DownWithTyranny!: "For the foreseeable future," says Dana Milbank, "gun control is dead," but as Adam Gopnik says, this is "no time to despair"

"There are no more grounds for despair about gun control than there were grounds for despair about the persistence of lynching in the face of the fight against that horror. The truth is known, obvious and inarguable. It cannot be said too clearly, and it cannot be said too often: guns make gun violence happen, gun-control laws make it stop. Anyone who says that this is 'dubious' or 'uncertain' or 'as yet undecided' or 'up for argument' is a liar or a fool or -- well, the third possibility is that he is a true 'American exceptionalist'; that is, someone who believes that Americans are so intrinsically, genetically homicidal that the same gun laws that have alleviated violence and ended massacres in Canada and Australia and Great Britain and Europe won't work here."

-- Adam Gopnik, in a newyorker.com post,
"No Time to Despair About Gun Control"

by Ken

On Monday night, the night of "The horror in D.C.," I noted that as the horror was unfolding and being processed, Washington Post readers were reading a customarily outstanding column by E. J. Dionne Jr., "The Colorado recall's morality lesson on guns," which concludes:

Certainly Colorado shows that when sane legislation is enacted, its supporters need to sell the benefits far more effectively and to persuade more voters to see gun sanity as a make-or-break issue. And they should follow the NRA in never allowing setbacks to demobilize them.

But they also need to be clear that they seek background checks, smaller magazines and the like not to disempower gun owners but to liberate all of us from fears that madmen might gun down our children and wreak havoc in our communities.

Those of us who support gun regulations share with most gun owners a devotion to a rather old-fashioned world. We believe that the possession of firearms comes with responsibilities and that we need to take seriously our obligations to protect one another. Ours is the real fight for liberty. For if we become a society in which everyone has to be armed, we will truly have lost the most basic freedom there is.

As usual, E.J. is far more generous than I am in his understanding of the gun nuts (um, not the term he uses) as people drawn from a large community of Americans who mourn a "lost world" of "solidarity and shared commitment," which they felt, paradoxically, "had once given them more real control over their own lives." But he winds up hitting pretty much the same mark I would:

The gun lobby responds to this lost world by saying: If you feel your power ebbing, grab a gun, and don’t let the elitists disarm you because they disdain your values and your way of life.

I also take the point made by conservative Post columnist Kathleen Parker ("Another mass murder, another conversation), who -- recalling a series on gun control she was assigned to do "about 30 years ago as a young reporter in Florida . . . in response to gun violence, which had peaked in the United States in 1980," and argues that every time we have the gun-control conversation again, we have the same conversation. But I don't think it's entirely true. As Adam Gopnik argues in a newyorker.com post, "No Time to Despair About Gun Control":

[I]t is fortifying, if not comforting, to know that the argument only gets stronger with each new day and each new study. Another one was just published, in that left-wing rag The American Journal Of Public Health, called "The Relationship Between Gun Ownership and Firearm Homicide Rates in the United States, 1981-2010." It shows the same things that every other scientific, refereed, and peer-reviewed study has shown:

We observed a robust correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.
The caution about causation, as I have written before, is not a sign of uncertainty but, rather, a sign of proper reserve: correlations are not causes, but they are the strongest evidence we will ever have. This one is about as robust a correlation as exists in the social science.

Nevertheless, it's hard to quarrel with the thrust of Dana Milbank's Post column After Navy Yard shooting, RIP for gun control":

Why can't conservatives just take the win on gun rights?

On Monday morning, President Obama didn't even try to use the massacre at the Washington Navy Yard to revive the gun- control debate. He praised the "patriots" who were targeted by the gunman, offered the requisite thoughts and prayers, and, without any overt call for gun restrictions, moved on to Syria, the economic recovery and his budget fight with Republicans.

Rather than accept this surrender on gun control, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus accused Obama of a "bizarre response" to the shootings, and House Speaker John Boehner complained the president didn't "rise above partisanship."

"President Obama delivered only brief condolences for the victims of the shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., Monday morning, before quickly pivoting to a scheduled attack on Republicans," protested the conservative Daily Caller.

Of course, conservatives would have been even more indignant had Obama used the occasion to talk about gun control, as he did after the Newtown, Conn., massacre. His response was really a tacit acknowledgment that there is no hope of reviving even the modest gun measure that failed in the Senate in April. If 20 slain first-graders didn't move Congress, the killing of a dozen adults -- a depressingly ordinary event in this violence-numb nation -- wasn't about to change the equation.

Obama continues to favor gun control, which he reiterated Tuesday when asked by Telemundo in an interview. But the issue, for the foreseeable future, is settled: Gun control is dead.

Days earlier in Colorado, voters tossed out two state senators because they had supported laws requiring background checks for gun transfers and limiting the capacity of ammunition clips. That dashed hopes that gun-control advances could be made in the states if not in Washington.

Some of Congress's most fervent gun-control advocates, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), made their ritual pleas for legislation, but they were going through the motions. "God forbid we go on with business as usual and not understand what happened yesterday," Durbin said on the Senate floor. He then proceeded with business as usual, looking up at the public gallery and debating Republicans on Obamacare.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) didn't even go through the motions. He said at a Politico breakfast Tuesday that the recall vote in Colorado "does not bode well for asking people to vote for legislation similar to that which went down in the Senate just a few months ago."

In the Senate, Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) put out word that he had no intention of reviving the legislation he wrote with Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to keep guns away from the mentally unstable and the violent. When it failed in April, Manchin vowed to reintroduce it.

Dana concluded his column:

At the White House on Tuesday, the Associated Press's Julie Pace noted Obama's subdued response to the shooting and asked if "maybe there's some sort of numbness among the public since these shootings have happened so frequently." Another questioner asked if there's "an exhaustion and an acceptance that this is the new normal."

Press secretary Jay Carney said the president "doesn't accept that it's the new normal."

Maybe not. But the loss of hope for gun control is becoming a durable abnormal.

Which brings me back to Adam Gopnik, whose post, you'll recall, is titled "No Time to Despair About Gun Control."

Now, one can get depressed having won an argument without winning a political fight, but that misunderstands the nature of political fights. Once the argument is won -- gay marriage is a fine recent example -- the action will go with it, sometimes far more quickly than one expects. The broken consensus is vulnerable to simple aging, at the very least. There are no more grounds for despair about gun control than there were grounds for despair about the persistence of lynching in the face of the fight against that horror. The truth is known, obvious and inarguable. It cannot be said too clearly, and it cannot be said too often: guns make gun violence happen, gun-control laws make it stop. Anyone who says that this is "dubious" or "uncertain" or "as yet undecided" or "up for argument" is a liar or a fool or -- well, the third possibility is that he is a true "American exceptionalist"; that is, someone who believes that Americans are so intrinsically, genetically homicidal that the same gun laws that have alleviated violence and ended massacres in Canada and Australia and Great Britain and Europe won't work here. The only way not to know that is to decide not to know anything. People can do that for a long time, but not forever.

Yes, Adam notes, there is an intractable Supreme Court standing in the way, but in time that can change too. There's also the overriding obstacle of the deep-rooted cultural "love of guns, the identification of gun ownership with liberty," but such cultural beliefs also change.

Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" is a fine study of why societies persist in obviously irrational, sometimes suicidal, behavior, even when the reality of just how suicidal it is stares them in the face. Why do they continue to deforest in the face of floods, refuse to eat fish even at the price of starvation? Most of the time, he points out, the simple sunk cost of the irrationality helps it persist: we have always believed this, and to un-believe it is to lose our faith in ourselves. Yet sometimes things change. Diamond cites the success story of the Tikopia chiefs who presided over the decision to eliminate pigs from their tiny island, despite an ancient chieftain's attachment to the destructive animals, and to turn instead to eating shellfish. Passionately held irrational values, even when they are hugely destructive, deserve empathy from all of us, since we all have values that are just as irrational, and just as passionately held. But it's our job as grownups, not to mention as citizens, to learn the price of our pet irrationality and, like the Tikopians, to undo the animal forces, on our island and in our head, before they finish undoing us.