On February 14, a deeply troubled young man named Nikolas Cruz walked into the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Cruz, 19, took an AR-15 rifle out of a black duffel bag and began firing at students in the hallways and in classrooms. In all, he murdered 17 people and injured 14 others. He was arrested later that day, having briefly escaped by blending in with fleeing students. He awaits trial in the main Broward County jail.
As in similar mass shootings in recent years, law enforcement was aware of the danger posed by Cruz. In this case, a caller to the tipline of the FBI’s Miami field office had described Cruz’s “gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.” The bureau failed to take action. The response of most Democrats and the mainstream news media, however, is not to ask how law enforcement officers failed so spectacularly to intercept an obvious threat, but, with flawless predictability, to fix their attention on the one question that admits of no political solution and offers no hope of stopping lunatic killers like Cruz: the laws governing gun ownership in the United States.
The focus of left-liberal animus is, as it always is after mass shootings, the National Rifle Association. Rarely if ever have we seen so much power and influence attributed to a single organization. If you knew nothing about American politics and read the Washington Post or the New York Times or watched MSNBC after the Parkland tragedy, you would conclude that the NRA—or a more nebulous entity called “the gun lobby”—holds Svengali-like powers over the nation’s political leaders.
The NRA and other gun-rights groups devote about as much to lobbying as many other special-interest groups do. Members of Congress are free to ignore them, and many do. Most of those who cast their votes against new regulations on firearms do so for principled reasons, not financial or crassly political ones: Many oppose new gun laws because they don’t believe these laws will accomplish their stated ends. We tend to agree with them. Others may oppose new gun laws out of fear that the NRA will run ads against them or fund an opponent, but that is a routine part of electoral politics. It applies to the farm lobby and the environmental lobby and every other special interest group in Washington.
None of these groups has an unlimited ability to “bankroll” candidates. Whatever clout single-issue groups have is largely a reflection of the popular support for their side. If members of Congress listen to the gun lobby, it is because large numbers of their constituents (a) feel strongly about the issue of gun control and (b) are not sympathetic to new regulation. Single-issue groups like the NRA do not create supporters; they either have them or they do not. The NRA has them.
Gun-control supporters like to point out that a majority of Americans tell pollsters they favor stricter gun laws—a Quinnipiac poll conducted just after the Parkland shooting indicates that 66 percent of registered voters favor stricter guns laws. Such polls are driven as often by sentiment as by fixed opinion. Telling a pollster that, yes, you favor stricter gun laws is a way of saying you wish Parkland hadn’t happened. When it comes to debating specific proposals, however, the people who care most deeply about the issue—the people who base their votes and their financial contributions on it—want to know exactly how proposed regulations will stop actual gun crimes.
And that’s a question gun-control proponents have trouble answering. We are open to the possibility that gun laws need to be changed or updated from time to time. This magazine favors a ban on “bump stocks,” the device that turns semiautomatic rifles into something close to machine guns. But the debate over gun ownership—if debate is the right word—generally only takes place after a psychopath carries out his satanic dream. Rejiggering gun laws is not a rational way to respond to the determined deeds of maniacs. Should the state of Florida or Congress raise the age at which you can buy certain kinds of rifles? The question is not an absurd one. What is absurd is the idea that this or similar laws would dissuade someone like Nikolas Cruz from carrying out the rampage on which he had set his twisted mind.
Surely, though, something can be done.
Let us grant the ineradicable existence of America’s gun culture; millions of ordinary Americans own and enjoy guns, making comparisons to Scotland or Finland worse than useless. Let us grant, too, that many progressives’ unstated aim—a full-on gun ban—is a political and practical impossibility. Few Democrats will even admit that they would prefer to get rid of the Second Amendment, and none will propose it any time soon.
Let us grant all that. But we should also admit that these newsmaking mass shootings are becoming more frequent and more disturbing. Ignoring the tendentious statistics on gun violence perpetrated by the New York Times and other left-liberal outlets—the Times includes everything from suicides to pellet-gun “shootings” in its “gun violence” tolls—every right-minded American senses that something is wrong. In October, Stephen Paddock killed 58 in Las Vegas. A month later, Devin Patrick Kelley killed 26 in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Now 17 are dead in Parkland, Florida. That another bloodbath will happen soon seems certain.
But the increased frequency of these diabolical acts itself would seem to suggest that the availability of guns is not the reason. Americans have always had the freedom to own and use firearms; it’s far harder to buy a gun now than it was 40 or 50 years ago. Yet mass shootings weren’t anything like a routine part of the news cycle in the way they have become. Why the change? Why has murdering strangers with a gun become an attraction for a certain kind of warped soul?
Surely part of the answer is the obsessive and emotive coverage given to these incidents. The dozens of stories by every major news outlet, the handwringing of editorialists and commentators, the interviews with the family members of victims and with gun activists, the press conferences by law enforcement, the virtue-signaling by politicians, the endless arguments between talking heads on news programs, the lavish and complex infographics splashed across the papers—the whole neurotic business goes on for days and days. After Parkland, we seem to have introduced a new element: impassioned teenagers who demand to be heeded, not because they’ve studied the problem and have ideas to contribute, but simply on the grounds that the victims were teenagers and so are they.
These episodes of rage and misery over a problem that has no near-term political solution seem almost calculated to encourage yet more sordid souls to come forward in gruesome bids for fame. The news media may at some point grow weary of giving these murderers what they crave. For now, we mourn the dead, noting only that further ire and recrimination won’t bring them back, and it won’t keep other innocents from a similar fate.
