Thoughts and Prayers

For the second time in a little over a month, Americans have been forced to contemplate man’s capacity for evil. Not “evil” in the literary sense; not some general badness that gives a movie or a book its dramatic tension. No; this was the sort of motiveless malice that points a rifle at recoiling innocents—at crying infants and small children—and pulls the trigger.

Americans prefer action to contemplation. The common response to any such horror is to wonder: What can we do, right now? Hence the rapid calls after an act of mass murder for changes in gun laws that wouldn’t have altered the outcome even if they had been in place beforehand. This is often little more than catharsis.

The cathartic response usually wants to know how the shooter acquired his guns. After the Las Vegas massacre, we learned that the killer, Stephen Paddock, had no criminal background. He purchased his guns legally, and nothing could have stopped him apart from an outright ban on and confiscation of all semi-automatic weapons. Congress could ban the “bump stocks” Paddock used to make his semi-automatic weapons fire like machine guns, but no one believes such a ban will stop mass gun killings. Even a full-on gun ban, supposing such a thing were possible in America, wouldn’t stop a man like Stephen Paddock. There are around 300 million guns already in circulation in the United States. Men given to hellish designs will get their tools illegally if they need to.

In the case of Devin Kelley, the killer should have been barred from purchasing a weapon. Kelley had been court-martialed in the Air Force. He had battered his first wife and injured her young son—an offense for which he served a year in military prison. He had also been caught sneaking firearms onto Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, made death threats against superior officers, and been forcibly placed in a mental-health facility.

Somehow none of this history made it into the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The relevant office in the Air Force did not send the records to the FBI.

Had Kelley shown up in the NICS database, he would have been unable to purchase the guns he used in Sutherland Springs. The right law was in place, then, but the system failed because military bureaucrats didn’t do their jobs. Accordingly, Congress will now pass legislation to require them to do their jobs by transmitting criminal records to the FBI in a timely fashion.

A similar sort of failure came to light after Dylann Roof murdered nine worshipers at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Roof had been arrested on a misdemeanor and admitted to possession of illegal drugs. This should have made him ineligible to buy a gun. The charge was incorrectly recorded, however, and the FBI official attempting to conduct the background check on Roof took longer than three days to track down the correct information. By then the sale had gone ahead. The three-day limit has been criticized by lawmakers and commentators, but the law was sound. No law can abolish human error and bureaucratic incompetence, and bureaucrats and regulations are no match for a soul gripped by depraved aspirations.

Each act of mass murder brings a similar debate over legislative proposals. Some of these proposals are defensible and right, but the debates are primarily therapeutic. They will save no one.

There are times when we must pass new laws, but passing laws, particularly ineffective ones, can give us the false sense that we’ve made ourselves more secure simply by doing something. Sometimes what’s called for isn’t action but thought. Or, depending on one’s tradition, prayer. And in the aftermath of an event like Sutherland Springs—in which a man committed acts that can hardly be put into words—perhaps we’d do better to reflect on the nature of human evil and consider the possibility that our culture has unloosed some dark mania that no law can stop.