RIGHT SPEAK: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Gun Control

No government regulation can make society moral.

A social ill takes place on three levels: the object level, the individual level, and the social level.

Take alcoholism. There’s the object, alcohol. There’s the choice that the individual makes to drink the alcohol. And, finally, there’s the social problems that can be blamed for widespread alcoholism.

The gun control movement operates in the same object-oriented space of the prohibitionist movement. For prohibitionists, the problem was gin. For the gun control movement, it’s all about the guns. Get rid of the gin and the guns, and the underlying problem goes away without having to do anything else.

While the old prohibitionism of sin substances, liquor, drugs, and pornography has been ridiculed and its legal infrastructure dismantled, the obsessive certainty that guns are inherently corrupting holds sway. The lefty media insists that the only solution to gun violence is prohibitionism and more prohibitionism.

Yet the argument for blaming guns is much weaker than the one for blaming drugs or alcohol. Alcohol and drugs are addictive compounds that shape how we think. Guns, unlike alcohol and drugs, aren’t addictive. Nor do they influence behavior. Their relationship to us remains an external one.

And object-oriented prohibitionism is the least meaningful way of looking at a social problem.

In the prohibitionist and anti-prohibitionist discourse over gun control, the familiar choice between civil rights and mass death dominates the debate. It’s the same framework that the Left rejects when it comes to crime and national security, but embraces on the issues of environmentalism and guns.

Guns do kill people in the same purely mechanistic sense in which alcohol, drugs, or rat poison do. But guns are a means, not a motive. They don’t explain why gun violence happens, only how it happens.