“Do something!” is the cry of the day.
Hecklers disrupted a memorial service in Dayton to yell “Do something” at Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.
A professional soccer player, after scoring a goal, grabbed a live microphone and shouted “Congress, do something now. End gun violence. Let’s go!”
The impulse is obviously understandable. And “something” is a pretty broad term, so it is also correct. But the question is, “What exactly should be done, and by whom?”
We know from experience that when Congress, state legislatures, or city councils react quickly and emotionally to devastating events, such laws usually bring tremendous negative consequences, sometimes totally undermining their stated purpose.
Many of the post-9/11 laws were overreaches that didn’t enhance national security. After a mass shooting in San Francisco in 1994, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (a former San Fran mayor) introduced an “assault weapons” ban. The bill was based on nothing, and during its ten years as law it did nothing to reduce gun violence.
Democrats are pushing again for more gun controls, and we can expect them to be just as ineffectual, while also trampling on the natural right to self-defense and the constitutional right to bear arms.
“Assault weapon” bans are foolish because they usually regulate guns according to their appearance, a cosmetic matter. Under the 1994 law, a legal pistol could become an illegal “assault weapon” if it was capable of being fitted with a flash suppressor.
The phrase “assault weapon” is intended to draw a distinction between weapons used for sport or self-defense on one hand, and those used for assault. But almost every potential assault weapon is already a highly valued defense weapon. The much-reviled AR-15 is the most popular gun in America. The millions of AR-15s in the U.S. are not owned in significant numbers by future shooters or by drug gangs, but overwhelmingly by law-abiding people who wish to defend their families or hunt large game.
A free people doesn’t throw out the liberties of its law-abiding people in an effort to block evildoers. Outlawing guns that can be used as murder weapons necessarily means outlawing guns that are used mostly for the constitutionally protected right to self-defense.
An exception to this rule is automatic weapons. The U.S. military has moved away from guns with automatic-fire capabilities because it is so indiscriminate that nearly its only use is in mass murder. That’s why automatic weapons are nearly illegal today, and why we support congressional action to outlaw bump stocks, which can convert semiautomatic rifles effectively into automatic rifles.
President Trump is right, in the abstract, to call for improved background checks. This should mostly involve improving our current system, which is overloaded and imperfect.
Congress, though, should not expand the background check program to include private sales. Under a proposal considered in 2013, a private gun owner who wanted to list his revolver on Craigslist would need to go through the same background check system that gun stores use. This infringes too greatly on law-abiding gun owners.
Tom Coburn, who back then was a senator, proposed a clever update to the system. It would allow would-be gun buyers to document that they are not prohibited from owning a gun. Private sellers, including sellers at gun shows, would be able to demand such proof from a prospective buyer. This would make it much harder for criminals to buy guns.
Policymakers are also discussing “red-flag” laws. These would take gun rights away from people with some mental illness or history of violence. Implemented well, these could help. Implemented poorly, “red-flag” laws could be a disastrous intrusion on civil liberties, with people weaponizing the law to strip their enemies or potential targets of their rights.
Most of the work to curb shootings, however, will not be done through gun control, background checks, or federal or state legislation. The root cause of our rise in mass shootings is a cultural sickness. Washington can’t fix that.
Our colleagues in the media, most of whom want to outlaw more guns, should do their own part to address this issue. It’s well established that mass shootings are contagious. The media too often turn these mass murderers into anti-heroes, plastering their names and faces across television screens and front pages. Cable, internet, and print publications engage in macabre score-keeping of body counts, ranking the worst shootings, just as most of these gunmen do. They turn it into a competition.
The Washington Examiner has made an effort to provide as little notoriety as possible to these shooters. This practice is spreading throughout the media. It should continue and become a norm.
Ultimately, though, mass shootings will become rarer when we have fewer men who fall prey to murderous rage. If we are getting more such men, it says something about our society.
Every place and every age will have people who feel angry, excluded, or lonely. But the sense that the world is irredeemably dark, cold, and evil, is increasingly common in the United States. Congress can’t turn that around. That will have to be done on a very local, very human level.
So those crying “do something” are correct. This is a message not for lawmakers, but for those crying “do something,” and for all of us.
