Why the NRA wins. (3)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 4


Human beings aren’t perfect. Some are a lot less perfect than others. Approximately 1% of the population, about three million people in this country, is sociopathic. Add to this reality the disparity of resources, opportunity, and history in an imperfect world and violence between people in even a wealthy and peaceful country is unavoidable.

One especially tragic form of violence is the mass shooting of people by a disturbed individual. There are few things more terrifying for the public than the possibility of a formerly safe place turned into a shooting gallery. Given the already ubiquitous presence of guns and the reality of disturbed individuals to wield them, mass shootings are a certainty for the foreseeable future. It’s only a question of where and when.

Solutions for this problem have been offered from both sides of the political aisle. The right seems to favor arming as many people as possible for reasons related to economics and the ideology of self sufficiency. The political left tends to favor the restriction of access to firearms to reduce the chances of such a tragedy. Such policy positions follow the underlying morality of authority and nurture respectively.

If the political left had achieved every policy initiative attempted after Sandy Hook, there would still be approximately one gun for every man, woman, and child in this country. And many deadly weapons would have gone unregulated. The most those initiatives would have done is to reduce the frequency of gun violence in general and mass shootings in particular somewhat. Eventually. Maybe.

So sooner or later there will be another mass shooting and the media will be overwhelmed with images of people fleeing the scene, terrified and weeping survivors and family members, impromptu memorials to the fallen and disturbing profiles of some individual that might be typical of someone from our personal experience. And the most that the left could say after a string of difficult and politically expensive legislative victories is, “If not for us this tragedy might have happened a little sooner. Maybe”. Such solutions that suggest a corrosive effect on civil liberties to problems that may affect any given individual with about the same chance as being struck by lightning offer at most a pyrrhic legislative victory. Such a victory might well result in a one way bus ticket to the political wilderness for any political party responsible for it.

While conservatives with the NRA in the vanguard can point to an actual object that can be acquired by individuals to empower them in the absence of any help from society at large, liberals are left fighting for an abstracted percentage and the hope that legislation will result in a fractional uptick in the odds of one’s survival from assault and the notion that some homicidal maniac will be slightly less efficient. That’s because the political left is attempting to redefine the problem to conform to an ideology that overlooks a rare albeit important facet of the human experience: sometimes in the real world people have to fight.