A few weeks ago Oxford Michigan, a small town adjacent to my community, was rocked by a school shooting. The incidence was the largest school shooting since 2018. The details of what happened can be poured over in a number of stories. Regardless of how the actual tragedy takes place what happens afterward is clockwork.
Pundits, politicians, and commentators of all stripes come out of their respective corners to duke it out over The Gun Question. It's hardly blameworthy to want to prevent mass shootings, especially those that occur in schools and victimize young people. However, the discussions regarding solutions are, like every conversation revolving around a deeply systemic issue, annoying as shit.
The conservative, pro-gun stance is obviously unserious about preventing future gun violence. The Wayne Thibbideau line of argumentation - that more guns would in theory prevent mass shootings - is a defacto pro-gun violence argument. Gun violence plaguing communities across the country would be acceptable as long as all the parties involved were armed.
But while the conservative mind lacks in solutions to random acts of gun violence their counterpoints to liberal stances on gun control can actually ring true. Namely, that gun criminalization will not prevent gun violence and there is no guarantee that proposed gun legislation would prevent any given incidence of violence.
This of course is the risk liberal politicians and pundits take when they stake the imperative to a given tragedy. Nothing embodies the politician's fallacy more than gun violence: "we have to do something about x, y is something, therefore y is doing something about x". This is to say nothing of the efficacy of the laws themselves. I support things like red flag laws or permit laws because they have been shown to reduce murders and suicides (which I generally think there should be less of), but neither of these laws would have prevented the Oxford shooting.
The rationalization is very similar to the body camera debate in my mind. I support making police officers wear body cameras, I support making them turn on those cameras when they interact with the public, I support making it a crime to cover up the camera in such interactions. This does not mean that body cameras are an effective measure of preventing police violence. Citing the need for more body cameras after a high-profile police brutality case is just as tone-deaf as citing the need for red flag laws after a high-profile school shooting.
The worse inclination is to criminalize guns, something Bloomberg's anti-gun legislation outfit is known for. Unlike permit laws, red flag laws, or laws that generally scale back the distribution of firearms this legislation aims at criminalizing gun ownership itself. This has a war on drugs effect where there is very little curbing violence or gun use, but there is intrusive police interaction that of course disproportionately falls on communities of color. I oppose banning lots of things for this exact reason, including abortion.
The leftist podcast Citation Needed has an excellent episode on this phenomenon.
Ultimately if liberal politicians and pundits want to claim that they're interested in preventing the next Oxford (which was the next Marjory Stoneman Douglas, which was the next Marshall County, etc) they should focus on systemic measures. Things that vastly reduce the number of firearms produced and proliferated in this country. Whether you support such policies or not, you have to admit they'd at least mean we're taking the problem seriously.
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