Gun Control is a Feeling
On Tuesday morning, he wept. “Every time I think about those children,” the President said from behind the podium in the East room “it gets me mad.” And with strength and poise and such a grave, grave look, the man wept. He would fight this country’s endemic gun violence. And we could all see he meant it. As he paused to gracefully sweep a plunging tear from his face, we would not mistake the depth and intensity of his feeling.
If I told you Tuesday’s executive actions to address gun violence were mere restatements of the current law, how would you know? Or, better, why should you care? The boys in my shop in Texas can each stand and deliver the legal definition of “being in the business” of selling a firearm. As can those men holed up in the Oregon visitor’s center. We’ve known it for years, and it remains unchanged. But the President says the words are “clarified,” that felons can no longer buy guns online and that people will have to get licenses, and you count this a victory.
The truth of the moment is that for many of you, my countrymen, American gun law and culture is entirely a dark wood. You ask only that the President valiantly confront your idea of it. What it must be like. This demand, for aesthetic reaction instead of political conclusion, is escapist. The President’s political romanticism is your own, and it is meant to obscure a capitulation.
This week’s Federal gun actions are premised on what’s known in the metropole as the “gun show loophole.” The term references the blind spots in the legislated interstate commercial network of federally-licensed manufacturers pushing product to federally-licensed dealers. That people meet at arenas and fairgrounds to sell their guns to each other is one of the more visible demonstrations of the outside of this supposedly closed-loop system. In the progressive vision, guns are born in large plants with maker’s marks and serial numbers, with their many dispositions run through an FBI computer database and signed for in the bound books of our nation’s firearms distributors and retailers. The vision is complete technicism. It’s ultimate ambition—live, systemic cognizance of a dwindling stock of biometic-reading, mirco-stamping, cloud-enabled pellet shooters—is of course fantastic, and that’s what largely gives it purchase.
Tuesday’s announced actions, like almost all such actions since the nineties, spring from the persistent fear that the deepest elements of American gun culture will escape techno-economic confinement. The fear, that the gun market cannot be completely apprehended by technical means, is sublimated into the desire of still more technical means, which themselves drive the original anxiety to greater intensity. All the while the target of this profound effort is preserved and invigorated.
It is no secret that American gun sales are setting all-time records. That the industry and its attendant culture are in fullest bloom. So I claim the left’s passivity is purposeful.
The political language of gun control has in less than thirty years regressed from handgun prohibition to violence prevention to the positive promotion of “gun safety.” If this last slogan sounds ambiguously pro-gun, it’s because it is. The American left has outsourced its role in gun politics to an “evil billionaire” Republican. The chief complaint against the AR-15 by the director New Yorker’s Against Gun Violence is that is “icky,” and the research director of Everytown for Gun Safety publicly brags about his study under Fukuyama.
Mr. Obama’s morning speech was the signature of a politics of mere personal expression. A strategy for evading, indeed replacing, political decision with aesthetic reaction. To help you avoid the deadly irony of liberal universalism (we’re telling you the way to fight gun culture is by making more people gun dealers) the President plays the romantic. In his final year we again spot perhaps the central theme of his presidency. Yes, virtually everything done was in the service of economic liberalism. But gosh he was a President of feeling.