Nasty and brutish
Some conservatives attack the very idea of community
Wednesday, after listening to the heart-rending stories of those who lost children and friends in the Parkland school shooting — while holding a cue card with empathetic-sounding phrases — Donald Trump proposed arming schoolteachers.
It says something about the state of our national discourse that this wasn’t even among the vilest reactions to the atrocity. No, those honors go to the assertions by many conservative figures that bereaved students were being manipulated by sinister forces, or even that they were paid actors.
Still, Mr. Trump’s awful idea, taken from the NRA playbook, was revealing. What’s going on in America isn’t just a culture war. For much of the right, it’s a war on the very concept of community, of a society that uses the institution we call government to offer basic protections to all its members.
Before I go there, let me remind you that no other advanced nation experiences frequent massacres the way we do. Why? Because they impose background checks for prospective gun owners, limit the prevalence of guns and ban assault weapons that allow a killer to shoot dozensof people in minutes.
Take Australia, which used to experience occasional American-style gun massacres. After a particularly horrific incident in 1996, the government banned assault weapons and bought such weapons back from those who already had them. There have been no massacres since.
Meanwhile, anyone who imagines that amateurs packing heat can be counted on to save everyone from a crazed killer with a semiautomatic weapon — as opposed to shooting one another or third parties in the confusion — has seen too many bad action movies.
But, again, this isn’t just about guns. Consider how we treat cars.
Yes, it’s much harder to get a driver’s license than it is to buy a lethal weapon, and we impose many safety standards on our vehicles. And traffic deaths — which used to be far more common than gun deaths — have declined a lot over time.
Yet traffic deaths should have fallen a lot more. There are far fewer in other advanced countries, which have used evidence-based policies like lower speed limits and tightened standards for drunken driving to reduce fatal accidents.
There’s also a lot of variation in car safety among U.S. states, just as there is in gun violence. America has a “car death belt” in the Deep South and the Great Plains; it corresponds closely to the firearms death belt defined by age-adjusted gun death rates. It also corresponds to the Trump vote — and to the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, gratuitously denying health care to millions of their citizens.
Our lethal inaction on guns, but also on cars, reflects the same spirit that’s causing us to neglect infrastructure and privatize prisons, the spirit that wants to dismantle public education and turn Medicare into a voucher system rather than a guarantee of essential care. There’s a faction in our country that sees public action for the public good as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom.
Does anyone remember George F. Will declaring that liberals like trains, not because they make sense for urban transport but because they serve the “goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”? And it goes along with infantile fantasies about individual action — the “good guy with a gun” — taking the place of such fundamentally public functions as policing.
This political faction wants a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide even the most basic guarantees of security — security from crazed gunmen, from drunken drivers, from exorbitant medical bills (which other advanced countries treat as a right and provide).
So, think of our madness over guns as just part of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described as a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”