The mass-shootings debate has become a depressingly common feature of our politics. Scarcely anything needs to be said that hasn’t already been said. Sometimes, it’s a debate about politically motivated shootings. But in many cases, it’s just some form of alienated or disgruntled loner acting out. What have we learned?
One, there are three different angles to a school shooting: the shooter, the weapon, and the target. Potential solutions should look at all three angles, especially because no solution is likely to be 100 percent effective, at least not unless we adopt massively draconian and disproportionate restrictions on a free society, its gun owners and sellers, its teachers, its schoolchildren, and/or its police. As I have discussed at length before, there are some partial solutions to be found in “arm the teachers” and other methods of hardening the target of schools, but conservatives who focus only on the target are making the same mistake as progressives who focus only on the weapon. There may be more targeted ways to tie weapons-related solutions to shooter-related solutions. But fundamentally, the source is the shooters: typically alienated young men, often fatherless, sometimes with substance issues, often with a very long trail of obvious red flags. The media should also refrain from using the shooters’ names, and consider other ways of starving them of the publicity they obviously crave.
Two, as with any real problem, there are costs to every possible solution: “Human beings are the real weapons of mass destruction, and the tools they choose are not the causes of violence. If we want to weed out people who might commit violent acts in the future, we need to scale back due process protections and incarcerate more people on less evidence. Although that too is a trade-off many of us would find it hard to make, we could plausibly target privacy laws that make it difficult to compile records on people with a history of threatening behavior . . . There are only easy answers if you are willing to sacrifice rights you don’t care about, and that other people do.”
Three, laws only matter if they are enforced, and enforcing them means cops. Conservatives and Republicans have long supported aggressive and uniform enforcement of laws against gun crime and illegal guns. A “war on guns” conducted with more seriousness, however, would look like the War on Drugs on steroids. Moreover, if the Left mistrusts cops, the Right mistrusts bureaucrats who would doubtless use civil enforcement powers against political enemies (how quickly would we get, say, demands to take away Tucker Carlson’s guns, or those of peaceful January 6 protestors?).
Four, numbers aren’t everything, but they should inform our sense of proportion in nationwide policy-making. Some perspective on the size of the problem and the direction of the trend is always important. The Associated Press counts 169 deaths in 23 years. That’s a lot in absolute terms, especially when we’re discussing innocent schoolchildren. But it is also seven deaths per year, compared with 43 per year by lightning, 300 per year by toasters, 800 per year by bedsheets, and of course, over 800,000 per year by abortion. We can also compare the number with problems such as Central and South American gangs that liberals and progressives commonly dismiss as insignificant threats. Moreover, when last I looked at this in 2018, there were reasons to doubt that schools were actually less safe or that school shootings were actually more common. But if they have become more common, they have done so long after guns were readily available and prevalent in American society — which suggests, once again, that the problem is not in our guns, but in ourselves.