The Horrific, Predictable Result of a Widely Armed Citizenry
The killings in Dallas are one more reminder that guns are central, not accessory, to the American plague of violence. They were central fifty-plus years ago, when a troubled ex-Marine had only to send a coupon to a mail-order gun house in Chicago to get a military rifle with which to kill John F. Kennedy—that assassin-sniper also fired from a Dallas building onto a Dallas street. They are central now, when the increased fetishism of guns and carrying guns has made such horrors as last night’s not merely predictable but unsurprising. The one thing we can be sure of, after we have mourned the last massacre, is that there will be another. You wake up at three in the morning, check the news, and there it is.
We don’t yet know exactly by whom and for what deranged “reason” or mutant “cause” five police officers were murdered last night, but, as the President rightly suggested, we do know how—and the how is a huge part of what happened. By having a widely armed citizenry, we create a situation in which gun violence becomes a common occurrence, not the rarity it ought to be and is everywhere else in the civilized world. That this happened amid a general decline in violence throughout the Western world only serves to make the crisis more acute; America’s gun-violence problem remains the great and terrible outlier.
Weapons empower extremes. Allowing members of any fringe of any movement to get their hands on military weapons guarantees that any normal dispute—political or, for that matter, domestic—can quickly lead to a massacre. Our guns have outraced our restrictions, but not our imaginations. Sometime in the not-too-distant past, annihilation replaced street theatre and demonstrations as the central possibility of the enraged American imagination. Guns allow the fringe to occupy the center.
The seeming breakdown of normal expectations about violence and public life reminds some of 1968, a terrible year—although, if you think this is like 1968, you weren’t there, since that year was marked by a generational breakdown far more extreme, a continuing foreign war far more violent, and a departing President infinitely more unpopular. But then, too, gun violence wasn’t just incidental but instrumental—pointed, causal—to the breakdown of social order. If Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., had not been so easily killed with easily available weapons, 1968 would have had a different shape and meaning.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-horrific-predictable-result-of-a-widely-armed-citizenry
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