≡ Menu
jaced.com

Guest post for December 14, 2012

My pal Thane jammed this out last night. Nails it. “There is a middleground between a handgun ban and making these mass tragedies at least a little more difficult to enact” FTW

Lots of guns, so few brains
by Thane Tierney

Just. Please. Stop.

The terrible, unfathomable, unconscionable tragedy in Connecticut – or was it Aurora, or Tucson, or a Portland suburb? – is about as unpredictable as, well, the full moon. Fact is, we’ve been averaging a little over one mass random shooting a month this year, accounting for the occasional “blue moon,” during which we have more than one in a month. And every time, we march through the same cycle: shock and awe, hand-wringing and sympathy, blame and counter-blame, return to the status quo… for a few weeks anyway, until the next one happens and we hit the reset button.

I’ve heard all the arguments. On both sides. As the distinguished musician, philosopher and condemned man (remember, he said that if Obama were re-elected, he’d be dead or in jail by April 2013) Ted Nugent tweeted, “Only fools blame tools.” And yes, guns don’t just shoot themselves. But we’ve never gotten serious about rigorous background checks or gun show sales. We’ve never had the moral or political will to suggest that semi-automatic and automatic weapons, Teflon-coated bullets, high-volume ammunition clips, and body armor might not be in our national interest.

The same day the Sandy Hook massacre took place, a similarly deranged man went on a rampage in China, except he only had access to a knife. He wounded 22 children and one adult. At the time this was written, at least several children were in critical condition, and it’s yet possible that some of them might die. In Connecticut, 26 people died, six of whom were adults. There’s a reason that people say, “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.” Two equivalent madmen, two schools, two different weapons, two radically different outcomes.

Whenever even the most moderate controls are proposed – hey, even the cops are against Teflon bullet sales to private citizens – they get, ahem, shot down. The NRA’s reductio ad absurdum runs, “Any restriction on any weapon at any time is a violation of our constitutional right to keep and bear arms.” It always – well, nearly always – trumps the lefties’ reductio ad absurdum, which runs, “We don’t let people have sarin gas, or surface-to-air missiles, or atomic bombs, so why do we need to let them have… [fill in the blank]?” Like the protagonists of John Godfrey Saxe’s “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” “…each was partly in the right / And all were in the wrong.” There is a middle ground between a handgun ban and making these mass tragedies at least a little more difficult to enact. Yet both sides, for ideological reasons, always seem to find a way to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

We, the people, have spoken, over and over again. We’re good with the longstanding and well-documented reality that, give or take, 11,000 homicides per year by handgun are an acceptable level of collateral damage. This is what we used to call in the retail business — and happens to be, quite literally in this case, true in terms of population — “shrinkage.” Occasionally it will strike somewhere — like, say, Newtown, Connecticut — disproportionately. C’est la vie, or perhaps more appropriately, c’est la mort.

So please. Don’t shed any crocodile tears for Sandy Hook, because we all knew it was coming. We just didn’t know its address. And there’s a virtual certainty we’ll get another opportunity — and another, and another — way too soon.

Comments on this entry are closed.