William McGurn, who regularly writes a column called “Main
Street” in the opinion pages of the Wall
Street Journal, has a rather weird view of evil. In his column titled “The
Liberal Theology of Gun Control,” he postulates that an evil can exist that
does not manifest itself in the real world. The hidden premise—that Islam is
inherently evil—does not appear in the article, which has as its subject the
excoriation of liberals for thinking gun control would have prevented the
terrorists attacks in San Bernardino and Paris.
He expresses liberalism’s approach to gun control as a
skeptic might approach a theology: “Put simply, today’s liberalism cannot deal with the reality of evil. So
liberals inveigh against the instruments of evil rather than the evil that motivates
them.”
The logic is ridiculous because it assumes that evil is
something concrete that exists apart from the actions by which evil manifests
itself. But if you think of evil actions but do nothing, how is your evil a
problem to anyone else? It’s when you commit evil actions that society will
consider you evil.
Thus, anything we can do to stop evil actions stops evil. The
San Bernardino suspects had legal access to guns, which they then illegally
modified. While no one would aver that greater gun control laws would have necessarily
prevented the San Bernardino killers from acting, it certainly would have
slowed them down, and perhaps made them come out of the closet and thus be
identified by the authorities. And we can be certain that stricter gun control
would have stopped some would-be terrorists.
McGurn also errs in assuming that all liberals want to do to
fight terrorism is establish stronger gun control laws. That is a fallacious
reading of the record of statements by President Barack Obama, Secretary of
State John Kerry, U.S. military and security officials, Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders. Implementing stronger gun control laws is a small part of the
package that liberals propose to fight terrorism, almost an afterthought.
Stopping terrorism is also not the only reason to establish
stronger gun control laws. In the United States, statistics demonstrate that we
have relatively little to fear from the terrorist, but much to fear from the
legal gun owner who has an accident, the child or other family member who
uncovers a loaded gun and the run-of-the-mill criminal who can purchase a gun
at a gun show with no waiting period. It’s a simple fact: the fewer the number
of guns per capita in a society, the lower the rate of death and injuries from
guns.
His assertion is completely false that in the wake of the
San Bernardino shootings, the entire public discussion is about gun control.
He’s confusing San Bernardino with the mass murders in Colorado Springs,
Aurora, Tucson, Newtown, Virginia Tech, Charleston, Pittsburgh and Columbine.
After Bernardino, the news media is focusing on Obama’s performance, what we
knew and didn’t know about the terrorists before the shooting, refugees and
Donald Trump’s awful statements about not letting Muslims in the United States.
A number of almost comic rhetorical flaws mar McGurn’s
article, except for those who enjoy finding logical boners. For example, he
says that tough gun control laws did not prevent terrorists from inflicting
mayhem on Paris and San Bernardino. McGurn scores a two-fer for stupidity with
this statement: 1) While it’s true that California and France have stricter gun
control laws than other municipalities, both, and especially California, are
part of larger geographic zones where in which one can travel without
constraints, and in which gun control laws are much
looser. 2) No one has said stronger gun control would have prevented the San
Bernardino or Paris murders. What liberals and progressives are saying is that
controlling gun sales will reduce the total number of terrorist attacks using
guns.
McGurn makes a weird historical comparison which hides the
fact that the two assertions in the comparison are fallacious. He states that
liberals today are calling for greater gun control instead of fighting ISIS,
just as liberals called for greater gun control during the Cold War instead of
fighting communism. While it’s true that many progressives both today and in
the past have called for gun control, it’s also true that most American
progressives on domestic issues have also been hardline on military issues. From
Truman, Johnson and Humphrey to Obama and Clinton, Democrats have taken a hard
line in foreign affairs while supporting gun control at home. Richard Nixon
could hardly be called a wimp in foreign affairs, and he was in favor of
outlawing handguns and requiring licenses for hunting rifles.
To the degree that it reflects current right wing thinking,
the scariest part of McGurn’s article is his underlying premise about evil,
that it is an essence and not a type of action. In McGurn’s world view, the
only way to free ourselves of the threat of terrorism is to kill everyone who
has evil thoughts. I don’t believe that McGurn expects our security forces to
begin reading minds. I’m thinking that he believes he knows an evil person
(which is different from an evil doer) when he sees one.
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