This isn’t one of those knee-jerk, gun-control screeds you often see after a high-profile shooting. But neither is it another example of rhetorical push back by Founding Father channelers going to the mattresses over the sanctity of the Second Amendment.
Just looking for common ground and common sense. We all get self-defense and castle-guarding, for example, even though “Stand Your Ground” has obvious loopholes and in-home guns kill more family members than intruders.
The issue is as graphically current as the on-air murders of two Roanoke, Va., journalists. That’s as literally high profile as you can get. Horrific live TV and then sickeningly streamed. Whether ACLU or NRA, we all felt the same visceral shock, anguish and anger.
But the reality is that the killer, while weird and unhinged, legally bought his weapon. No weapon laws were broken or unenforced. He wasn’t like the Houston cop-killer who had a certifiable history of mental illness.
Whether at movie theaters, schools, churches, malls, workplaces or highway overpasses, gun violence is as varied in its permutations as it is in its perpetrators. Too often no laws were broken until somebody was killed.
What now? we keep asking.
Demonizing Wayne LaPierre or Barack Obama, while ideologically appealing and emotionally energizing to partisans, hardly helps.
Better mental-illness awareness; check. Background-check vigilance; indeed. Enforcing the laws already on the books; of course. Gun buy-backs; of minimal impact.
The upshot: There are no panaceas. We’re talking about something that is embedded in our society’s culture. That’s why we have about as many guns (300 million) as we do people in this country.
Let’s go back, alas, to the perverted touchstone that is the Newtown, Conn., slaughter of little kids and their teachers and principal. Mrs. Nancy Lanza, whose private arsenal ultimately enabled her disturbed son, Adam, to murder 26 innocents, would have passed any background check.
Her “Live Free or Die” credo, however, was hardly incidental. Mrs. Lanza was no community outlier. She embodied a gun culture for the worse. That was the real Sandy Hook Elementary take-away.
And how about the vacationing parents who took their young daughter to a shooting range last year, where she would accidentally and tragically shoot and kill the instructor? Why would a little girl and an assault weapon be part of any family get-a-way? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.
And how about the local couple who were recently married at the Shooter’s World gun range in Tampa? The groom’s boutonniere was made of a .308 caliber shell casing and the cake topper was a couple standing back-to-back holding guns. They each shot at heart-shaped bulls-eyes on paper targets.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all culturally: weaponry as matrimonial accessory. No reports of a blushing bride. Unless it was a shotgun wedding.
And then there’s Washington’s role.
Background checks for online or gun-show purchases? Sorry, the timing’s still not right.
And remember the assault weapons ban once sought by the White House? Not, to say the least, remotely doable.
The argument that assault weapons and high-capacity magazines should be the purview of SWAT teams, not your next-door neighbor, goes nowhere. It’s always “Groundhog’s Day” for Second Amendment worshipers who see no principled difference between militia-era muskets and contemporary society AK-47s.
But this just in. Wal-Mart has announced that it will stop selling AR-15 rifles as well as other semi-automatic weapons. Recall that Bushmaster variations of the AR-15 were the weapons of choice in Newtown as well as Aurora, Colo. Taking one for the Team? Doing the right thing?
Actually, it was a marketing decision, say Wal-Mart officials, one based on sales and demand. According to Wal-Mart, stores would be increasing inventory of other models of shotguns and rifles.
Call it progress.