The horror of the slaughter of 26 parishioners—including an unborn infant—at the First Baptist Church in Texas is compounded by our sense that atrocities like these are becoming routinized. Mass shootings are more frequent than they once were. They also produce a higher body count. But after every one, the shock of the viciousness and cruelty on display is slightly less nauseating than it was the last time. We resent being habituated to mass death as much as the senseless bloodshed itself. Maybe desensitization is inevitable, but it is a noble inclination to rage against it.
And yet, a ritualized response to these events seems unavoidable. After all, we all engage in it. The human reaction to carnage like that which occurred in Texas on Sunday is to emote, pray, and seethe with anger as we confront our own impotence. When our capacity for rational thought returns, we retreat into it; perhaps we can preempt reversion to entropy if we can only anticipate and control for events. Often, the response among partisans in the wake of gun-related massacres is to examine the efficacy of existing gun laws, but not always.
When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with 13 others, six of whom died, in January of 2011, the nation focused on rhetoric. Perhaps if we could impose civility on our political discourse, we might prevent the easily radicalized from turning to violence. Sometimes, we discuss mental health and the provision of resources both for those who are begging for help and others who aren’t. Occasionally, we attack the symbols that inspire the shooter, as was the case with the last mass church shooting in this country—the racist murder of black churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015. Sometimes, as was the case after the attempted murder of multiple Republican members of Congress, we simply move on from the whole affair as quickly as possible.
This time, though, it’s about guns. At least, it is for editorial boards at calcified reportorial establishments on the Eastern Seaboard. Except on this occasion, it would be dishonest to demand stronger checks on gun purchasers or even barring at-risk owners from accessing firearms. Those laws already exist. They just were not followed.
The gunman in Sutherland Springs purchased his weapons legally from a sporting-goods store despite having been court-martialed and discharged from the U.S. Air Force for assaulting his first wife and cracking his infant stepson’s skull. Federal law bars those with such convictions from owning a firearm. But the Air Force failed to transmit the relevant information to the National Criminal Information Center, and the Texas shooter passed his background check. That’s it—a bureaucratic error that cost the lives of 26 people.
That kind of tragic oversight is difficult to accept. The federal enforcement mechanisms that advocates for gun control are fond of invoking as a fail-proof backstop against the worst excesses of evil minds had failed. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not have a distinct charge for “domestic violence.” Instead, those convictions are bundled with “assault,” which does not prevent someone from purchasing a firearm. Clarifying the UCMJ would be prudent. That clarity might have interrupted the cascade of unfortunate events that ended in a massacre in a church, but it’s no guarantee. Moreover, this is not the first time the checks in place ostensibly designed to prevent mass shootings failed. And so, the advocates of stricter gun controls have become more honest in their advocacy.
“No doubt the angry young man who stormed the church in a ballistic vest was, as the president said, ‘deranged’ with ‘a lot of problems,’” the Washington Post editorial board conceded. “But imagine what would have happened if he had been deranged—and armed with only a knife? What if, at least, he had had to stop and reload?” Police found 15 spent magazines, each capable of holding 30 rounds, inside the church; the number of gunshots witnesses describe hearing strongly suggests much more than a single magazine was used.
The ignorance routinely displayed by gun control advocates about the tools they’re interested in controlling hinders their ability to make a convincing case, but many don’t seem to care too much about making one. To “imagine,” as the Post asks of us, that this gunman was able only to secure a knife for his rampage is to “imagine” fewer guns in private hands.
Laboring over the stages of grief that now routinely accompany mass shootings, the New York Times editorial board engaged in their own rituals. Lamenting the “cynical evasion” of the National Rifle Association’s allies like President Donald Trump, “who now parrots the diversionary talking point that we must first control for mental illness,” the Times gets to the meat of what they see as the problem: “continually increasing private American arsenals.”
The Times editorial board is right that guns in the hands of unstable people enraged as a result of a domestic dispute, as the Sutherland Springs killer was, are responsible for most mass shootings. But, in this case, “the right law was on the books.” The Times editorialists lack the strength of their convictions, so they allow the reader to reach their preferred conclusion via the Socratic Method.
The most honest gun-control advocates, those who are less interested in disguising their preferences for the benefit of an adversarial audience, are more direct. Occasionally, they recommend the course that scared the Times: confiscation.
Liberal gun-control advocates without pretensions to mass appeal cite the government-backed seizure of Australia’s 650,000 guns in 1990 as a model to follow. Even Barack Obama praised Australia’s ability to “craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings.” But these and other liberals speaking exclusively to liberals do not contend with the fact that there are roughly 462 times as many firearms in the U.S. today as there were in Australia in 1990, and they don’t address the constitutional amendment that must be crafted and ratified before this involuntary program is implemented.
To do so would be to confront the unfeasibility of their policy preferences. So the bastions of intellectual argument in this country are resigned to imagine and finger wag, all the while dancing around their true preference—one that would almost certainly result in fewer acts of mass gun violence. That would be the honest debate that gun control proponents claim they seek, shorn entirely of “diversionary” talking points. The problem for these self-styled advocates for honesty is that theirs is a losing proposition.
