Gun control as a solution to spectacular public murders doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
I n the aftermath of multiple murderous outrages — political assassinations, school shootings, attacks on law enforcement — Democrats and commentators across the left are yet again pressing to put the focus on guns. In Minnesota, the site of the assassination of the former state house speaker and of the murder of Catholic schoolchildren at prayer, Governor Tim Walz is calling the legislature into special session to focus on “gun violence.” It’s unlikely that Walz will get anything significant passed, given that his party has just a one-seat majority in the state senate and that the state house is evenly divided. But he’s under pressure from activists, and he likely sees this as an opportunity to pressure Republican legislators in swing suburban districts ahead of next year’s elections.
Forget the electoral calculations, however. Targeting guns is foolish as a diagnosis and worse as a cure. Those who leap at gun control as an answer to political violence and mass-casualty attacks on schools are not going to accomplish anything, and along the way, they’re draining the time, attention, and public energy that could be put into solutions more tailored to the problem. That’s not harmless.
There are five reasons why blaming guns is counterproductive.
First, the diagnosis is too narrow. To harp on “gun violence” and convene working groups and legislative sessions on the topic is to suggest that other kinds of violence are just not the same kind of problem. But that’s not realistic. Plenty of spectacular and brutal crimes are committed without guns, from the horrific stabbing of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train earlier this month to the stabbing, burning, and “molesting” of an elderly couple in Queens the same week. Many nations with few guns still have serious problems of violence and murder on the street. France this year has had a wave of school stabbings.
Historically, guns have by no means been the only weapon of assassinations, terror attacks, or attacks on schools. September 11 wasn’t gun violence. Neither was the Boston Marathon bombing. Neither were Oklahoma City, the first World Trade Center bombing, the Molotov cocktail attack in Boulder in June, or recent car and truck attacks in New York, Waukesha, Charlottesville, or New Orleans (although the New Orleans attacker subsequently shot at the cops). The 1999 Costa Mesa school attack used a car. Bombs were used in the worst school attack in American history, in Bath Township, Mich., in 1927, which killed 44 people (38 of them kids). Alexander II of Russia was assassinated with small, handheld bombs. Most of Japan’s garish history of assassinations didn’t involve guns.
None of that is to deny the obvious: Guns are very useful in committing violence, and they are particularly useful in killing political figures from a distance or hunting down people inside a school or workplace. There’s a reason why they are the most common weapon of choice for these kinds of assaults. But when you focus exclusively on the guns as the problem rather than the violence, you’re already missing part of the picture — a part that would be bound to grow bigger if you actually succeeded in doing away with guns.
Second, the diagnosis is too broad. There are hundreds of millions of guns in this country — maybe as many as half a billion, depending upon what estimates you believe. We probably have more guns in America than people. Far fewer than 1 percent will ever be used in a violent crime, and a comparably low percentage of gun owners will ever use their weapon in a violent crime. A governor or member of Congress is statistically far more likely to be involved in a crime than is a gun or an owner of a legally purchased and owned gun.
In most any other circumstance, we would recognize that punishing vast numbers of innocent people in order to punish a tiny percentage is unjust enough that we should explore every other possible option first. Hence, the old saw about letting ten or a hundred guilty men go free — go free to kill again, even — rather than send one innocent man to jail. We know from numerous studies that school shooters tend to be heavily motivated by notoriety and tend to be steeped in stories of prior school shooters and inspired to imitate them. There’s not the slightest doubt that publicity of such shooters causes more shootings. And yet, given the high premium we place on speech free of government restraints, we are collectively willing to treat those deaths as the cost of not legally limiting the press coverage. The press, in turn, tends to see no responsibility to limit itself.
Moreover, even within the category of “gun violence,” events such as assassinations and school shootings are a minuscule percentage compared with, say, gang violence or street crime. It takes nothing away from the horror of such killings to notice that governments are particularly bad at eliminating things that are rare and often the results of lone individual decisions to start with. Trying to target them by broadly addressing guns society-wide presents a serious risk of huge dislocations while missing a small target.
The typical left-leaning response to this argument is that overinclusion isn’t a problem because owning guns has no value that we should care about. Which is true to some people — people who only want to limit the rights other people value, and not the rights that they themselves value. But no matter how often and how insistently you argue that gun ownership is a thing of no value that nobody should care about, you run smack into the solid fact that people who value those rights exist in our country in large numbers, always have, and almost surely always will.
We do not write on a blank slate. We do not have the culture or politics of Europe, or of East Asia. We were founded as a frontier society, and guns were part of that from the beginning. Nor do we have the culture of, say, Australia (where gun confiscation was largely accomplished in recent memory) or Canada of deference to authority. We fought a revolution; Australia simply took what nationhood was given it by the crown, and the most famous Australian uprising on the road to receiving self-government from the British, at the Eureka Stockade in 1854, was comparatively tiny and included among the rebels a conspicuously large contingent of heavily armed Californians, the “Independent Californian Rangers Revolver Brigade.” The reality is that there is very little successful track record in the Western Hemisphere of reducing existing gun ownership by government regulation.
Third, the desired solution is too broad. When left-leaning activists and commentators are venting on this topic, they often go straight to “guns are the problem” or “we have too many guns.” But consider what it would take to actually eliminate or vastly reduce the number of guns in the country. A sharp ban on new gun sales faces, first, formidable legal obstacles: not just the Second Amendment but also the bills of rights in the constitutions of 45 states would need to be amended or radically reinterpreted. Amendments would require dozens of majority or supermajority votes — for example, amending the federal Constitution requires the consent of two-thirds of Congress and passing 38 state legislatures. Rewriting those amendments out of the federal and state constitutions by creative judicial interpretation, besides being an attack on the whole concept of written law and the Bill of Rights, would itself require a seismic political shift in the composition of the judiciary.
And that’s not counting the political earthquake that would be required to get serious gun bans through Congress and/or the state legislatures. If you listen to progressives, that means all of them — after all, when strict gun laws get passed in places such as Illinois and don’t work, state and local officials just blame neighboring states for not having the same laws.
A radical shift in the nation’s politics of this nature would require making gun control the priority in American politics, to the point that the people favoring it would have to recruit and compromise with people they currently disagree with on a whole host of other issues. Of course, there is little interest in doing any of that. It feels better to just cast blame on the opposing political tribe, or on the country.
Then, there’s enforcement. Laws do not enforce themselves. And even an effective ban on new legal gun sales would not instantly undo the vast number of guns already in circulation, nor would it magically abolish the capacity to build homemade or 3D-printed guns. Mexico famously has only one legal gun store, yet it’s awash in firearms and is the most dangerous country on earth for journalists and political candidates.
To get rid of those guns requires confiscation. That requires a lot of law enforcement. If you like the War on Drugs or ICE’s immigration raids, you will love a War on Guns. To collect those hundreds of millions of guns will require many more cops, many more home searches by armed cops that could result in shootings, many more stops and frisks on the streets, and a great many more prison sentences for gun possession — a crime that is often under-enforced by blue-city and blue-state prosecutors because sentencing those offenders tends to lead disproportionately to jailing young black men. But if the guns are the problem and removing them is the solution, you need to act as if you believe those things.
Recall the famous exchange between Sean Connery’s Jimmy Malone and Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness in The Untouchables:
Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I’m saying is, what are you prepared to do?
Ness: Anything within the law.
Malone: And then what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they’re not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.
Malone’s is the enduring question of law enforcement, and for that matter of international affairs as well: What are you prepared to do? And then what are you prepared to do? If you’re not prepared for the dramatic escalation of heavy-handed law enforcement that a War on Guns would entail, then you’re not serious about one.
Fourth, the likely solution is too narrow. This is the point at which the same people who say from one side of their mouth that the problem is guns and we need to get rid of guns will reassure the listener that nobody is coming for their guns and all they want is “commonsense” regulation on “gun safety.” But the moment the solutions start narrowing, they run into the problem that they get increasingly unlikely to have any effect whatsoever on the (already numerically rare) incidents that are used as the principal justification for the legal changes. Bans on “assault weapons” invariably founder on the difficulty of defining which kinds of rifle or handgun are covered — and then you get something like the shooting of Charlie Kirk, carried out with a standard old-school hunting rifle. Were we really safer after bump stocks were banned? After Las Vegas, one hasn’t been used again in a high-profile killing. Red flag laws can help, but only if the killers give off public signs and the laws are enforced — Minnesota, for example, already has a red flag law that prevented neither the Melissa Hortman assassination nor the Annunciation school shooting. We’ve seen from long experience that people get guns to commit crimes through a broad variety of means: Some buy them legally, some illegally, and some borrow or steal them from legal gun owners. It is true far more often than not that the proposals pushed in the aftermath of a high-profile shooting would not even have prevented that particular shooting.
Fifth, the real weapon of mass destruction is human beings. All of the focus on guns reflects a more fundamental left-right divide, one that we have frequently seen as well in international affairs. Too many liberals and progressives find it more convenient to blame violence and war on weaponry or impersonal social forces rather than on aggressors, predators, and fanatics among us. That’s why solutions that focus on disarmament are always doomed to failure — because they aren’t even looking in the right place.