By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the
weapon, and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans
immediately pick their preferred root cause, with its corresponding pet
panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument
goes nowhere.
Let’s be serious:
The Weapon
Within hours of last week’s Newtown, Conn., massacre, the
focus was the weapon and the demand was for new gun laws. Several prominent
pro-gun Democrats remorsefully professed new openness to gun control. Senator
Dianne Feinstein is introducing a new assault-weapons ban. And the president
emphasized guns and ammo above all else in announcing the creation of a new
task force.
I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress
enacted (and I supported) an assault-weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It
didn’t work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by
the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to
confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry, and repeal the Second
Amendment, it’s almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.
Feinstein’s law, for example, would exempt 900 weapons.
And that’s the least of the loopholes. Even the guns that are banned can be
made legal with simple, minor modifications.
Most fatal, however, is the grandfathering of existing
weapons and magazines. That’s one of the reasons the 1994 law failed. At the
time, there were 1.5 million assault weapons in circulation and 25 million
large-capacity (i.e., more than ten bullets) magazines. A reservoir that immense
can take 100 years to draw down.
The Killer
Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days
they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I
committed people — often right out of the emergency room — as a danger to themselves
or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing
bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely
more difficult today.
Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution?
Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates
are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their
rights on.
A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass
killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was
mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be
put away — and (forcibly) treated.
Random mass killings were three times more common in the
2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011
University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong
civil-commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.
The Culture
We live in an entertainment culture soaked in graphic,
often sadistic, violence. Older folks find themselves stunned by what a
desensitized youth finds routine, often amusing. It’s not just movies. Young
men sit for hours pulling video-game triggers, mowing down human beings en
masse without pain or consequence. And we profess shock when a small cadre of
unstable, deeply deranged, dangerously isolated young men go out and enact the
overlearned narrative.
If we’re serious about curtailing future Columbines and
Newtowns, everything — guns, commitment, culture — must be on the table. It’s
not hard for President Obama to call out the NRA. But will he call out the
ACLU? And will he call out his Hollywood friends?
The irony is that over the last 30 years, the U.S.
homicide rate has declined by 50 percent. Gun murders as well. We’re living not
through an epidemic of gun violence but through a historic decline.
Except for these unfathomable mass murders. But these are
infinitely more difficult to prevent. While law deters the rational, it has far
less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them,
disarm them, and discourage “entertainment” that can intensify already
murderous impulses.
But there’s a cost. Gun control impinges upon the Second
Amendment; involuntary commitment impinges upon the liberty clause of the Fifth
Amendment; curbing “entertainment” violence impinges upon First
Amendment–protected free speech.
That’s a lot of impingement, a lot of amendments. But
there’s no free lunch. Increasing public safety almost always means restricting
liberties.
We made that trade after 9/11. We make it every time the
TSA invades your body at an airport. How much are we prepared to trade away
after Newtown?
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