Recently a politically enraged lone gunman decided to shoot congressmen outside Washington because he thought their party was destroying American democracy. On the same day, a UPS driver in San Francisco killed three coworkers and then shot himself because he thought he was being bullied at work. The fate of the dead and the sufferings of the survivors are tragic, but they are all too familiar. Shootings like these are the natural and probable result when pretty much any American who hasn’t been imprisoned or institutionalized can lawfully buy a gun.
Firearms give power to the otherwise powerless. They give the reality of power, or at least the illusion of it, to the ordinary private individual. Supposedly he can be safely trusted with the power of life and death over his fellows because he is restrained by a combination of his own moral virtue, his conscience, his judgment, and the deterrent power of the criminal law. To the doctrinaire proponents of the Second Amendment, that’s the point. But firearms equally give power to those private individuals undeterred because of religious or political fanaticism, or just plain private rage, whose judgment and conscience tell them that violence is virtue, and who are content to die themselves, as long as they can send others to the grave before them. When they wield that power, we will be saddened, but we shouldn’t be surprised. It is the terrible collateral cost of an armed populace.
