Of course our world, on balance, would be a safer place if we controlled our guns better, made them harder to acquire, harder to fire, and easier to track, etc. But in a multicausal world such as our own, we don’t actually have to choose, as Sandra does, between access to guns and political vitriol when we explain Jared Loughner’s killings; we can say, at least in part, that it was both. For to shoot someone, you have to have both access to a gun and the desire to actually shoot it. In the language of deductive logic, both access and desire are necessary, but neither is sufficient.
If we’re trying to answer the question put forth by Obama in last night’s speech, the “question of what, beyond prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward,” then we ought to think about what is reasonable to ask of fellow Americans. While we can’t ask everyone to lobby for gun control, we can make demands on the way that we speak to each other as citizens. We can demand that all Americans in the public sphere speak as members of a shared political community — that they speak with civic regard, with public reason, with other-facing responsibility. We can make that demand because speech is what makes our democracy work. Democracy, as J.S. Mill said, is “government by discussion.”
Would more civic speech reduce the probability of political violence? I think it would. For when people assert that America is being taken over by outsider conspiratorial forces — whether they assert this explicitly, as we’ve heard quite a bit, or whether they do it implicitly, with those ubiquitous references to “protecting the constitution” or with that American Revolution iconography — they are saying, in effect, that the appropriate response to our political problems is armed resistance. The people talking might not follow that logic down — they might skip a step between “American is being attacked” and “we as patriots need to fight back” — but that’s where the logic, logically, should lead them. And importantly, that’s where some in the audience — some would-be Loughners sitting there listening — are bound to go.
Take, for example, a speaker at a 2009 conference called Take Back America. Conservative Kitty Werthmann says the following in a panel entitled, “How to recognize living under Nazis & Communists”:
If we had our guns, we would have fought a bloody battle. So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. […] Take back America. Don’t let them take the country into Socialism. And I refer again, Hitler’s party was National Socialism. […] And that’s what we are having here right now, which is bordering on Marxism.
What sort of moral responsibility does Kitty Werthmann have for the Tucson shooting? Loughner almost certainly didn’t attend that conference. And he almost certainly has never heard of Kitty Werthmann. But ask yourself: why shouldn’t he have been there? Is there some logical reason why he wouldn’t have been influenced by her words? For all she knows, Loughner — or someone like him, someone violent and suggestible, someone willing to take seriously the corrupt implications of her arguments — could very well have been at that conference listening attentively. The chance that someone mentally unstable will listen to her and take up the cause she advocates for is a risk that Kitty Werthmann takes every times she opens her mouth. And the more Kitty Werthmann-like speakers we have — the more people who call for rebellion but assume that no one will listen — the more tightly we stitch that violent potential into the fabric of our society.
I’m puzzled by all these people running to defend the innocence of the purveyors of violent speech. You’d think it’d be a truism, but apparently it’s not: if political pundits don’t actually want a political insurrection, then they probably shouldn’t call for one.
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