When This Blows Over

Take a few days and think about what you've become.
Obviously, we have a problem. But facts matter: Twenty-six of the 27
shooters in the biggest mass-shooting events in modern American history
were fatherless. You want to look for a cause, there's one place to start. The
U.S. is about 94th among nations of the world in murder rate. We do not
have the highest rate of mass killings or victims of mass killings. Are you
getting that from mass media? Or a different story? Mass shootings
continue at about the same rate they've been at for the past several
decades, through presidents and Congresses of both parties, while gunownership
rates go up but the overall murder rate has actually gone down.
That is a very specific problem that doesn't bend well to memes and
platitudes and partisan blasting. Also, the "Australian miracle" is a myth. I
wish it were true, and I wish it were that easy. But it isn't. Sorry to the
kneejerk xenophiles here. No serious proposal to ban all firearms is being
made by anybody in Congress. Even if you could do it without a widespread
uprising, there would still be somewhere around 300 million firearms out
there in circulation. What do you think is going to happen to those? Guns
are durable goods. The ones made last week will be firing bullets a hundred
years from now, if they're taken care of reasonably well. You'd better
change the mind and heart that has access to the gun, because you're not
going to make guns actually unavailable. They're going to be available, and
they'll be available for a long time. Longer than your lifetime. Longer than
your children's lifetimes. You're going to need a better plan than "scream
until all guns are gone." You're going to need to think in clearer terms than
"If we pass this law against guns, that guy who was planning to massmurder
a ton of people at the mall won't be able to get a weapon, so he'll
just give up that plan." If all guns were made illegal tomorrow, getting one
would be no more than a speed bump for a criminal intent on doing harm.
It's the intent to do harm that matters. You're either interested in actual
facts or you just want to keep picking up and amplifying the monocultural