I was just re-reading the piece before this, the one about mass shootings, and I decided I botched the ending. Asking "How do we put an end to mass shootings?" is the wrong question. It's like asking, "How do we make sure there are no more auto accidents or muggings on the street or bank robberies?" We are never going to totally eliminate such things so to ask those questions is to set ourselves up for impossible tasks and certain failure.
With government, the questions should all be in the form of "How do we lessen this or that awful thing?" A law accomplishes something if it leads to 50 people dying a year instead of 500. We've passed many laws that have reduced things like drunk driving or counterfeiting. Those are good laws even if they don't rid us of 100% of those crimes.
We will never stop all mass shootings but we can probably lessen them. This means opening the possibility of laws that might make it harder for someone like the kid in Florida to get his mitts on an AR-15. It probably means reinstituting the assault rifle ban and undoing laws like the recent one that made it easier for the mentally ill to obtain weapons.
I am not talking about confiscating all guns or grabbing them away from folks who are sane, know how to use them and may even need them. Gun Control is not Gun Elimination.
And to make any of that happen, we have to elect Senators and Governors and other officials, including a President, who are more worried about losing their offices because they're on the wrong side of the N.R.A. than if they're on the right side. That's it. Nothing's going to pass as long as they're more afraid of the N.R.A. and similar institutions than they are of voters who want the availability of guns controlled more.
I don't know if that can be changed. But like I said in the last post, we need to be pragmatic…and I think the pragmatic view is that that has to happen before anything can change. I am not saying it will; just that I'm not sure anything else is going to matter.