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The Second Amendment Is a Gun-Control Amendment
We dealt with Adam Gopnik, a newly minted former Canadian citizen, when he let us know what he really thinks about the Roanoke shooting last August.The tragedy happens—yesterday at a school in Oregon, and then as it will again—exactly as predicted, and uniquely here. It hardly seems worth the energy to once again make the same essential point that the President—his growing exasperation and disbelief moving, if not effective, as he serves as national mourner—has now made again: we know how to fix this. Gun control ends gun violence as surely an antibiotics end bacterial infections, as surely as vaccines end childhood measles—not perfectly and in every case, but overwhelmingly and everywhere that it’s been taken seriously and tried at length. These lives can be saved. Kids continue to die en masse because one political party won’t allow that to change, and the party won’t allow it to change because of the irrational and often paranoid fixations that make the massacre of students and children an acceptable cost of fetishizing guns. Only a person so close to some concept of a fetish would characterize a Gawd given right as a fetish. If the only consequence of not using gun was that it made society safer, then maybe, maybe giving up guns could be an acceptable solution to mass shootings. However, a gun is the most effective tool that can stop a mass shooting. Everything else that can be included into the mix as possible means of ending a mass shooting before it starts falls into the same category as having a gun. In the course of today’s conversation, two issues may come up, treated in what is now called a trolling tone—pretending to show concern but actually standing in the way of real argument. One is the issue of mental health and this particular killer’s apparent religious bigotry. Everyone crazy enough to pick up a gun and kill many people is crazy enough to have an ideology to attach to the act. The point—the only point—is that, everywhere else, that person rants in isolation or on his keyboard; only in America do we cheerfully supply him with military-style weapons to express his rage. As the otherwise reliably Republican (but still Canadian-raised) David Frum wisely writes: “Every mass shooter has his own hateful motive. They all use the same tool.” As I understand it, the Oregon shooter did not have "military-style weapons" at hand, the banning of which is an unspoken goal for leftists like Gopnik. The shooter did have weapons available to him that he bought legally in a state which recently added universal background, the Holy Panacea that gun control advocates want to impose on the nation. Posted by: badanov 2015-10-09 |
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