A reader writes: “Numerous mentions of praying, not a single word regarding easy access to guns. You can and should do better.”

This morning, I responded as follows:

With respect, sir, I did make mention in my column (“The Nightmare in Minneapolis“) of red flag laws, which I support, as a way to make access to guns more difficult for the mentally unstable or for anyone who is a threat to himself or others.

It is my view that, with appropriate due-process safeguards, well-written red flag laws can be and should be taken up in all states. Red flag laws should also be made a public service announcement priority and cultural focus, so that members of the public are aware of how and when these laws can be triggered to get help for family, friends, students, coworkers, etc. After 9/11, there was a “see something, say something” campaign and mantra that broke through into the public mainstream. (It wasn’t always effective of course.) There have been a couple of PSA campaigns, but I’d like to see that level of cultural penetration for red flag laws. I bet if you or I walked onto the streets of Minneapolis the day before this terrible incident and asked 100 people what a red flag law — or in Minnesota’s official terminology, an “Extreme Risk Protection Order” (ERPO) — is and how it works, distressingly few citizens would be able to tell us.

It appears, however, at least in the early going, that Minnesota’s red flag law was not activated in this case — and that is so even though the individual who committed these heinous crimes had, reportedly, been visited several times by local police for various disturbances of the peace in recent years.

My column was not meant as a comprehensive outline of my views on mental illness, gun control, mass shootings, etc., except in where I wrote that “no American — right or left, conservative or liberal — at this stage of our national life, should promise or anticipate the complete eradication of this scourge that is upon us. None of us should be naïve enough to think that our preferred policy suite would entirely ‘solve’ this problem.”

In principle, I am open to higher age limits for the purchase of certain types of firearms or quantities of ammunition than is the norm (I am in favor of higher age limits for voting as well). The young — and young men especially — are, on the whole, more violent, more unstable, and more compulsive than their elders. I am open to other reasonable measures as well. But, in my view, most of these proposed measures are somewhat besides the point in a country in which there are already 400 million guns in circulation and in which we are a few short years away from an era in which anyone with a 3-D printer can manufacture his own gun in his garage quite easily.

I am a Marine. I have used, owned, and handled guns of all kinds all my life. I keep guns at the house. I will teach my young boys how to shoot guns. I believe that the right to keep and bear arms and the right to self defense is not just an important American constitutional principle, it’s God-bestowed natural law. I have also myself been the victim of a violent public shooting incident in which I found myself under fire on the streets of an American city, faced with an armed lunatic trying to kill me and my friend. I wish that I had had a gun that day to shoot back at the guy who was shooting at me (I was unarmed), and I would not wish a situation on my fellow law-abiding citizens in which they were prohibited from carrying arms for their own protection or their family’s.

But I do not think our constitutional rights, or even our natural rights, are absolute. And it is my view that a temporary restriction on one’s Second Amendment rights, under a judge’s order and under law and with due process, is licit when warranted. In a similar way, I think citizens have both a constitutional right and a right under natural law to raise their children as they wish. I also believe the state has the power, under a judge’s order and under law, to remove your children from your keeping, for their safety and yours, when licit and appropriate.

Can such powers be abused by judges and courts? Of course they can, as can all powers given to governments, princes, and potentates. Citizens ought to be very mindful of this.

The issue of mass shootings is principally, in my view, a mental-health problem — which is why I think red flag laws, family courts, judgments for involuntary commitment and/or involuntary counseling, and the like are where the country will find some ways to address the problem of distressed young men falling into evil action and horrific deeds. That doesn’t mean the question of access to guns is wholly unimportant. But I do think that it is secondary. With the best gun control in the world — even a world completely devoid of guns — a truly disturbed individual, or this one in particular, could have killed just as many people if not more by ramming his Toyota 4Runner into a crowd of people, as we have seen in other terrible incidents, such as in Nice, France, in 2016. That attack killed 86 innocent people.

The social contagion that is upon us is that affects “alienated outcasts.” “Rampage shooters tend to be losers,” Park MacDougald wrote in 2022, in an essay that is one of the best things I’ve read on this horrible phenomena. The problem for our country is that I don’t think we can create a society that doesn’t have alienated young men. “Losers” will always be with us. A very few of them will act out in horrible ways. I don’t know how to stop that completely. In fact, I think it’s simply not possible. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done. And yes, I think part of what we can do is to pray for the victims, for their families, and for all the distressed and lonely young people out there, lost in their dark thoughts, and contemplating evil.

Mark A. Wright
Executive Editor
National Review