With respect to just about anything in life, if you ask the wrong questions you’ll get the wrong answers. That’s particularly the case if you’re trying to solve a problem. If you fail to understand the root cause of the problem, you’re going to fail to come up with an adequate solution.
Right now we’re seeing that with respect to school shootings in the wake of the Uvalde massacre. Leftists are going on the warpath, using the massacre as an excuse to achieve the goal of civilian disarmament which they’ve always sought to achieve. Banning certain types of guns won’t do anything to lessen the incidence of school shootings, but it does make leftists feel better about themselves.
The first question that people get wrong is, how can we stop school shootings? The answer is that we can’t. But if we continue down the path of thinking that we can prevent these events from occurring, the solutions we come up with will inevitably harm innocents and fail in their objective.
The reality is that we live in a world of fallen human beings with a propensity to do evil. You cannot eradicate evil. The purpose of laws against murder, rape, robbery, etc. isn’t to prevent those crimes from happening, because there will always be someone who commits those crimes regardless of the consequences. The purpose of those laws is to punish evildoers and to ensure that they can’t continue committing crimes, either through putting them to death or incarcerating them.
But just because we can’t stop these events from occurring doesn’t mean that we can’t minimize their occurrence. There’s a common denominator to all of these shootings, and it isn’t guns. Banning guns or 30-round magazines won’t result in fewer broken teenagers going off the deep end. All it would do is punish innocent gun owners for the actions of a few bad people, bad people who would still be out there looking to inflict harm.
The question that needs to be asked is, how do we keep from creating these bad people? It starts with how children are raised, and continues with how they are schooled. Take children from broken homes, put them in an environment in which they’re mercilessly teased and ostracized for whatever reason bullies can find, and you’ll end up with school shooters.
But no one wants to urge parents to take responsibility for raising their children, because that’s too hard. No one wants to question our system of schooling and how its indoctrination and socialization creates cliques and outsiders and damages the mental health of growing children. This is how it’s always been, and no one wants to do the dirty work of changing it because that would require actual thinking and effort. Why would teachers and administrators actually try to care about the children in their care and take security seriously every day, when they can just make someone else – gun owners – do something instead?
Another wrong question bandied about on social media is, why do gun owners value gun rights more than children’s lives? That’s a loaded question, and a straw man.
The proper question to ask is, why do gun owners defend the right to keep and bear arms?
The reality is that the right to life is the ultimate right in our society, and everything else flows from that right. The right to defend our life, and to use firearms to do so, derives from that right to life. Getting rid of the right to defend your life means that you don’t actually respect the right to life.
Of course, the problem with many of the questions coming from the left is that they’re not being asked in good faith. Leftists don’t really want to engage in dialogue and they don’t really want to learn why other people believe what they do. They just want to enforce their will by government fiat. So they’ll never ask the right questions, just the wrong ones, so they can get the answers they want rather than the answers they need.