Americans are generally practical, and though that trait can be very useful, it leads us into the dangerous assumption that every problem has a solution. When tragedy strikes, as it did last week in Jonesboro, Ark., we look immediately and not always carefully for remedies, figuring that anything is better than nothing.
At moments like this, no one pays too much attention to the fact that violent crime is declining, that most schools are safe or that mass shootings in public places are exceptionally rare events. The horror of children being slaughtered in cold blood by other children is too great for people to be expected to keep it in any sort of perspective.
Plenty of ideas were bandied about in the wake of the fatal shooting of five in a schoolyard, which police attributed to a pair of boys ages 13 and 11. The Washington Post lamented the lack of tighter gun-control laws. The Los Angeles Times called for measures to deny teenagers access to firearms. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin proposed making parents guilty of a federal crime if they fail to keep guns and ammunition secure from children. Others suggested that the entertainment industry needs to stop offering films and TV shows that glorify violence.
All this assumes that effects can be traced neatly back to causes, which can then be eliminated. We don’t like to acknowledge that many calamities are such freak occurrences that there is no plausible way to prevent them.
Gun control? One of the biggest school massacres took place two years ago in Dunblane, Scotland, where gun laws are among the tightest in the world. Last fall’s shootings at a school in Pearl, Miss., were stopped by an assistant principal who had the foresight to keep a gun in his car.
The Jonesboro attack renders much of our recent gun control debate irrelevant. Not long ago, Americans were persuaded of the need to prohibit so-called assault weapons. Handguns are a perennial target of gun opponents. Neither, however, were to blame here. The shooters had pistols, but police said the fatal rounds came from ordinary deer rifles, which even the most ardent gun-control advocates say they don’t want to outlaw.
The episode illustrates the absurdity of the federal “assault weapons” ban. Such guns are functionally indistinguishable from garden-variety semiautomatic hunting rifles, which is to say most rifles. The only difference is cosmetic. Except for someone planning a bayonet charge, non-assault weapons can serve criminal purposes just as well.
Would it make sense to bar anyone under 18 from having access to a firearm? Possibly, but kids in rural America and the South have been shooting for centuries–and haven’t been mowing down their classmates in the schoolyard for centuries. If something has changed to bring on the recent spate of school ambushes, it’s not juveniles’ ability to get their hands on guns.
Most youngsters who are allowed by their parents to use guns for hunting and target shooting are responsible and law-abiding. Stringent restrictions would punish the millions of trustworthy kids who have never done anything wrong with a gun in an effort to get at the minuscule number who pose a danger. Sometimes, such tradeoffs have to be made, but we ought to think it through before we burn down the house to roast the pig.
Durbin’s bill presumably would send a parent to prison for keeping a gun in a place where a child could get it. Some of the weapons used by the two boys reportedly were taken from a locked glass case–which suggests the owner was hardly reckless but which Durbin says just isn’t good enough.
Why does the United States Congress have to decide for every American what constitutes sufficient care? Fifteen states have passed laws making it a misdemeanor offense to store a gun improperly, and more undoubtedly will. Ideas about guns and how they should be handled, however, may not be exactly the same in Manhattan as they are in Southern farm communities. There is no good reason for Washington to pre-empt all 50 state legislatures by dictating a single rule from coast to coast.
Though the entertainment media produces plenty of gruesome fare, it’s not clear that violent images spawn violent deeds. Canada has far less crime than the U.S. despite endless exposure to our movies and TV series. For that matter, plenty of countries import all the R-rated mayhem Hollywood can generate without any noticeable effect on their civil peace.
In the aftermath of events like this, there is no shortage of people pretending to have answers for why they happened and how to stop them. The best available answer is: We don’t know.
