Last week two children were killed and 17 people were wounded in a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.
Do we have to accept that shootings will be part of American life because of the freedoms we enjoy? What, if anything, can policymakers do to prevent them? Newsweek contributors David Faris and Mark Davis debate:
David Faris:
Once again, elementary school children have been gunned down by a maniac wielding an assault weapon. And once again, America is poised to do absolutely nothing about it. As the parent of two young children, I refuse to accept that the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent kids is simply the price of freedom. The bare minimum policy response should be a renewed assault weapons ban, which worked quite well before it was allowed to lapse in 2004. No policy can prevent every shooting, but prohibiting the weapon of choice for mass murderers should be a no-brainer for anyone who isn’t hopelessly lost in a gun cult.
Mark Davis:
It would be depressing to proclaim that school shootings are inevitable in America, but the reason for their frequency is not the blessings of liberty we have enjoyed since the nation’s birth, but the sickness in our culture that has spawned a greater number of people capable of such horrors. The notion that twisted monsters would be dissuaded from acts of violence by an absurdly broad and undefinable “assault weapons ban” is farcical. In past generations, when guns were far easier to acquire, we did not have this problem. It would be useful to understand why.
Faris:
Many countries—from Canada to Australia—enjoy the blessings of liberty without allowing citizens to carry weapons of war into Walmarts and movie theaters. This uniquely American pathology gives troubled individuals access to unimaginable firepower, and as long as such weapons are legal we will never see the end of such tragedies.
Davis:
The United States is not Canada or Australia. Our Constitution recognizes the value of the right to bear arms, a right bolstered by case law since our founding. The problem has never been the weapons, but the “troubled individuals.” Focusing on that requires fixing hearts and minds, which involves neither activists nor government, but good parenting and sound values.
Faris:
The biggest problem truly is the weapons, which is why clear majorities of Americans have rightly favored an assault weapons ban throughout the 21st century. All that currently requires is an act of Congress. Pointing the finger at parents or some undiagnosable cultural ill does nothing but conveniently absolve us of responsibility to take action.
Davis:
The “action” of gun-grabbing will not work. Healing our very diagnosable cultural sickness will. Meanwhile, the overly broad term “assault weapon” swallows countless firearms used legally and responsibly by hunters, sportsmen, and citizens seeking to protect themselves. Again, we do not have a gun problem; we have a people problem.
Faris:
After every mass shooting there is predictable talk from the Right about mental health and “individual” causes. But the same people murmuring “thoughts and prayers” back the president’s funding cuts for mental health services. Their solution to the problem of mass shootings remains a performance of sympathy followed by calculated inaction.
Davis:
This is progress! Here’s a proposal: I’ll fight for more funding for mental health programs if we can stop the disrespect for the prayerful responses that will actually address the problem. Both ends of that bargain place the focus where it squarely belongs—on the dark urges of the perpetrators.
Faris:
No serious person argues that there is an easy fix to America’s mass shooting epidemic. But you can’t point to religiosity while ignoring the fact that countless countries have both lower religiosity and fewer mass shootings. These horrors have increased in lockstep with the relatively recent introduction of the AR-15 and similar weapons onto the commercial market in the U.S., whose logic has been backfilled by the Supreme Court’s maximalist interpretation of the Second Amendment. The GOP is the unapologetic handmaiden of this twisted death cult, and nothing will change until we start getting military-style guns out of circulation.
Davis:
We all want to reduce horrible shootings like the one in Minneapolis. I can even understand the temptation to find that magical legislation that would curtail these tragedies. But it doesn’t exist. In past generations, we had far less gun control and far fewer mass shootings. That fact cries out for a solution that addresses what has truly changed—our broken families, our dysfunctional culture, the poisons of social media and our lurch toward godlessness. No politician can fix that, but a society with a proper focus can. That’s the “action” we need.
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris and Bluesky @davidfaris.bsky.social.
Mark Davis is a syndicated talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.
Read the full article here
