While discussing the atrocity in Uvalde from the White House on Tuesday evening, President Biden indulged himself in a cynical rhetorical game. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” he asked. “Why do we keep letting this happen?”
This framing was disgraceful and counterproductive — implying as it did that all Americans secretly know how to fix this problem, but that only some of them wish to do so. Worse still, it was profoundly self-deceptive. Repeatedly, the president cast himself as a brave truth-teller who is willing to “stand up” against inertia. And yet, when one examines his actions more closely, one sees little but anger and smoke. Very little of what Democrats have proposed as “common sense” measures has anything to do with what happened in Uvalde. Nothing that the president is pushing for would touch the 450 million firearms that are already in private hands. In the states, his party’s leaders have begun to shy away from the draconian measures they insist America needs (even Beto O’Rourke, for all his inappropriate bluster, has backtracked on taking away so-called “assault weapons”). And, despite all the talk about the “gun lobby” and those intransigent, obstructionist Republicans, the Democrats’ failure to move a single gun-control bill since Biden took office has been the result not of the filibuster or of the magical NRA, but of its lacking even 50 votes to do so in the Senate. Perhaps — just perhaps — this is more complicated than it seems. Perhaps the consistent behavior of elected politicians over many years in a democracy reflects the fact that American voters are not actually clamoring for these measures.
Certainly, it is more complicated than pointing to a particular sort of gun and shouting “ban!” As has now become customary in such attacks, the shooter in Uvalde used an AR-15, which he bought legally on his 18th birthday. It is true that, over the last decade, this particular model of rifle has become the weapon of choice for many deranged mass shooters, even as it has remained statistically insignificant within the broader landscape of crime. (Each year, more Americans are killed by hands and feet than by all rifles put together.) It is not true, by contrast, that to remove it from the shelves of America’s gun stores would do anything useful at all. The worst mass shooting on a college campus in all of U.S. history — the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech — was carried out with a couple of handguns. The attack at Columbine High School in 1999 occurred while the Biden-written “assault weapons ban” was in place. Even today, handguns are more commonly used in massacres than are rifles. Abhorrent as it is to contemplate such things, it is difficult to imagine that the shooter in Uvalde would have been less able to wreak havoc in a classroom full of unarmed people had he been in possession of a pistol, a revolver, or a shotgun.
What should we do? There is, of course, no easy answer to this question. In the 23 years since Columbine, the chance of an American child being killed on a K–12 campus has been around one in a million — a fact that has made contingency planning almost impossible. But there are a few avenues that seem promising as first steps toward addressing the mess.
We would encourage the careful consideration of “red flag” laws by states (but not at the federal level). Conversations held after mass shootings typically tend to focus on background checks, but, given that mass shooters almost always pass those checks, this represents a chronic misallocation of effort. Far too often, mass murderers convey obvious warning signs to those around them, even though they have neither the established criminal records nor diagnosed mental-health problems that would show up when trying to buy a gun from a stranger. We are sympathetic to fears that “red flag” provisions could be abused, but we would note that states such as Florida have shown that it is possible to balance effective interventions with the rigorous due-process protections to which all Americans are entitled.
Second, we would recommend that states bring their age-of-majority rules into harmony. There is no obvious reason why non-enlisted Americans should be able to buy a handgun at age 21 but to buy long guns at age 18, and if there is solid evidence that raising the age of the latter will help prevent mass murders, states should seriously consider doing so (as Florida did in 2018), or at least imposing more requirements — such as waiting periods and affirmative parental consent — in order for those under age 21 to purchase and carry firearms. Several perpetrators of recent massacres were 18-year-old males who purchased rifles at a store. Conservatives correctly complain that none of the proposals that gun-control activists tend to offer seem tailored to the problem they are hoping to address. This one would be, and it would pass constitutional muster.
Finally, we ought to make it tougher for madmen to gain access to our schools. Many of America’s private schools are hardened against attack, and it would not break the bank to bring public schools into line. At present, this country’s 90,000 or so public-school districts are sitting on an astonishing $113 billion of federal Covid-19 relief money, which, per the Wall Street Journal, they are desperately “struggling to spend.” Should it wish to, Congress could repurpose just 10 percent of that money for school security and instantly hand every public school in the United States $120,000 with which to make improvements.
Beyond that, we must reiterate that the Second Amendment protects a foundational individual right and that, however heartbreaking the behavior of their heinous criminals might be, free countries do not wantonly limit foundational individual rights that are, in well over 99 percent of cases, exercised by law-abiding citizens. The right to bear arms is not only woven into our federal Constitution; it is woven into 45 of the 50 state constitutions, and it enjoys enormous support across the country. This did not happen by accident, but because history has shown that the private ownership of arms is inextricable from the maintenance of ordered liberty. It still is.