advocate for reforms so that American prisons stop serving as the nation’s Crime University system, from which low level offenders graduate with advanced degrees.
More immediately, and much more easily, they can discourage politicians and left-leaning media outlets from the sort of irresponsible racial grievance-mongering that Flanagan used to justify his killing spree in the hours before his death — just as he had justified his litigious and incompetent career. Their propaganda, though protected by the First Amendment, is dangerous in the wrong hands.
An America with new ideas about justice, more racial healing and less irresponsible political opportunism may seem like a dream. But it is not nearly as distant a dream as an America without guns. The sooner gun-control advocates recognize this, the sooner they will be working for something worthwhile.
