How do you stop a bad person with a gun? Do you
- Take away their gun?
- Send in a good person with a gun?
- Try to figure out why they’re bad?
Now that you’ve chosen your answer, I’ll tell you the correct one: You’re wrong. You’ve got a good point, but what you’ve chosen won’t work every time. And there’s no telling how often it will work.
These issues are complicated. We’re told to respect beliefs because that’s what decent people do, and it leads us to popular conversational catchphrases like “I respect your opinion, but…” We might feel forced to say it or do so behind gritted teeth, yet we know it’s the right thing to do and can move past the argument.
Gun control is an issue with gray areas that have a can have a bloody result. The issue, as I see it, is this: How do you stop a bad person with a gun? It’s a question that I do believe has multiple answers. Unfortunately, none of them alone will stop the taking of innocent lives, so we are tasked to decide what will work best.
When I was still in school, one of my favorite parts of classes was trying to answer questions without definitive answers. Even if it felt futile, you had the sense that you were learning about yourself, others around you and the way the world worked in general. And most of the time, these questions gradually left my mind after class was over, maybe to reappear in conversation later.
But when 49 people get slaughtered at a gay nightclub in Orlando, gun control doesn’t escape your mind. When 20 second-graders get wiped out in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, gun control doesn’t escape your mind. When bodies pile up because evil got hold of a gun, it divides society in an interesting way.
You end up with everyone on the same side of an argument but arguing for different methods, which comes out as people being on different sides. When the cons to an argument include civilian casualties, it seems pretty hard to advocate for it.
Normally, when we “pro and con” something, the cons are the compromise that we have to come to in order to make the plan come through. However, in each of the options that I listed at the beginning of this column, one of the cons is that innocent people are going to die. Which is what we are trying to solve by selecting an option in the first place. Every argument shares at least one of the same cons. No one wants innocent people to die, so we root for a system that will cause innocent people to die.
Because no one wants innocent bloodshed, but the quasi zero-sum game quality of each argument turns the debates into a heated chess game in which heads butt while evil puts bullets through bodies with the same ferocity. Which is why it is vital that we don’t see each other as gun nut conservatives or as pot-smoking liberals. Do you fight fire with fire, or do you hope that you have enough water to put the fire out?
Jeffrey Langan can be reached at lang5466@stthomas.edu