I do not, however, feel the need to pose in pictures wearing a tightfitting dress and heels, while holding my very own AR-15, as NRA spokesvixen Dana Loesch does on the cover of her book. I’m not absolutely sure, but this increasingly common pose among youngish female conservatives seems aimed at sexualizing guns, or metaphorizing weapons to within an inch of their lives.
.. hating the media is how many Republicans pass the buck. Their accusations are a distraction, the roots of which can be traced to evil. You can’t talk about freedom while also making an argument for gutting the First Amendment.
.. LaPierre may have many valid points, but when he, Loesch and others speak in tongues of hyperbole and conspiratorial incantations, they are not to be taken seriously.
Appeasing the Trigger Gods
During his campaign, Donald Trump often bragged about his skill as a negotiator.
In conversations, he ventured that, as president, he might be able to resolve two of the most thorny and tragic dilemmas: finding peace in the Mideast and reaching a sensible compromise on guns.
He said he would hop in his limo and go to N.R.A. headquarters in suburban Virginia and stay as long as it took to make a deal, noting that there were points where both sides in the debate could agree.
.. Trump wrote in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” that he was in favor of a ban on assault weapons and “a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.” But then the N.R.A. spent more than $30 million to get him elected.
.. “You came through big for me and I am going to come through for you,” he told the N.R.A. after his election, out-Hestoning Charlton Heston.
.. After 49 people were killed in a shooting at an Orlando nightclub in June 2016, he suggested that it would have been “a beautiful, beautiful sight” if more people in the club had been armed and went “boom” at the “maniac” shooting at them.
It was too hard-line even for the N.R.A.
“I don’t think you should have firearms where people are drinking,” N.R.A. chief Wayne LaPierre demurred.
.. Last year, weeks after taking office, Trump signed a bill rolling back a regulation that made it harder for mentally ill people to buy guns.
.. I wrote in disgust about President Barack Obama failing to marshal the L.B.J. mojo to push through a gun control bill after Sandy Hook even though he had 90 percent of Americans on his side and a Democratic Senate.
.. America would accept periodic human sacrifices to the trigger gods in the interest of upholding this bizarre notion that the Second Amendment is inviolate or even really threatened.
.. Since Newtown, there have been more than 1,600 mass shootings.
No Country for Young Men With AR-15s
The pro-gun vision is linked, of course, to practical concerns — support for gun ownership is higher in rural areas where the police are far away. But it’s essentially a moral-political picture in which the fullness of citizenship includes the capacity to protect and defend, to step in when the state fails and resist when it imposes illegitimately.
.. I can imagine many situations and political dispensations in which a morally responsible citizen should own a weapon; I have encountered many communities where “gun culture” seems healthy and responsible rather than a bloodthirsty cult. And the claim, often urged on anti-abortion writers like myself, that guns and abortion should both be opposed on “life” grounds seems like a category error, since every abortion kills but guns sit harmless in millions of households and many deter violence or turn back evil men.
.. However: A fetishization of guns and violence is also a real American cultural phenomenon, perhaps especially among alienated, isolated young men. And for them and for others (including the N.R.A. these days), the guns-and-citizenship ideal can curdle into a crude myself-alone libertarianism for an age of polarization and mistrust.
.. For instance, instead of debating gun regulations that would apply to every gun owner, we could consider limits that are imposed on youth and removed with age. After all, the fullness of adult citizenship is not bestowed at once: Driving precedes voting precedes drinking, and the right to stand for certain offices is granted only in your thirties.
.. Perhaps the self-arming of citizens could be similarly staggered. Let 18-year-olds own hunting rifles. Make revolvers available at 21. Semiautomatic pistols, at 25. And semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 could be sold to 30-year-olds but no one younger.
.. But it is more specifically targeted to the plague of school shootings, whose perpetrators are almost always young men.
.. And it offers a kind of moral bridge between the civic vision of Second Amendment advocates and the insights of their critics — by treating bearing arms as a right but also a responsibility, the full exercise of which might only come with maturity and age.
Repeal the Second Amendment
From a law-and-order standpoint, more guns means more murder. “States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides,” noted one exhaustive 2013 study in the American Journal of Public Health.
.. The F.B.I. counted a total of 268 “justifiable homicides” by private citizens involving firearms in 2015; that is, felons killed in the course of committing a felony. Yet that same year, there were 489 “unintentional firearms deaths”
.. The Minutemen that will deter Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are based in missile silos in Minot, N.D., not farmhouses in Lexington, Mass.
.. The Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, the New York draft riots of 1863, the coal miners’ rebellion of 1921, the Brink’s robbery of 1981 — does any serious conservative think of these as great moments in Second Amendment activism?
.. Conservatives often say that the right response to these horrors is to do more on the mental-health front. Yet by all accounts Stephen Paddock would not have raised an eyebrow with a mental-health professional before he murdered 58 people in Las Vegas last week.
.. What might have raised a red flag? I’m not the first pundit to point out that if a “Mohammad Paddock” had purchased dozens of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition and then checked himself into a suite at the Mandalay Bay with direct views to a nearby music festival, somebody at the local F.B.I. field office would have noticed.
.. they argue their case badly and — let’s face it — in bad faith.
.. There is no “gun-show loophole” per se; it’s a private-sale loophole, in other words the right to sell your own stuff.
.. The civilian AR-15 is not a true “assault rifle,” and banning such rifles would have little effect on the overall murder rate, since most homicides are committed with handguns.
.. The N.R.A. has donated a paltry $3,533,294 to all current members of Congress since 1998
.. equivalent to about three months of Kimmel’s salary. The N.R.A. doesn’t need to buy influence: It’s powerful because it’s popular.
.. guns recovered by police are rarely in the hands of their legal owners, a 2016 study found.
.. Americans who claim to be outraged by gun crimes should want to do something more than tinker at the margins of a legal regime that most of the developed world rightly considers nuts. They should want to change it fundamentally and permanently.
.. Gun ownership should never be outlawed, just as it isn’t outlawed in Britain or Australia. But it doesn’t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either.
.. Donald Trump will likely get one more Supreme Court nomination, or two or three, before he leaves office, guaranteeing a pro-gun court for another generation.
.. Some conservatives will insist that the Second Amendment is fundamental to the structure of American liberty. They will cite James Madison, who noted in the Federalist Papers that in Europe “the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” America was supposed to be different, and better.
.. I wonder what Madison would have to say about that today, when more than twice as many Americans perished last year at the hands of their fellows as died in battle during the entire Revolutionary War.
.. The true foundation of American exceptionalism should be our capacity for moral and constitutional renewal, not our instinct for self-destruction.