National Review Online
Monday, March 26, 2018
Saturday’s “March for Our Lives” carried the acrid whiff
of moral panic. That the driving force behind the display was genuine — the
event was planned and led by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
who are passionate advocates of gun control — is beyond doubt. But not all that
earnest is sensible, and this was a not a sensible display. Although it was
invoked incessantly, as if part of a catechism, “common sense” was notably
lacking from the streets and from the stage.
It is universally acknowledged in America that the death
of an innocent person is a tragedy worth our attention. Where we differ is on
what can — and should — be done to prevent the next one. That there exists in
this country a range of considered and heartfelt opinion as to how a free
society should respond to savage mass shootings apparently hasn’t occurred to
the march’s participants. Repeatedly, those who disagreed with the
ill-considered prescriptions of the speakers were cast as shills or monsters, or
as traitors to their country, their faith, and their posterity. The worst of
the vitriol was cast at Senator Marco Rubio, a man who has been more open and
accommodating than most in the wake of the Parkland shooting, but who has been
repaid for his efforts with attacks on his character, his sincerity, and his
religious beliefs. He was far from the only target. To listen to the parade of
hostility was to be told that to support the Second Amendment is to be a
revanchist, an outcast, or a vassal. An exercise in persuasion this was not.
Indeed, while one would not have known it from the
hyperbole, gun violence is not on the increase. Rather, it has been
dramatically reduced over the last 30 years, even as the number of guns in
circulation has doubled, the laws governing the keeping and bearing of arms
have been loosened almost everywhere, and the Second Amendment has surged in
popularity. Likewise, school shootings — which, it must be acknowledged, were
already incredibly rare — have diminished in number. Had these developments
occurred after the imposition of strict gun control, reformers would no doubt
have claimed victory — just as they did in the nations that adopted an opposite
policy to America’s and saw precisely the same trend line.
Bluntly put, there is no meaningful way in which students
in the United States are being forced to march “for their lives.” Children
today live in an America that is safer than it has been at any point since the
1960s. One’s chance of being killed in a school is around six times lower than
one’s chance of being hit by lightning. Hideous as it was, the event that
precipitated Saturday’s march was a classic “black swan” attack, the solution
to which is not at all obvious.
Nonetheless, many of the marchers basked openly in the
comforts of simplicity, monomania, and crass demonization. Evidently, the
leaders of this movement do not respect those they oppose, and so they
dehumanize them. They do not value the Second Amendment, and so they dismiss
it. They do not know — or care — that hundreds of thousands of Americans use
guns in self-defense each year, and so they cast the right as all downside.
Their knowledge is shallow and their focus is narrow, as one would reasonably
expect of teenagers.
These shortcomings can be forgiven in the youthful
advocates; they, after all, were thrust cruelly into the spotlight of someone
else’s volition. But one cannot be so kind to the adults who are encouraging
them — and, in some cases, who are cravenly hiding behind them waving the bloody
shirt. There is argument, and there is agitation. There is discourse, and there
is propaganda. There is reflection, and there is reaction. The show that the
marchers put on this weekend was untethered from reality and from civility. It
deserves to be treated as such.
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