"Oh, reason not the need."

Everyone's reaction to the President's gun initiative(s) has made me think more about the issue whether I want to or not.  I've also been thinking more about the post I wrote yesterday discussing the false analogy of video games to assault weapons.  I've been sitting upstairs listening to various pundits weigh in on Chuck Todd's Daily Wrap Up and trying to come up with analogies that make sense and the more I come up with the more I get confused about my own position.

If you factor out the loonies on both sides of this issue, the debate becomes increasingly interesting.

Why does anyone need a military style weapon with high capacity magazines, gun control advocates ask?  "Oh, reason not the need," Lear rightly says.  After all, why does anyone NEED anything?

I think the answer to that first question is that a Bushmaster with one of those magazines is a lot of fun at the shooting range, but we liberals roll our collective eyes at that answer.

Why does anyone NEED a military style vehicle, a Hummer?  Because they're fun!  Yes, they spew their lethal emissions into the atmosphere and cut up pristine forest land and make a lot of noise, but the fact remains that it would be cool to go four wheeling in one.

What about stock cars at Bandimere and the dirt bikes racing away just up the road?  My daughter almost got killed in a car accident.  Cars that can do the quarter mile in 2.5 seconds and reach speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour have no business on the roads.  Someone could get killed.  But on a closed track I wouldn't mind seeing what it would be like to get behind the wheel of one of those monsters.  I don't think we should have a federal push to control Funny Cars, besides it wouldn't do any good.  There are entirely too many Funny Cars in circulation already.

The problem is that it is also fun to treat this whole issue as an abstraction--to debate how many Bushmasters can balance on the head of a pin--but this issue is no abstraction.  This country has been debating the ambiguous language of the Second Amendment ever since the Reconstruction.  It has been interesting and amusing and intellectually stimulating, but it hasn't dealt with anything real and it certainly hasn't resulted in any clarity.

The whole debate reminds me a little of the health care fight four years ago.  Pundits on both sides never tired of weighing in.  Liberals and conservatives alike tried to derail the whole thing because they made good the enemy of perfect.  I loved following the debate, but then I already had health care and so did all the other debaters out there.  But we all forgot that there were real flesh and blood people going bankrupt because they needed some kind of resolution that took forever to come.  There were flesh and blood people denying themselves the care they needed while well-heeled pols back in Washington carried on their intellectual exercise in Parliamentary Procedure.

Well, there are a bunch of flesh and blood kids in Connecticut who are dead now.  How much more real can it get?  I don't know if anything will stop the violence, but I'm glad our President is willing to expend the political capital necessary to have the dialogue.