There’s an old cliché in America’s gun debate that is so anathema to common sense — Guns don’t kill, people kill — that politically serious defenders of gun culture seldom even invoke it anymore. Like “thoughts and prayers,” it has become a dark and self-defeating punchline. Yet former President Donald Trump and his former vice president, Mike Pence, both went there last week, while speaking separately to the National Rifle Association’s annual gathering in Indiana.
“We don’t need gun control, we need crime control,” Pence declared, offering a clever rhetorical construct that neatly ignores the undeniable relationship between crime and guns. Trump opined: “This is not a gun problem, this is a mental health problem, this is a social problem, this is a cultural problem, this is a spiritual problem,” a laundry list that more closely resembles his own psychological maladies.
The undeniable fact they keep avoiding is this: Yes, it’s the guns.
Consider these recent incidents:
— Kaylin Gillis, 20, was shot and killed in upstate New York Saturday by a man sitting on his porch after the driver of the car in which Gillis was a passenger accidentally turned into the wrong driveway while trying to find a friend’s house.
— Two teenage cheerleaders in Texas were shot Tuesday when one mistakenly opened a car door in a parking lot, thinking it was their car.
— Four people were killed and more than two-dozen wounded after shooting broke out at a teenager’s birthday party in Alabama.
— An 11-year-old boy was shot in the chest in East St. Louis after gunfire erupted during a dispute between two women over clothing. His condition was unclear.
— Ralph Yarl, 16, was shot in the head by a Kansas City resident whose door Yarl mistakenly approached while trying to pick up his siblings. Yarl survived.
In each of case, conflicts that might have ended with flying fists instead ended with flying bullets. This is the reality of a nation with far more civilian guns per capita than any other, during an era when red states like Missouri are loosening gun restrictions with ideological abandon.
Mass shootings wouldn’t have anything like the body count they do if the attackers had less access to such lethal weapons. In fact, on the same day that a gunman attacked Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, a man armed with a knife attacked a school in China. The American death toll: 26. The Chinese death toll: zero.
Suicide accounts for most American gun deaths. Think about that: People who try to end their lives with pills or by jumping off bridges have a chance of survival; gun suicides mostly don’t. Roughly 500 Americans die annually from gun accidents. Knives don’t go off accidentally.
So, yes, guns kill. But only to the extent that America’s gun-addled politicians — and the voters who keep electing them — allow them to.
