One Track Minds

One of the downsides of negative partisanship is that, eventually, people start to lean into it. That is to say, they seem to act as if they want to drive people away from their position. Consider the following, culled from LinkedIn:

In 2020, some forty-five thousand people died from firearm-related injuries. Which was substantial, but not remarkably higher than previous years. Is it really that inconceivable that someone might decide that tens of thousands of deaths might be prevented every year if the public no longer had access to firearms?

I could understand a "Second Amendment absolutist" concluding that the number of people who are killed (and injured) each year who aren't engaged in any sort of government-sponsored acts of tyranny are an acceptable sacrifice, and that those deaths are simply a price that must be paid for an armed and vigilant society. Presumably, this "Foundation for Economic Education" (which seems more like a right-Libertarian think-tank than an educational foundation) believes just this (although I suppose they could have bought into an Infowars-adjacent mindset that presumes that some substantial part of the reported gun violence rate is part of hateful plot to subjugate the United States), so why not own it? Why not simply come out and say that attempting to do away with the public's right to keep and bear arms in order to save lives is not worth the potential consequence?

As an aside, I scrolled through the "Foundation for Economic Education's" LinkedIn posts. Nothing on police violence. Not that I really expected anything. For some reason local law enforcement, who often cite concerns that members of the public might be armed in cases of lethal force that later turn out to be unjustified, are exempted from "the government" when there is talk of creeping tyranny, despite the fact that they are the people most often tasked with enforcing laws.

In any event, it's difficult to imagine anyone other than a committed partisan honestly buying into the idea that about twenty-thousand homicides and twenty-five thousand suicides are such a trivial number that no-one in "the government" might come to the conclusion that it's worth doing something about. Instead, gun control has to be nothing other than part of some hateful conspiracy to subjugate the public.

While it's true that sometimes, people disagree with someone's position out of hidden self-interest or motivated reasoning, sometimes, a position is unpopular with certain segments of the society because it comes across as manifestly irrational. For my part, I myself am a proponent of a much more limited role for government than what the United States currently has; but I'm also observant enough to recognize that the United States has the government it does because a fairly substantial subset of the population understand that it works for them. After all, this "Foundation for Economic Education" apparently can't even be bothered to acknowledge that the United States has a problem with violence (given that it has, far and away, the highest intentional murder rate of advanced, industrialized nations), let alone offer anything approaching a solution. While I'm pretty certain that the authors of the Bill of Rights realized that allowing an armed public would result in the wrong people being shot from time to time, I'm not sure they would have signed up for the level of violence in the United States today, had they foreseen it.

Government's solutions to people's problems are often sub-optimal, but they're something. Which tends to be more than doctrinaire critics of government offer. But then again, it's easier to complain about someone else's solutions than to create them oneself.