Facebook can be a place where silly people say silly things, and I have at times been one of them. But after the recent “transgender” shooting at Annunciation School in Minneapolis, in a moment of gravity I decided to post something obvious to me that seemed less obvious to others: that a boy who thinks he is a girl—or a horse or a dog or a cat or anything else that he is not—is unwell. It may be just a phase that, with time and maturity, he will outgrow. But this delusion, if it persists, does not cease to be a delusion. It becomes something evil and malign, which, if fostered and encouraged, will grow to greater evil and malignancy. For this reason, I contended, we should no more “affirm” or celebrate mental illness in the form of gender dysphoria than we would tell a young girl suffering from anorexia, “yes, you really are fat and need to lose more weight.”
In the face of these simple truths, twelve people immediately unfriended my wife, on whose Facebook page my comments were posted. Fair enough. The great majority of her friends were wholly in agreement and said so, which I find often is the case on so-called “divisive” cultural issues. But a few questioned whether transgenderism was really to blame and whether the real problem might be that America has simply too many guns.
Voices on the left are wont to show that America has the highest rate of gun-ownership and one of the highest rates of gun-related homicides of any country in the world. Their notion is that one is the cause of the other, which is rather much in doubt.
First, some perspective: If you have traveled anywhere overseas, you know that America has more of everything, and not just guns. We have more varieties of peanut butter than anyone, more supermarkets than anyone, and more cars full of more people at the supermarkets buying more peanut butter than anyone. That’s just unbridled capitalism, and America does capitalism better than anybody. If you’re an American company selling fishing rods, fly swatters, window treatments, or shotguns, your mission is to make more of them, and sell more of them, and do it faster and better than anybody. That’s what Henry Ford taught us. That’s the American Way. It’s why we’re (still) the biggest economy on the planet, and it’s also why we have the most TVs and the most guns. But it’s not the reason why we have more gun crime.
Just as Charlie Kirk was shot, he was answering a question about what percentage of mass shootings have involved transgender shooters, the questioner’s intended point presumably being that the percentage is rather low. To this question, Charlie was heard to ask, “counting or not counting gang violence?” Charlie’s life ended with those words, and that is the very place where we should begin the present debate about gun control.
America’s gun crime is not a problem of Cousin Jerry taking his deer rifle down to shoot up the local Piggly Wiggly. Our high rate of gun violence is greatly skewed by the rate of inner-city gang violence. These casualties arise mostly from turf-wars among gangs selling narcotics and using unregistered or stolen guns, which is to say they would be completely unaffected by any law or “good citizen” program to register or confiscate firearms. Anyone convinced of the power of gun-control laws to stop gun crime should ask whether laws against possession of narcotics have stopped the influx of illegal drugs over the last sixty years.
The best way to reduce gang-related gun crime is to imprison the gangbangers, which big-city Democrat mayors have long refused to do because of the racial optics involved, and which President Trump is now attempting to do over the howling objections of many on the left because of the racial optics involved. But as Charlie Kirk surely knew, once the rate of gun crime in America is corrected for gang-related violence, the overall incidence of mass shootings becomes less remarkable and the relative number of transgender shooters somewhat more remarkable in turn.
But regardless who is pulling the trigger and why, what of the argument that when it comes to gun control, we must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good? Outlawing private gun ownership might not eliminate all gun crime, but neither has outlawing narcotics solved our drug problem, and yet we still outlaw narcotics. Why not do the same with guns? The answer is twofold.
First, humans have a God-given right to self-defense, enshrined in the Constitution for American citizens as the right to bear arms. There is no right, constitutional or otherwise, to use illicit drugs. Secondly, there is considerable social value in ensuring each citizen’s ability to defend himself. There is no social value in ensuring illicit drug use.
In America, more than twice as many people die each year in motor-vehicle accidents than are murdered with guns. We could eliminate virtually all of those deaths by outlawing private vehicles, but we don’t. Why? Because we recognize that there is more value to society in allowing motor-vehicle travel than in eliminating motor-vehicle deaths. Likewise, if someone is killed in an accident with a drunk driver, we don’t say they were killed “by a car” and call for more “car control.” Rather, we say that they were killed by a drunk driver. To protect the public, we send the drunk driver—not his car—to prison, and we let law abiding citizens keep driving. The same is true when a homicidal maniac shoots someone with a gun.
The importance of the right to bear arms, not purely for hunting but for self-defense, cannot be overstated. As defenders of gun rights have humorously observed, the Founding Fathers did not give us the Second Amendment because they feared a deer uprising. They knew all too well the threat of tyranny and how to meet it. Paul Revere’s cry “through every Middlesex village and farm,” in the words of Longfellow’s poem, was “for the country folk to be up and to arm.”
We might once have thought that the need to arm oneself against the government was a relic of colonial history, but consider how different the history of the 20th century would have been had the Nazis encountered a cocked and loaded gun behind the door of every Jewish home. And no less needed today are weapons to defend ourselves when the government refuses to act, as we saw during the “Summer of Love” following the death of George Floyd, when police departments across the country were inexplicably defunded and ordered to stand down in the false name of “racial equity.”
To return to the question my wife’s Facebook friends asked and that Charlie Kirk was attempting to answer when he died: the connection between transgenderism and mass shootings is something relatively new and yet far from trivial. However, our concern must be not only for the rising number of transgender persons or their sympathizers who go on to become assassins, but for the number of children now suffering in silence, whose lives are being destroyed by this evil ideology. It’s high time we stopped “affirming” them and started helping them.
Michael Hurley is a retired American attorney, novelist, memoirist, and singlehanded trans-Atlantic sailor, now traveling extensively in Europe and the UK. He is the author of seven books and has written for numerous magazines and newspapers.
Image: VasenkaPhotography, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.