Gun control activists need to learn a little sympathy
23rd February 2018
John Podhoretz, who lives in an Other Left Coast bubble, still finds an acorn every now and then.
In 2013, 107,000 crimes in the United States were committed with a gun. There are 330 million people in the United States. If we assume every one of those crimes was the work of a different individual, then .03 percent of all those who live with a gun in the United States used that gun in the commission of a crime.
That’s not 3 percent. That’s not one-third of a percent. That’s three-hundredths of a percent.
There are approximately 120,000 schools in the United States. If we use the term “school shooting” in the most capacious way, there have been 145 incidents since 2010. That means 0.12 percent of all schools in the United States have suffered the horror of a school shooting.
If you are the sort of person who believes guns are evil objects no one should want to possess, or that semi-automatic weapons are especially monstrous devices no one should be allowed to own, these numbers won’t matter all that much to you, or at all. In your mind, the very fact that guns are used in crimes, especially in mass shootings, invalidates any arguments on their behalf.
One Burning Issue. People Who Are Like Me are the only people who matter, and People Who Aren’t Like Me are barely tolerable and might not really be People after all.
But you are almost certain to ask, “Why does anyone need these things when they can do such harm?” You scoff at the tired line that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. You have likely assigned moral meaning to the ownership of a gun. And you have judged those who own one to be suffering from a moral flaw, and those who own many to be fetishistic monsters.
Maybe not even People at all.
What you have to understand is that while you believe you have all the moral force on your side, you cannot make a gun owner believe that he is the Parkland shooter. Because he isn’t. And let’s face it — somewhere, deep in your heart, you think he is.
And that’s the problem. To the Left, the Right aren’t even people, they’re just some sort of underworld denizens who just happen to resemble people in some respects.