OPINION:
As Congress begins to discuss what to do next with respect to gun laws, some context, perspective and a sense of the limits of legislation are essential. Optimal, durable policy is usually based on facts, not sentiments, emotions or passions.
Excluding suicides (about 24,000 a year), nearly 21,000 people died from gunshots last year — an increase from the last 10 years or so when the average was closer to 15,000. Mass-shooting events (defined as those that result in four or more people being shot) accounted for more than 700, or about 3% of these deaths.
Less than 200 people — or about 10 people per year — have been killed in school shootings since 1999. For contextual purposes, accidental deaths of those between the ages of 5 and 14 are mercifully rare (1,566 in 2020 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), but still about 150 times more prevalent than deaths from school shootings.
If Congress is going to try to solve a problem, it first needs to define what it is trying to solve. For example, if the purpose of the effort is to reduce the number of school shootings, minimizing and complicating access to guns may be a useful, but not particularly productive, way to start. Improving the security of schools might be a more immediately fruitful approach.
If reducing overall gun deaths is the goal, experience suggests that a different suite of policy options — including taking guns from the hands of criminals in the street — is in order.
In all cases, a healthy dose of mental health support — including redirected or increased funding (whether governmental or private) and an approach that emphasizes prevention (red flags) is warranted.
As always, humility and the setting of proper expectations are essential; legislation, no matter how well constructed, can only do so much.
The essential truth of free societies is that once the constraints and guardrails created by a belief in God and the consequent system of morality are gone, it is impossible to hire enough policemen to maintain order. The motto of the University of Pennsylvania sums it up well: Leges sine moribus vanae — laws without morals are useless.
The simple and sad truth is that violence has become normalized in the United States in the last 50 years. From the entertainment we consume to foreign wars we choose to fight to the most permissive abortion laws on the planet that we tolerate, Americans have marinated in violence for the last 50 years. Not surprisingly, that has desensitized us to violence, in all its forms.
As a practical matter, that means that even if more laws are passed — either with respect to gun violence or abortion — the exercise of both pathologies is not likely to be reduced immediately. The larger culture has tolerated, embraced and accepted the violence involved in both as normal for two generations.
Here’s a news flash: Television hasn’t helped. Studies estimate that the typical American child will view 16,000 murders on television by the time they graduate high school. Nor has the fetishization of weapons. A gun is a tool, like a lawnmower or a hammer, yet some insist on treating weapons as having some innate moral value or as an extension of their personality.
The left’s insistence on celebrating abortion also does not help.
Change on these issues, if it comes, will be gradual and based on individuals changing their own hearts and minds. If you are expecting some sort of sharp and immediate societal metanoia with respect to either gun violence or abortion, you are likely to be disappointed.
We all need an appreciation of context and facts when talking about legislation, and we all need a sense of what legislation can and can’t accomplish in a republic of free people. In this instance, the wise course is to minimize expectations.
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.
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