March for Our Lives – really?

Over this weekend, the country is hearing yet again from a movement calling itself March for Our Lives. Their point seems to be that children’s and students’ lives will always be at risk from “gun violence.” Or to be more specific: if anyone other than police or military can get a gun, they’ll use it against a child or student. It sounds reasonable, but yet again – it fails.

March for Our Lives – where did they come from?

The movement calling itself March for Our Lives is, of course, not the same as the March for Life that started in Washington, D.C. in 1974. That movement protests the notion of a Constitutional right to get an abortion. March for Our Lives started in Parkland, Florida in 2018. In that year (so the story goes), a student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School brought a gun to school and started shooting his fellow students. (In fact a court in Parkland has had to seat a second jury merely to sentence this student. Furthermore, accounts from that day remain in doubt four years later.)

More recently the country saw a mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas last month. The only doubts about that account are whether law-enforcement and school-resource officers and other adults followed proper procedures. (They might not have.)

But the students who run March for Our Lives refuse to doubt one proposition above all. Too many people can get too many guns, all too easily, they say. So they march, in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Nashville, and many other American cities. They demand measures to make it harder for anyone other than a law-enforcement officer (LEO) or active-duty military to get a gun. These include things like:

• Background checks even for private gun sales,
• “Red Flag” laws that force a court to order local LEOs to take someone’s guns away from him, and
• Raising the minimum age to buy a rifle to twenty-one.

Asking for the wrong thing

Lay aside for a moment the political grandstanding that always follows a mass shooting. Let’s even lay aside Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) yelling at Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to:

Spare me the [censored] about Constitutional rights!

They, and the President,

and celebrities like Matthew McConaughey, all miss the point. Mass shootings happen, not because guns are so easy to get, but precisely because they are hard to get. As CNAV has said before, Utah doesn’t have mass shootings in its schools. That’s because, in Utah, anyone having a concealed-carry permit can bring a gun into school. So no person, entering a school bent on mass murder, can know whether his next target can shoot back. (The his is deliberate: women don’t do mass shootings except rarely as accessories.)

Furthermore, as John R. Lott recently found, mass shootings don’t happen “only in America.” Nor is America the worst place in terms of having them.

So what’s the right thing?

The organizers of March for Our Lives seem to be sincere – though that doesn’t mean they aren’t sincerely wrong. If taking guns away from law-abiding citizens isn’t the answer, they might reasonably ask, then what is?

For whatever reason – which could go to emotional conditioning – they don’t like the idea of hardening the target. Instead, they’ll continue to believe that “authorities” can magically take guns away from everyone except LEOs, active-duty military, VIPs and their bodyguards. (They’ll also believe in the magic that makes anyone in those categories implicitly trustworthy.)

One other thing they’ve forgotten (if this current generation ever knew it) was that such things started relatively recently in America. Cases like Lemon v. Kurtzman happened before many of them were born. That’s when the courts took God out of our schools. When they did that they finished what Horace Mann and John Dewey started when they invented government schools. But as Fyodor Dostoyevsky said, without God everything is permissible. That demonstrably includes mass murder.

Which is why General Douglas MacArthur called for a spiritual re-awakening in America. That’s the right thing. Hard targets might be harder to hit. But if schools were to teach morality again, fewer people would be going after such targets.