Questions of the Second Amendment lurk beneath the conversation about mass shootings.
FOR 17 pensive minutes, students from across the nation marched out of class on Wednesday in protest. Their pleas are as familiar as they are poignant. “Are we next?” inquired one Manhattan student. “No more silence. Stop gun violence,” read a poster in Seattle. One particularly keen protester noted, “My middle school’s dress code was more restrictive than this country’s gun laws.”
The high school I attended, Mira Loma High School in Sacramento, California, had its own walkout, too. It was organized by an activist-minded girl with whom I’ve shared classes and conversations. I admire her. Her energy is impossible to ignore, her enthusiasm impossible to stop.
As Arthur Brooks has argued, good thinkers will maintain both a sharpness of mind and a softness of heart. But when the two clash, which wins? That is precisely the dilemma I face on the issue of gun control.
Last month, 17 were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Nikolas Cruz, the murderer, unleashed the demons in his mind upon students and teachers whose only offense was to exist. These were innocent lives, wasted. It is a gut-wrenching event—made worse by the increasing regularity of such mass shootings.
The trouble I have is that the problem of mass shootings seems nearly unfixable. Gun control measures would help, but only on the margins. More research on gun violence could help reduce gun-related deaths (most of which are suicides), but offers no way to stop mass murderers. The fundamental reason America has so many mass shootings is because it has so many guns. The solution, therefore, is to somehow confiscate America’s 300 million guns.
But the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the possession of handguns—and arguably other firearms as well—is protected by the Second Amendment. The 2007 Virginia Tech shooting that left 32 dead was carried out with handguns—as the plurality of mass shootings are. The bleak choice we’re left with is either amend the Constitution or accept an unacceptable reality.
And this is where the unstoppable force of teenage activism hits an immovable wall. The gun control debate could pivot toward amending the Constitution, but it’s unclear whether that’s possible—or even advisable. Three-fourths of the states would have to ratify a gun-restricting constitutional amendment in a country deadlocked over gun restrictions. And the doomsayers who long feared Barack Obama was “coming to take your guns” would, at last, have a point.
Still, I can’t help but ask: what if that was my high school? What if Marjory Stoneman Douglas was Mira Loma? How would I react? Would my views change? I pray such questions remain purely hypothetical.
America has, in effect, chosen the status quo on mass shootings. The tribal war over gun control has taken the place of a real debate over the Second Amendment. Backing or opposing gun control is a form of catharsis, the only remaining reprieve from a uniquely American tragedy.
