Policy arguments driven by emotion will often have incoherent gaps in their logic, and the Ulvade shooting exposes a big one.

Emotional people tend to focus on the most-dramatic element in a scene, which in this case is the shooter, and the solution appears to them to be removal of the gun.  The problem is that it simply isn’t possible to remove all dangerous implements from the hands of those who are driven to evil, and the more we try, the more we’ll affect others.  Even the most “common sense” of restrictions affects our lives in deep ways.  For one thing, they require that we cannot insist our Constitution and Bill of Rights must be read literally by means of the words on the page.  No small thing, that.  If the words aren’t literal, then who gets to interpret them?  The documents cease to be an agreed basis for our coexistence, but rather a tool for gaining social leverage.

This observation does not necessarily imply a position on gun regulation; the point is only that we should strive to make decisions based on facts and a thorough understanding of our assumptions.

One assumption that Ulvade swept entirely away is that we don’t need guns for self-protection because our modern society has a police force to protect us.  What we witnessed, instead, was the police mainly protecting people from their own impulse to do something to protect children from the slaughter.  The story was the same not long ago in Parkland, Florida.

What happened in between those horrific events reduced our ability to trust in police protection even more.  With head-spinning speed, the activists’ call went from putting a police officer in every school to getting police out of the schools — indeed, getting them off the streets altogether and defunding them.

In other words, not only can we not trust that individual police officers will actually live up to the expectations on which we rely in order to take the burden of self-reliance off our own shoulders, but we can’t trust our fellow citizens not to get swept up in a moral mania and trample our policy compromises into the ground.  The parents outside the school were easy to restrain with guns, while the shooter was dangerous and intimidating to authorities.  The lesson is worth contemplating as we ponder disarmament of the citizenry.

Everywhere around a school shooting are complicated, thorny problems.  At a minimum, we must resist the lure of the crowd and its madness.

Featured image by Jacob Morch on Unsplash.