Sandy Hook Kabuki

Maybe it's just me, but when I get involved in the gun debate, I find it highly irritating. It's a debate that ultimately will never end and it inevitably leads to rancor and name-calling. You aren't going to have a civil debate when it looks like this, ahem, discussion between gun rights honcho Larry Pratt and CNN's excitable Piers Morgan:

PRATT: Your violent crime rate is higher than ours as is the violent crime rate in Australia. America is not the Wild West that you are depicting. We only have the problem in our cities, and unhappily, in our schools where people like you have been able to get laws put on the books that keep people from being able to defend themselves.

I honestly don't understand why you would rather have people be victims of a crime than be able to defend themselves. It's incomprehensible.

MORGAN: You're an unbelievably stupid man, aren't you?

PRATT: It seems to me that you're morally obtuse. You seem to prefer being a victim to being able to prevail over the criminal element. And I don't know why you want to be the criminal's friend.

MORGAN: What a ridiculous argument. You have absolutely no coherent argument whatsoever. You don't -- you don't actually give --

PRATT: You have no --

MORGAN: You don't give a damn, do you, about the gun murder rate in America? You don't actually care. All you care about --

PRATT: It seems to me that facts don't bother you, do they, Mr. Morgan?

MORGAN: -- is the right for any -- Americans -- you would like to see --

(CROSSTALK)

PRATT: Facts seem to -- they bounce right off of your head.

It actually gets worse than that, but I'll spare you the rest. It's at the link if you really want to go there.

For me, there are two things that are especially irritating about the post Sandy Hook discourse. First, it would be helpful if gun control advocates had evidence that their nostrums will work in this country. It's hard to find evidence that strict gun control laws prevent, or even inhibit, murder and mayhem. If you doubt that, consider Chicago, where gun control laws remain among the strictest in the nation. My friend Mitch Berg makes the point well here (link in original):

In Chicago, since 2008, 622 children have been murdered.  That’s almost thirty Sandy Hook classrooms full of kids.  They didn’t have the “luck” to look, largely, just like the children of our nation’s “elite”, our media, business and wonk classes – white, exurban, upper-middle-class.  The died in ones and twos, not in a bloody pile that became a media feeding frenzy.  They weren’t killed by children of privilege, shot by weapons that the dominant political class was trying to turn into a boogeyman and political wedge; they were mostly murdered by their neighborhoods’ own criminal underclass, carrying mundane, mostly-stolen pistols and illegally-modified shotguns, almost none of them by any “assault weapon” anyone would recognize.

No – they’re mostly black and Latino.  They’re mostly from poor families, students at Chicago’s wretched public schools.  And they live – lived – in a city that has been the American left’s social laboratory for the better part of a century.  And they died in a city that is a fully-owned subsidiary of the American left, and a key part of its national power base, and a place that has made it harder for the law-abiding citizen to buy guns than to buy crack, heroin or a hooker. A city that trumpets the ambitions – and exhibits the failures – of everything American “progressivism” stands for.

Do you think that's a harsh assessment? I suppose it is, but each of the deaths involved is every bit as meaningful as the deaths that took place in Newtown, Connecticut. Murder isn't any better when it happens on the installment plan. And the laws that are designed to make legal gun ownership onerous in Chicago clearly aren't working. If you look further at the link that Mitch provides, you see that the City of Chicago has had nearly 500 homicides in 2012. That's not a sign of efficacy. But you know what? If that's how Chicago politicians wants to handle things, and the citizenry of Chicago agrees with that approach, it's not really my concern. If you believe in local control, you have to let the locals have control. It's up to the people of Chicago to hold their politicians accountable.

Which leads us to the second issue -- while the Piers Morgans of the world bloviate, the various politicians in Washington who respond to such urgent national demands for serious action on guns aren't paying sufficient attention to other issues. Crucially, we're not seeing much movement on what really ought to be job one in Washington, dealing with the various fiscal bills/cliffs that we are about to face. Crime remains primarily a local issue, even when we're talking about heinous crimes like the ones Adam Lanza carried out. The actual working and finance of the federal government ought to be center stage right now. Instead, we're watching politicians alternate between grandstanding and hiding behind the grandstands. Keep your eyes on the prize, folks.