In the Wake of the Las Vegas Shooting, There Can Be No Truce With the Second Amendment

By Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

03 October 17

as it a jihadist or just a guy?” So the seventeen-year-old girl asks, on hearing the news, landing at once on the central black-comedy question as the annals of American mass murder expand this morning. If the author of the at least fifty dead and more wounded—the word “wounded,” of course, fails to capture the extent of the maiming, just as the blank word “dead” fails to capture the dawning of grief for so many families—was someone who had, even once, communicated with or been radicalized by ISIS, no matter how remote or long-distance that radicalization, or if he was merely a Muslim from a Muslim country, then a massive act of terrorism would have been committed and a militant response, including travel bans and broad suspensions of rights, would be essential. If it was just one more American “psycho,” then all we can do is shrug and, as the occupant of the Oval Office put it, send “warmest condolences and sympathies...” President Trump, deprived from birth by some genetic accident of all natural human empathy—one should listen to a recently recovered tape of Trump, speaking to Howard Stern, in which he is actually boasting of his indifference to a man he thought was dying—speaks empathy as a foreign language and makes the kinds of mistakes we all make in a second language that we have barely mastered, placing adjectives in places that no native speaker ever would. Who sends warmest anything to the families of murder victims? Vice-President Mike Pence, who is not a sociopath, merely a Republican, knew that the right language is the language of bafflement, talking about “senseless violence” and the rest.

So far, all signs are that it was just a guy—just one more American killer who got his hands on some collection of weapons designed for the sole purpose of killing people, and who then killed people. We know that if it was a Muslim with a foreign name, we would be in full panic mode and all we would be hearing about is the ever-greater dangers of terrorism. Indeed, the killings in France, on Sunday, which were surely terrorism, have already begun to attract that kind of attention from the right wing here. But when it happens here, what we’re told by the entire power structure of American life—both houses of Congress, the White House, and now the Supreme Court, locked and loaded to sustain the absurd and radical pro-gun ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller—is that there is nothing at all to be done, save to pray.

The facts remain facts. Gun control acts on gun violence the way antibiotics act on infections—imperfectly but with massive efficacy. Yet, even with that knowledge, some of us, in our innocence, proposed a sort of truce about Second Amendment issues in the face of the ongoing national emergency—the Trump Presidency—in which it seemed essential to make common cause, even with those who have the strange American fixation on the right to own military-style firearms. They don’t have a reason for this fixation—no reason can be found. There’s no argument for it—such weapons are useless in sport, except for the sport of using them; they play no role in hunting, or not hunting anything except helpless people; and they protect no one from a tyrannical government, since the tyrannical government, if it would ever come to that, is hardly in need of small-arms fire to assert its will. Absent an argument for it, they merely have a fixation about it, but it remains practically religious in its intensity. Between the consolidated power of the pro-gun right, and the truth that gun control has slipped down the agenda of even anti-violence liberals, this means that the only American response to regular mass gun killings will be a shrug and faked sympathy. It is hard to know how to stay too far ahead of despair.