The Pity Party (24 page)

Strident demands for more gun control were numerous in the weeks following Newtown. By contrast, new laws and attitudes that would place a heavy burden of proof upon those whose movies and video games normalize and even celebrate lethal violence, thereby requiring them to demonstrate their products were socially benign, were peripheral to the national debate. No one suggested that to demur from calling to account the purveyors of those entertainments was to become complicit in the murder of schoolchildren.
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Gun violence, after all, does not exhaust the list of tragedies a civilized nation should strive to reduce. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 32,367 Americans were killed in vehicular crashes in 2011, 1,341 of whom were under the age of sixteen. (By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that firearms killed 350 Americans under the age of fifteen in 2010. Of these, 62 were accidental shootings, 208 were homicides, and 80 were suicides, all of the latter committed by children between the ages of ten and fourteen.) Collisions at intersections account for one-fifth of all traffic fatalities, according to a 2007 study by the Federal Highway Administration, and left turns were responsible for the majority of those accidents. We could, it follows, save the lives of thousands of Americans, many of them children, by reengineering busy intersections to allow for left turns without crossing in front of oncoming traffic, and by prohibiting left turns at less busy but still dangerous intersections. Doing so would entail large financial outlays, borne collectively, and millions of small time outlays, borne individually, as drivers avoided left turns by taking longer routes, including ones that require three right turns to go around a block. The certain result of such efforts, however, would be a reduction in the number of funerals attended by grief-stricken parents.
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Must
we, QED, relegate left turns to the dustbin of transportation history? Most of us would hold that truth to be contestable, at best, rather than self-evident. That position, in turn, rests on another: our obligation to attempt measures that would save the life of even one child goes only so far. We weigh even the most dreadful prospects in balance against other considerations, some profound—such as the need to curtail preventive detentions ordered by psychiatric officials, or to uphold the free speech rights of those who make movies and video games—and others mundane—like the need to limit the taxes devoted to highway construction, or to prevent time-consuming trips to workplaces and stores from being even more time-consuming. A politician who invoked any such offsetting considerations could count on being spared accusations that his refusal to pursue the safety of children to whatever policy conclusions it required was “morally repulsive,” “craven,” “sickening,” and “cowardly,” proving him to be a “whore” with the blood of dead children on his hands. The liberal journalist Michael Tomasky threw all these bouquets in the course of a single article denouncing the senators who voted against expanding the number of gun purchases subject to background checks.
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How is it possible to accept that lifesaving measures certain to curtail personal liberties, cost exorbitant amounts, or cause major inconveniences pose trade-offs that decent, reasonable people can disagree about, while ascribing opposition to any particular gun control measure to shocking moral depravity? Only by assuming the rights and benefits associated with gun ownership are too slight to outweigh any benefits, however modest or unlikely, from curtailing guns. Such an assumption is, in the first place, culturally biased: blue-state gun control advocates don't grasp the red-state insistence on private ownership of firearms. Gopnik concedes, then proves, the point by describing guns as “ego-accessories” providing “the illusion of power.”
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In urging us to be “as tolerant as humanly possible about other people's pleasures, even when they're opaque to us, and try only to hive off the bad consequences from the good,” Gopnik restates rather than clarifies the problem. Friedersdorf admits to sharing Gopnik's blue-state sensibilities, but is more rigorous and less self-indulgent about applying them to the question of regulating guns: “The fact that it's a very different subculture than mine makes me
more
wary of insisting that the preferences of its members ought to be paid very little mind in shaping future public policy.”
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There is also a constitutional impediment to restricting guns in order to do anything that might save the life of even one child. In a 1989 law journal article, Sanford Levinson warned against cultural assumptions' power to distort constitutional reasoning. Thus, “the absence of the Second Amendment from the legal consciousness of the elite bar, including that component found in the legal academy, is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even ‘winning,' interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.” Levinson deplored the “happy endings” approach to constitutional exegesis: a jurist who invariably discovers that the Constitution's requirements and prohibitions align perfectly with his own political preferences is engaged in ventriloquism, not interpretation. Levinson does not try to settle the question of the Second Amendment's true meaning, and certainly does not align himself with the position that whatever individual rights it protects are absolute. He does, though, argue that however much those who favor gun control would prefer to read the Constitution as though its meaning without the Second Amendment would be exactly the same as its meaning with it, the historical and textual basis for treating the right to bear arms as protecting individuals' rights is, in fact, too formidable to ignore.
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Levinson's article was a bracing communication from one anti-gun liberal to others. It appeared at a time—1989—when the default assumption among the enlightened was that the Second Amendment concerned only “a well-regulated militia” and, therefore, was not even the smallest impediment to government regulations restricting individuals' rights to acquire or retain firearms. “Levinson's article inspired a wave of complementary scholarship in the 1990s,” according to Randy Barnett, another law professor. This new interpretation not only culminated in Supreme Court decisions upholding individual gun rights, but in gun control advocates' abandoning their advocacy for the older, narrower interpretation of the Constitution. The president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the leading gun control organizations, told a reporter in 2012 that he considers the debate on the Second Amendment “closed” and has no interest in reopening it.
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There is, finally, a practical impediment to the idea that more gun control will have some kind of beneficial effect, however tenuous the assumptions of efficacy may appear under interrogation: Americans already own millions of guns. It isn't clear exactly how many, due in part to the limited monitoring of gun purchases. The
Atlantic
's Jeffrey Goldberg estimated in 2012 that there were between 280 and 300 million privately owned guns in America, with 4 million new ones being acquired each year. He cites a 2011 public opinion survey indicating that 47 percent of American households possess at least one gun. Since politics is not a graduate seminar, and history does not present blank sheets of paper to those who want to shape the future, discussions about gun policy that disregard this enormous fact on the ground are a waste of everyone's time.
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One anti-gun argument that takes account of this reality is that our extraordinary level of private gun ownership is intolerable, and therefore must not be tolerated. It seems “positively ludicrous,” to the
New Republic
's Noam Scheiber, that we put up with thousands of gun-related homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths each year, not to mention wounds that result in agonizing pain or cruel debilitations, because “we accept these things as a kind of cost-of-business for widespread gun ownership.” Even allowing for the great difficulty of arriving at the ultimate goal, he insists on clarity and candor about what that goal is: “If it were up to me, gun licensing would be so strict that only people who use guns professionally—cops, soldiers, firearms instructors, farmer and rancher types—could own them and store them at home. Everyone else could rent them if they wanted to go hunting or to a shooting range.”
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Scheiber deserves credit for endorsing a clear, maximalist position that other gun control advocates may share, but don't advertise. They are reticent because his logic not only directs us to a distant goal but its political effect makes the goal even more distant. One sympathetic critic, journalist Joel Mathis, pointed out that if liberals are to have any hopes of enacting “modest, smart, commonsense changes to gun ownership rules” it's imperative for them to avoid saying
anything
that vindicates anxious gun owners' fears of a slippery slope leading to prohibition and confiscation. Advocates of politically feasible measures must, instead, repeat over and over, “We're not going to take your guns away.”
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The trouble with modest, commonsense changes to our gun laws, such as background checks, waiting periods, or restrictions on the capacity of ammunition clips, is that there's no persuasive reason to believe that any reduction in gun violence such measures might effect, in a nation with nearly as many guns as people, would be distinguishable from statistical noise. And if the rejoinder is that we “have to start somewhere,” the question of what exactly we're starting and how we'll know when it's completed reenters the debate. Such arguments suggest that red-state rubes who cling to their guns may be perceptive rather than paranoid about blue-state sophisticates' determination to treat private gun ownership as a privilege the government can confer or withhold, rather than a right it is obligated to respect.

They suggest, as well, the reluctance to fashion policies that take account of distasteful facts. Goldberg argues that given the remote possibility of effecting an enormous reduction in the number of privately owned guns in America—it would be a miracle of politics and policy if that number were cut in half, and the 150 million or so remaining guns would still be consistent with a high level of gun violence—a prudent objective would be to make the best of the existing situation rather than indulge dreams of transforming it. He points out, for example, that more states allow citizens, through “concealed-carry permits,” to carry firearms outside the home than in the past, and there's no evidence this policy has increased crime and some it has reduced it. “Today, the number of concealed-carry permits is the highest it's ever been, at 8 million, and the homicide rate is the lowest it's been in four decades—less than half what it was 20 years ago.” Before Ohio enacted a concealed-carry law in 2004, opponents predicted it would turn the state into a free-fire zone. After it became law, crime rates involving firearms stayed the same.
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After the U.S. Senate thwarted laws to expand gun control in 2013, the Obama administration announced it was going to follow the course first indicated after the Aurora, Colorado, shootings in 2012: make existing federal laws work rather than enact new ones. The Associated Press reported that gun laws passed in 1968, 1993, and 2007 pointed to the creation of a database for delaying or preventing gun purchases by those deemed to have mental health issues. Many states had forwarded fewer than ten records to the database, however, because of concerns compliance with
that
law would require violating other laws protecting health privacy. The administration committed to any legislative action that might save even one person, one child from gun violence had not, during its first four years in office, gotten around to the executive actions that would make the existing legal strictures created for that purpose operate effectively.
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In January 2014, nearly five years after Obama's first inauguration, the administration announced executive actions that would clarify the particular mental health determinations that would prohibit a firearms purchase, while also clarifying how health care providers could report on these issues without violating protections of medical privacy.
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An America without guns is a fantasy, but it is at least a fantasy we can imagine government officials in the United States securing and maintaining. The planet's 6.8 billion non-Americans could not, however, nullify our gun control regime by their gun- and trigger-happy actions.

An America that reduces carbon dioxide emissions to the point that global warming decelerates and reverses is, however, far less plausible than a gun-free America. The world's non-Americans could, through economic growth driven by availing themselves of the most readily available forms of energy, easily negate America's enactment of every item on the Sierra Club's agenda. After declaring that “the health of the planet we inhabit” required President Obama to make the environment the highest priority of his second term,
New Yorker
editor David Remnick lamented that America's “paltry attempts to reduce global warming are being overtaken elsewhere by the attempt to raise hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. Advances in living standards in China, India, and Africa will radically increase the demand for cars, televisions, air-conditioners, washing machines—in short, the demand for power and the burning of fossil fuels.”
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Though noting the existence of arguments rebutting the contentions that (a) global warming is real; (b) its effects will be harmful, if not devastating; and (c) it is largely caused by human actions and can, therefore, be largely remedied by such actions, I stipulate these propositions in order to pursue a different inquiry. To borrow another David Mamet line, this time from Brian De Palma's movie
The Untouchables
: what are you prepared to do? “Climate change is the single biggest environmental and humanitarian crisis of our time,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading advocacy group. If global warming presents a grave or even existential threat, it demands a response that will accomplish as much good as possible, as distinguished from one that makes its advocates feel as good as possible.