Everything can seem hopeless until suddenly it doesn’t — some form of this thought has been bouncing around in my head since the killing of 17 souls at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week. The hope, to our country’s credit, is coming from surviving students, who, in the words of one of them, are calling "bullshit” on a state of affairs in which American students are called upon to die by gunfire in escalating numbers so that politicians never have to face the unnerving prospect of admitting they’re wrong and turning against reliable campaign donors like the National Rifle Association and other elements of the gun lobby. Their willingness to speak out is shaming a nation, both progressives who have not pressed nearly hard enough on this issue in the face of what seemed like daunting odds, and conservatives, who may finally be waking up to the fact that the price of gun rights dogma may be their own children in the next school shooting.
I can say that the sheer scale of school shootings — 290 since 2013 alone — is a stain on our country’s conscience, but this has been said again and again with no action. Reform founders on the illogic spewed by pro-gun forces, who insist that no particular law could stop any particular shooting. Many people are beginning to push back on this obscuring argument, whose logic would suggest that passing any law ever on any topic is hopeless since it will not accomplish 100% of what it sets out to achieve.
The evidence from states like Connecticut that have passed gun restrictions, as well as the sharp increase in mass shootings since the ban on semiautomatic weapons expired in 2004, suggests why gun rights advocates are so opposed to any legislation. Despite their bad faith arguments, it turns out that even quite limited gun restrictions work in reducing slaughter in our schools and other public places. And this evidence creates a powerful logic of its own — if a few laws can have an effect, then it follows that more, stronger laws would have an even greater beneficial effect. And as some are arguing, this will help change the larger culture around gun violence. This is the truth that the gun rights folks resist, and this is the truth that shows that they own the slaughter that we see in our schools and elsewhere. They would rather people have an unfettered right to own guns than protect their own children’s safety, let alone the safety of their fellow citizens.
A toxic yet potent combination of commercial interests, racism, paranoia, feelings of powerlessness, and fantasies of control seem to drive the NRA and its ilk. To a great extent, we are living in the world that they have fought tooth and nail to bring into being over the past few decades, ratified by the decisions of an extremely conservative Supreme Court that sided with their maximalist interpretation of the Second Amendment. And as Kurt Andersen points out in his provocative Fantasyland, the complete victory that the gun rights movement achieved hasn't even been enough for them. They began to propagate imagined threats to gun ownership, such as the idea that the Obama administration planned to confiscate firearms — a lie that, not coincidentally, escalated firearms purchases by people worried about this impending government crackdown. And even after President Trump’s election, NRA head Wayne LaPierre warned attendees at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference that the U.S faces renewed threats from violent leftist forces, against which fantasized threat firearms are the obvious answer.
So we are living in their preferred world — and yet nearly all of us are feeling less secure for it. What their extremism has wrought is a land of mass shootings that are, for all practical purposes, the functional equivalent of terrorism; though nearly all the shootings lack a distinct political purpose, they are in fact having the effect of increasingly terrorizing our nation. Every time a shooting occurs, setting a new record for number of citizens slaughtered, it raises the anxiety level of all of us a little more. In no population is this terrorizing function more obvious than in schoolchildren, who have now collectively been subjected to active shooter drills for going on two decades — drills that, on their own, instill fear in those that a healthier society would seek to nurture and soothe.
It’s ironic, and more than a little suspect, that gun rights advocates, a purported group of libertarian-minded citizens, have done arguably more than any other group to set the stage for a massive enhancement in the power of the state over its citizens. How else to describe the regime they’ve forced us to implement, in which students are as a matter of course made to play-act that they are in fear for their lives, and to accept the presence of metal detectors in their schools, and to accept the presence of armed security guards in their halls? By the NRA’s logic of unfettered access to weapons of war for all comers, further turning not only our schools, but all public places, into fortresses of unfreedom is the price we all must pay when they impose their fantasies of individual firepower on the rest of us.
Given that so many gun rights extremists argue that guns give citizens the ability to overthrow a tyrannical government if push comes to shove, I think it’s a legitimate question whether our current bloody state of affairs is not such an unintended consequence of their logic. After all, what do we make of a government that can’t protect its own citizens — its own children?! Perhaps it deserves to be overthrown after all! It’s also notable that a traditional definition of the state is that it’s an entity with a monopoly on the use of violence in society; from this perspective, the assertion that all we millions of citizens have our own right to perpetrate violence challenges this monopoly — it is, in effect, a subtle attack on collective, democratic action as embodied in our elected government, in favor of a brutish vision of every citizen for himself, defending his individual turf by force of arms rather than by relying on the power of laws and duly-appointed officials (aka the legal system) charged with enforcing them.
But the Florida students currently raising holy hell are also calling bullshit on this effort to delegitimize our ability to act collectively and democratically. By reminding us that the American people are never truly stuck so long as we can speak out, organize, and vote, and that laws are how we express our collective will, they’re helping shake us out of our collective, fatalistic torpor. We will vote out the bastards who take money from the NRA. We will vote in people who will work to end this senseless killing.
