From The Economist blog ‘Democracy in America’:
Still, freakish death is profoundly unnerving and facing its immunity to reason tends to aggravate rather than soothe our cellular fear of disorder and death. Far from leading us to resignation, the inscrutability of a sui generis disaster sets our minds in mad motion. We desperately and pathetically grope for some blameworthy failure of foresight, some forward-looking lesson, some food for prudence. It doesn’t matter if there are none to be found. We’ll make it all up if we have to.
Not every general feature of Saturday’s shootings in Tucson has been seized upon. No one is proposing new rules for supermarkets, young white guys, or sun-baked locales. The things we already fear and already desire more thoroughly to control are most vividly salient to us. We seize on those: guns, crazy people. Did Jared Lee Loughner shoot government officials with a gun? Ban guns within 1,000 feet of government officials! Was Jared Lee Loughner detectably crazy? Make involuntary commitment easier! Did Jared Lee Loughner buy a gun while detectably crazy? Tighten background-screening requirements! Did Jared Lee Loughner’s gun sport an extended magazine? Ban extended magazines!
Some of these proposals may have merit, but no more now than on Friday.
The issues they address have become no more urgent. Sadly, people are shot to death every day. The odd and the infirm roam our streets. Some of them buy guns and use them. With the incarceration of Jared Lee Loughner, the odds of crazy people shooting and killing officeholders (and untitled, less newsworthy human beings) has gone down, not up. There is no more reason now to deliberate publicly about mental-health and gun-control policy. Indeed, there is every reason to postpone deliberation and debate until we recover from the panicked burst of irrationality and high emotion predictably induced by a highly-visible but singular, largely ungrokkable enormity.
The groundless yet tenacious insistence of partisan rhetoricians that Mr Loughner’s evil deed was somehow brought about by partisan rhetoric is Exhibit A in the case that our opinion- and law-making classes are now in no condition to reason responsibly about guns and insanity. If our instinct for order and self-protection really needs something to chew on, consider a new cultural norm discouraging public deliberation and policymaking regarding the issues that spring immediately to mind in the aftermath of a traumatising tragedy. Wouldn’t the PATRIOT Act be better had Congress waited six months, or at least long enough to read the thing, before voting on it? Good arguments for banning extended magazines will still be good in two months, and it will be easier to tell.
We may badly want to do something, but we will be better off in the end if we hug our jerking knees and find our cool. The ordinary operation of the criminal-justice system is enough for now. If you’ve got to do something, why not tell a pundit or politician yammering on about background checks or forced institutionalisation to please shut up, since it’s just too soon for reason to prevail.
Read the whole thing here.
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