Two fathers respond to the Isla Vista shooting -- the only problem is that one is a journalistic joke

We don't need any stinking Magic 8 Ball. Tonight to read the future we have . . . the Great Punditto!

"The war against euphemism matters most because it forces us to look at the truth we already know. The actual consequences of the N.R.A. and the gun policy it frightens those craven politicians into sponsoring is the death of kids like Christopher Michael-Martinez. This truth may not triumph tomorrow, but the truth remains the truth."

-- Adam Gopnik, in a Sunday newyorker.com post,
"Christopher Michael-Martinez's Father Gets it Right"

by Ken

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik began the above-referenced Sunday blogpost:

I don't think I've ever been as heartbroken by anything as I was, last night, by the video of Richard Martinez, whose twenty-year-old son, Christopher, a college student at the University of California Santa Barbara, had been murdered the day before. Christopher and six others were killed in a mass shooting near campus. That I have a twenty-year-old son who is also a college student makes an empathetic response easy, almost obligatory -- but I suspect that many others felt the same way, and that they felt this way because they were hearing a hard truth spoken clearly. Martinez, almost overcome with a grief that he knows and we know will never fade, not for as long as he lives, still struggled to speak sanely in that moment. And so there was something almost heartening amid the heartbreak. Richard Martinez, in the height of his grief, somehow did the hardest thing there is, and that is to find the courage to speak a painful truth: "Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A.," he said. "They talk about gun rights. What about Chris's right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, 'Stop this madness; we don't have to live like this?' Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more."

Adam had some important things to add to his previous writings on this subject, notably about the importance to have the courage to speak truth in place of lying euphemism on the subject, very much worth reading. But for now I want to focus one more prosaic but extremely important thing he had to say:

Why did Christopher Michael-Martinez die? Because the N.R.A. and the politicians they intimidate enable people to get their hands on weapons and ammunition whose only purpose is to kill other people as quickly and as lethally as possible. How do we know that they are the 'because' in this? Because every other modern country has suffered from the same kinds of killings, from the same kinds of sick kids, and every other country has changed its laws to stop them from happening again, and in every other country it hasn't happened again. (Australia is the clearest case -- a horrific gun massacre, new laws, no more gun massacres -- but the same is true of Canada, Great Britain, you name it.)

ALONGSIDE THIS I WOULD LIKE TO PLACE
THIS STERLING PIECE OF RAPPORTAGE

It's from this afternoon, courtesy of washingtonpost.com's august Fix-master, the Great Punditto, Richard Martinez’s grief won’t change the gun debate. It just won’t.

Like Adam Gopnik, the Great Punditto quotes from Richard Martinez's message:

"Today, I’m going to ask every person I can find to send a postcard to every politician they can think of with three words on it: Not one more," Martinez told The Washington Post's Kimberly Kindy on Tuesday morning. "People are looking for something to do. I’m asking people to stand up for something. Enough is enough." Martinez added a stern message to politicians up to and including President Obama: "I don't care about your sympathy. I don't give a s--- that you feel sorry for me. Get to work and do something. I'll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me."

And Punditto allows that Richard Martinez's "grief and anger is hard to look away from."

As a father of two boys who gets worked up when either one of them gets a fever, the thought of losing one of them to this sort of act of violence makes his emotion all the more real and affecting for me. The tendency in the wake of these shootings -- and the emergence of people like Richard Martinez -- is to think that his pain and loss will be the tipping point when it comes to legislating guns.

But it almost certainly won't be that galvanizing moment. In the same way that the attempted assassination of then-Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords wasn't. In the same way the deaths of 20 children in Newtown wasn't. (In fact, since Newtown, more states have loosened gun laws than have tightened them.)

The simple fact is that tragedies involving guns do not move the political needle -- whether you are talking about public opinion or the actions of politicians --  in any meaningful way.  Check out this chart from Gallup detailing peoples' thoughts on gun laws from 1990 through the end of 2013.

AH, PUNDITTO! THE VOICE OF COLD, HARD TRUTH!

Well, Punditto has spoken. Pack up your anger and your heartbreak. Ain't gonna change no thing, so let's all do the jolly NRA victory dance. Who knows, maybe next time it'll be Punditto's kids. Won't that be a hoot? Doesn't matter, because we're Americans, and that's the way it is.

Omitting only the one crucial fact: We're Americans, and we kill people with guns because we love it, baby, it's cool, it's a gas, it makes us feel manly, and godlik.. Is it any wonder that God loves Americans and thinks everybody else sucks?

Just this one thing, Punditto. YOU SUCK, YOU WORTHLESS PILE OF IGNORANT PUKE. YOU ARE WHAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA. Well, not just you personally, but assuredly including you personally. Let's listen again to Adam Gopnik:

How do we know that they [i.e., "the N.R.A. and the politicians they intimidate"] are the 'because' in this? Because every other modern country has suffered from the same kinds of killings, from the same kinds of sick kids, and every other country has changed its laws to stop them from happening again, and in every other country it hasn't happened again. (Australia is the clearest case -- a horrific gun massacre, new laws, no more gun massacres -- but the same is true of Canada, Great Britain, you name it.)

So, Punditto, by all means trot out your facts and numbes and charts. Because you don't have the skills or maybe just the inclination to do an actual job of reporting, which might consist of asking why Americans are so crapitatious (but uh-oh, this might already lead us right back to the NRA and all its money and power and willingness to use both as ruthlessly as necessary), and wondering what it is that makes Americans different from, you know, Australians and Canadians and Brits. Or were you hoping to pass it off as a Universal Truth that horrific and senseless gun violence never has an effect on public opinion?

Maybe we need to listen to Adam Gopnik after all about why it's so important to speak the truth at a time like this.

Martinez's brave words put me in mind of a simple point, which I failed to make in a long essay about language this week, or didn't make strongly enough. The war against euphemism and cliché matters not because we can guarantee that eliminating them will help us speak nothing but the truth but, rather, because eliminating them from our language is an act of courage that helps us get just a little closer to the truth. Clear speech takes courage. Every time we tell the truth about a subject that attracts a lot of lies, we advance the sanity of the nation. Plain speech matters because when we speak clearly we are more likely to speak truth than when we retreat into slogan and euphemism; avoiding euphemism takes courage because it almost always points plainly to responsibility. To say "torture" instead of "enhanced interrogation" is hard, because it means that someone we placed in power was a torturer. That's a hard truth and a brutal responsibility to accept. But it's so.

Speaking clearly also lets us examine the elements of a proposition plainly. We know that slogans masquerading as plain speech are mere rhetoric because, on a moment's inspection, they reveal themselves to be absurd. "The best answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" reveals itself to be a lie on a single inspection: the best answer is to not let the bad guy have a gun. "Guns don't kill people, people do." No: obviously, people with guns kill more people than people without them. Why not ban knives or cars, which can be instruments of death, too? Because these things were designed to help people do things other than kill people. "Gun control" means controlling those things whose first purpose is to help people kill other people. (I've written at length about farmers and hunting rifles, and of how they're properly controlled in Canada. In any case, if guns were controlled merely as well as cars and alcohol, we'd be a long way along.) And the idea that you can be pro-life and still be pro-gun: if your primary concern is actually with the sacredness of life, then you have to stand with Richard Martinez, in memory of his son.

There, that isn't hard, is it? The war against euphemism matters most because it forces us to look at the truth we already know. The actual consequences of the N.R.A. and the gun policy it frightens those craven politicians into sponsoring is the death of kids like Christopher Michael-Martinez. This truth may not triumph tomorrow, but the truth remains the truth. It would be nice if the President, who knows all this perfectly well, put aside his conciliatory manner and his search for consensus and just said it. Speak up, Mr. President! Speak plainly. Just say, "Last night, I heard Chris's dad. He's right."

As for you, Punditto, we all know that the system that allows the NRA to have its way is the system that makes you employable despite your journalistic ineptitude. The best advice I can offer is: Go suck an egg.

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