I have a two year old daughter, and I’m overwhelmed every time this happens with fear and anger. I teach at a university, and I feel special fear every time there is an active shooter reported, though I quickly cover it with bravado and statistical arguments. (There were two on my old campus in a single semester a few years back.) Guns make me scared, I don’t want to be anywhere near them. I even think it’s creepy that police officers carry them.
And yet, I’m never very happy with the way these discussions go. More than perhaps any other policy discussion, there’s a palpable sense of paralysis; I have more hope for a basic income guarantee than for substantial and effective gun control. For one thing, everyone who talks about gun control of any sort has to recognize that most there are almost as many guns as people in the US. The horse has left the barn, Pandora has opened the pithos, the djinn has escaped the lamp, etc. Plus it’s impossible to amend the 2nd Amendment under anything like current partisan political conditions. So our response has to be geared towards that. It’s got to involve action and organization and policy savvy.
The NRA’s power is not primarily money: it’s a large, active, and single-issue-voting membership list. The money is comparatively small and irrelevant: all you can do with money is buy ads to affect votes. The NRA already *has* votes, and gun control advocates don’t. For instance, most liberals who want more gun control would still be happy to have Bernie Sanders as President, despite his stance on guns.
So when the President says we should become single issue voters, he’s saying we should choose guns over finance sector regulation, campaign finance consistency, real attention to inequality, pro-choice judges, funding for Planned Parenthood, climate change, and many other things that matter.
That’s what a single-issue voter is: would you vote for a member of the other party if she had a stronger pro-gun-control record than the incumbent from your party? Because NRA members will, even if they mostly don’t have to: they will primary out a viable candidate and accept a loss, which comes to the same thing.
Despite the fact that gun control proponents are in the majority, we just don’t want it enough. We have a minor desire to see fewer mass shootings; gun owners have a strong desire to support untrammeled access to guns. Forget what people say: look at what they do. And we just don’t do much about guns.
And even if we did take that single-issue stance, there’d still be a gun for every man, woman, and child in the US for decades. So we’ll continue to be a country where assholes with guns kill our children and neighbors. And Black men will continue to die at twice the rate of whites, because we talk about school shootings and automatic weapons, but not handguns used in assaults and homicides.
I want to hope that someone will give an answer to the question of what we should do–what my readers and neighbors and friends and I should do–to actually change the terrible, atrocity-ridden status quo. And yet a sober calculations suggests that despair and impotent anger is the appropriate response. The love and hope we nurture can’t reach these issues: the guns will always be a background condition of our lives, a potential risk, yet–if we are white and comfortable–a statistically unlikely one.
It’s like Camus describes in La Peste:
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
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