'Tis A Cruel Irony That Adam Gopnik Ventures A Hopeful Note In The Gun Debate On April 1, 2018

If there is a Hell, this blogger fervently wishes that Laura Ingraham and Ted Nugent burn there through all eternity. And that is letting the two scum-suckers off lightly. If this is a (fair & balanced) dream of justice in the face of hatred and bigotry, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
Two Views On The March For Our Lives And The Second Amendment
By Adam Gopnik


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Two views seem possible about the movement behind high-school students’ March for Our Lives, of which, if experience is your guide to American life, you should take the more pessimistic. The optimistic angle is that what one writer would call a tipping point was finally reached in the drive for gun sanity. The eloquence of the testimony by the survivors of the Parkland massacre—and, in Emma González’s case, the eloquence of her silence—and the authority of their witness might, one imagines, finally turn the ever more despairing national debate about gun control around. (The debate was one to despair over because it was not really a debate, with all the arguments on one side and all the politics on the other.) With large corporations shunning the gun lobby, with the general and appropriate shaming of those who spoke contemptuously of the Parkland kids, it seemed like a pivotal moment.

Indeed, the strident contempt that the Parkland kids earned from some quarters of the gun lobby derived exactly from the strength of their witness: they are not the élitist intellectuals or compulsive do-gooders or obsessive gun confiscators of fervid imagination. They are teen-agers who have seen their friends and their teachers slaughtered by a deranged former classmate, using a gun designed to shoot large numbers of people in as short a time as possible. Where the rest of us have to engage in acts of empathy to understand the horror of the wounds inflicted by these weapons, the Parkland kids have heard it, seen it, and, in some cases, felt it and watched it. Firsthand witness is the essence of every great American movement for reform. I am the student, I suffered, I was there. Watching, the march, it was even possible to think that the movement might point the way toward a more general revivification of democratic action, reconnecting the streets with the legislatures in a way that hasn’t happened in a long time.

The students’ witness continues to be remarkable, as demonstrated by a powerful Op-Ed by Isabelle Robinson, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas senior, published on Tuesday in the Times. “No amount of kindness or compassion alone would have changed the person that Nikolas Cruz is and was, or the horrendous actions he perpetrated,” Robinson explained, having herself tried to offer him that kindness, when, as an eighth-grader, she was his peer counsellor. “That is a weak excuse for the failures of our school system, our government and our gun laws. My little sister is now the age that I was when I was left alone with Mr. Cruz, anxious and defenseless. The thought of her being put in the same situation that I was fills me with rage. I hope that she will never know the fear that I have become so accustomed to in the past month . . . I beg her to trust her gut whenever she feels unsafe. And I demand that the adults in her life protect her.”

The more pessimistic view of the situation is that the march was one more weekend event that will soon run up hard against the organized resistance of the National Rifle Association and its dependents in the Republican Party, and so will fail. The adults in your life whom you expect to protect you are not going to protect you. Donald Trump was briefly tempted by his wholly narcissistic instincts—get people to approve of you this instant!—to take the more obviously appealing side, in speaking up, if not for gun control then at least for gun sanity. But he quickly turtled and shut down. It doesn’t pay for a right-wing politician to even tease, or tweet at, the NRA.

Then, on Tuesday, John Paul Stevens, the ninety-seven-year-old retired Supreme Court Justice, intervened, suggesting, to much Twitter stirring, the necessary repeal of the Second Amendment. I’ve often pointed to Justice Stevens’s dissent in the landmark Heller decision, of 2008, as one of the best explanations available that the belief that the Second Amendment protects individual ownership of guns is new, radical, and unjustified. It seems odd, then, to be, in this case, more Catholic than the Pope—or more Stevensian than Stevens—but the argument for repeal, apart from being implausible, also seems unnecessary.

Stevens, to his credit, clearly puts great weight on the value of judicial precedent—far more than the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in Heller, did, in overturning years of universal agreement on the extent of Second Amendment protections—and also feels that, if Heller stands, the only alternative is repeal. This seems, to a non-Justice, or to one not quite so enrolled in the myths of a disinterested, apolitical Supreme Court, unduly ambitious. Overturning or correcting Heller is a business of one or, at most, two more votes on the Court for gun sanity.

After all, no one on the “pro-life” side feels that Roe v. Wade need be permanently accepted because it was once decided. Opponents of that decision want it changed, and, in the meantime, have gone to great lengths to alter local laws in ways that challenge or skirt it. And, even if the arguments against Heller don’t carry the day in some future Court, Scalia’s opinion, not being entirely divorced from reality, accepts the principle that some forms of gun sanity are necessary. Even he didn’t imagine that machine guns should ever be freely bought and sold. There seems no reason to doubt that the current Court would uphold a ban on assault weapons and semi-military weapons of the kinds used in Las Vegas and Newtown and Parkland. (If you doubt that such weapons are the practical equivalent of machine guns, just listen to the tape of the Las Vegas massacre.)

We can expect the usual extremist insistence that this weapon isn’t really comparable to that one, that assault weapons exist only in the liberal imagination, that the bump stock isn’t connected to the shin bone. This is like an opponent of drunk driving being told that no one should listen to her belief that the drinking age should be raised because it wasn’t Scotch that the driver of the car that killed her child was drinking—it was bourbon. And here, perhaps, dark humor carries its own wisdom. If we want a model of effective change, Mothers Against Drunk Driving is a good one to take.

With minimal national legislation, but much of the local kind, in the face of the same kind of scorn levelled against gun reformers—it sounds good, but do we really expect that raising the drinking age will stop teen-agers from drinking?—those women helped establish, mostly from the ground up, a small set of sanities. These included raising the drinking age to twenty-one; promoting ignition-lock devices that make it impossible for those with a history of drunk driving to start their cars while intoxicated; helping to lower speed limits. These simple acts became the springboard of great social change. Drunk driving hasn’t been eliminated, but it has been miraculously reduced: since 1980, alcohol-related traffic deaths, as a percentage of the population, have diminished by half.

If, this time, following the students’ lead, we can make similar strides through activism and local legislation, encouraging new horizons in gun sanity—identification locks on rifles, and licensing, and safety instruction, and insurance demanded for rifles, along the same lines that we universally accept for cars—it would mark a small step forward, which, in the way of social reform, could become a sequence of bigger steps sooner than you might imagine.

In any case, the best consequence of the students’ movement isn’t likely to be the effect that it has on legislatures as they now exist. It will be on the next legislatures, as they exist after the next elections, and those that follow after that. The one sure truth of political reform is that, as the Hemingway character says about going bankrupt, it happens two ways: gradually and then suddenly. Even a hard-core pessimist might think that change may be closer than we think. # # #

[In 1986, Adam Gopnik began his long professional association with The New Yorker with a piece that would show his future range, a consideration of connections among baseball, childhood, and Renaissance art. He has written for four editors at the magazine: William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick. Gopnik, born in Philadelphia, lived his early life in Montreal and received a BA (art history) from McGill University. Later, he received an MA (art history) from New York University. In 2011, Adam Gopnik was chosen as the noted speaker for the 50^th anniversary of the Canadian Massey Lectures where he delivered five lectures across five Canadian cities that make up his book Winter: Five Windows on the Season (2011). More recently, Gopnik has written The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (2012). In 2013, McGill University awarded a DLItt (honoris causa) to Adam Gopnik.]

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