The Patriot Post® · Don't Just 'Do Something'; Do the Right Thing
It seems that holiday weekends are becoming more memorable for their mass shootings than for their parades and parties. Urban shooting deaths are now so commonplace that they rarely merit mention in the news. Chicago, the usual front-runner, tallied 10 dead and 56 wounded over the recent Independence Day holiday — hideous numbers, but lower than the 14 fatalities and 75 injured on Father’s Day weekend three weeks earlier.
It’s hitting home. What was once just a bothersome statistic has become for many a very personal concern. For the first time in memory, people are choosing to avoid crowded public events for fear that they might be occasions for violence.
That pent-up anxiety is prompting angry public demand that we “JUST DO SOMETHING!” about guns and what the Left routinely calls “gun violence.” I share the public frustration, but in my view our collective failure is not in doing nothing; it’s spinning our wheels racing down dead ends.
Figuring out just what might help solve the problem of escalating violence, often perpetrated by assailants wielding illegal guns, demands a cold-eyed assessment of what it is and what it isn’t. Here’s my take:
1.) The deadly increase in mass shootings is part of a broader outbreak of violence of all kinds — unprovoked assaults, stabbings, vehicular homicides, subway violence, angry protests, the works. We seem to be a society on edge, willing and ready to erupt at any moment.
Our current societal disorder has many causes and consequences. One dimension is for sure: a society that is openly tolerant of uncivil behavior and petty crime — shoplifting, for example — not only invites more of that misbehavior, it opens to door to more harmful behavior, including both random and targeted violence.
2.) There is a racial component to a lot of urban violence, but it’s not the one we hear about. By far, most of its victims — and perpetrators — are not whites. Clearly, the problem is not white supremacy, and only a small fraction of violence is driven by racial animus of any kind.
3.) The problem is not too many guns. That oft-repeated and passionately held belief — and the attendant clamor for repeal of the Second Amendment and far more restrictive gun laws — is illogical and misguided.
The Second Amendment has been on the books for 240 years; it’s obviously not the cause of mass shootings, and repealing it won’t make them stop. Gun bans don’t make guns go away; they just make guns unavailable to law-abiding citizens.
It’s not the availability of weapons that drives human behavior. If there were enough axes for every man, woman, and child in the USA, would there be an epidemic of axe murders? Probably not. Persons intent on taking a human life (including their own) will find a time, place, and weapon, legal or not, to do the job.
We don’t have too many guns; we have too many people predisposed to use guns to harm others.
4.) Nor is the problem too many of the wrong kinds of guns. Despite political and media obsession with “assault rifles,” the fact is that ordinary handguns account for about 97% of the shooting deaths in the U.S. If we’re truly serious about solving the problem, zeroing in on a tiny fraction of it won’t make much of a dent.
So, what can we do? There are sensible ways to provide improved protection from so-called gun violence and to address the longer-term societal issues that drive it. Some are already well accepted. Others — essentially reversals of disastrous law enforcement trends that emerged from the George Floyd era — will surely be controversial, but are sorely needed:
Proceed with full implementation of actions to keep guns from the wrong hands, including universal background checks, consistent with the Second Amendment.
Put in place highly effective security measures in schools, houses of worship, and other vulnerable areas of peaceful assembly. Nobody likes turning public places into armed camps — we old folk look back fondly at the days when that was unnecessary — but today is today, and better protection is needed.
Send an unambiguous, bipartisan message to current and prospective criminals that the soft-on-crime experiment (non-prosecution of brazen retail theft and cashless bail, as two examples) is over. Elect prosecutors who will enforce the laws as written.
Restore proactive policing in high-crime areas, implemented by officers empowered to look for and interdict ongoing or incipient criminal activity. By policy and practice, make clear to police officers in harm’s way that we have their backs, every time.
Reinstitute “stop and frisk,” the policing practice that was demonstrably successful in stopping violence before it happens.
In all of this, there is the critical need for responsible leadership. Mass shootings are not caused by an ideology, by one political party, or by inanimate weapons. Political leaders who make such assertions erect an impassable roadblock to common-ground solutions. We can’t let that continue.
Let’s not just do something about violence; let’s do something that works.