What made a young couple walk into a health facility and start shooting people? It wasn’t our gun laws. It wasn’t the easy ability to purchase a weapon in this country.
If such things made people killers, all Americans would be killers. In that narrow way, gun advocates who bristle at any change after the San Bernardino killings are right.
No one makes you pull a trigger.
But if you stop the argument there, you’re being naive — as naive as saying no one makes you abuse drugs, no one forces you to drink and drive, no one tells you to give your money to phony investment advisers. Yet we have laws regarding all those things.
Laws, smartly written, address the dangers facing a society. The item in question should be less important than the threat.
But our biggest gun law was written 224 years ago, and it remains mostly about that — guns, and the ownership of them. It’s not about bad behavior, murderous thoughts or anything else that guns frequently exacerbate. We have been arguing over this law, the Second Amendment, for centuries.
But we don’t touch it. Because it’s part of our Constitution. Because it’s cherished by many. And because, supporters argue, it’s not the law that makes people put on vests, drop their baby at a relative’s house, then go on a mass murder spree and die.
That’s a sick mind.
And you can’t legislate against a sick mind.
Certain to happen again
On Saturday, the New York Times ran its first front page editorial in nearly 100 years. It called for the end of the “gun epidemic.” Earlier in the week, the New York Daily News, in criticizing lawmakers who offered prayers for victims but no new legislation, ran the headline “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS.”
Naturally, both papers were buried in insults, dismissed as “typical liberals,” and argued against with an avalanche of selected facts and figures that make the case for doing nothing — or for arming more Americans, not fewer. President Barack Obama, calling for tougher gun laws, was shouted down by a well-practiced chorus of critics, who cynically noted, “How’s it working for Paris?”
But being loud and being right are two different things. It’s always easier to scream against change than to create it. Especially since what change would be 100% effective? If we banned every gun in the country, some criminals would still get their hands on them, or use bombs instead, etc.
But is that a reason to watch the next whacked-out fundamentalist go freely into a U.S. gun shop, legally purchase guns designed for quick, multiple killings, then use them on fellow citizens to go out in a blaze of infamy?
Because you know it will happen again.
No choice but change
I don’t have a fast answer for this. Nor do I have the energy or stomach to argue with hate-spewing people who are so mesmerized by gun possession they won’t budge an inch. It’s pointless.
But I do take issue with those who refuse to accept that mass killings with assault weapons fall under the same category as a hunter wanting to go after ducks. Yes, we have had guns in this country since its inception, but we have not had other things: a media that sensationalizes violence on a global scale, a population that feels alienated, video entertainment that numbs you to murder and a Internet that can connect all these elements with warped minds that see death as a badge of honor.
I’m pretty sure if America in 1791 had improvised explosive devices, jihads and YouTube, our Second Amendment wouldn’t read the way it does. But we cling to words written 224 years ago in a world that changes by the blink. This fact remains: people without a previous criminal history can make their first bad deed a doozy with legally purchased American guns, and killing them once they do only speeds up what many of them hope for: a sensationalized death. This is not limited to Islamic fundamentalists. Mass shootings in Colorado Springs (three dead), Oregon (nine dead) and Charleston, S.C. (nine dead) — all in the last six months — had nothing to do with Islam.
We can leave gun laws untouched, but something else will eventually give: maybe surveillance on every home and business; metal detectors on every door frame; random interrogations, sweeping immigration reform, airborne snipers, rounding up of particular religions. All things that will make America look a lot less like America than if its people were a little less armed.
Our choice. But sick, murderous minds are here to stay. How easy we make it for them is the only thing we can control.
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. He will sign copies of his new book, “The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto,” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Schuler Books in Okemos, at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Barnes & Noble in Northville, at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Art Van Furniture in Warren and at 11 a.m. Dec. 13 at Costco in Bloomfield Hills.
Another mass shooting and the first words I hear is “Gun Control”!!! After all these years, nobody has not come up with any other solution??
When they call for gun control, how can you make laws that will make all people to obey??
Why not a better system?? Why not a system where guns and other heavy metal items can be detected?
Can detectors be developed to where a gun be detected first, and then the armed person can be shuttled to another area first before the heinous crime can be committed?
My idea is to have such metal detectors imbedded in door posts/jams to cause an alarm in another room be activated quietly so that the proper personnel can take action first.
The suspect can be seen and recorded on a monitor first. As the suspect enters the building, he enters a prepared place to where he can be encountered and contained.
As new establishments are built, these items can be constructed. As for older buildings, it will take some modifications. When an alarm is turned on, maybe a series of door ways can be opened to “guide” the suspect to an encounter area.
I have thought of this idea. Now, are there any other “brainiacs” out there that can think of a better realistic plan?
Another idea is to allow everyone to have weapons. It’s like going back to the old west.