Guns, Guns, and More Guns

     Justus D. Barnes in  “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) . . . the first Western

Assigning attribution or “literary parentage” to a particularly well-known epigram rarely yields THE TRUTH. As a rule of thumb, the wittier the wheeze, the more parents there are. One of the greatest - and unquestionably snarkiest - epigrammatists of the past hundred years, Dorothy (Rothschild) Parker (“Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses”), best summed up literary attributions with a hilarious aphorism of her own: “If with the literate, I am/Impelled to try an epigram/I never seek to take the credit/We all assume that Oscar said it.”  The “Oscar,” to whom she refers is, of course, Oscar Wilde, generally considered, next to Shakespeare, to have been the most clever and skillful of all English-language scops.

Here in America, the four people who generally sit atop the “literary parentage” list are the aforementioned Parker, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain. Parker generally comes in first, with Franklin second, Twain third and Jefferson fourth. My all-time favorite Parkerism is “You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.” One of Franklin’s best known quips is “A penny saved is a penny earned.” As for Twain, one his best was “A little lie can travel half way 'round the world while Truth is still lacing up her boots” But it is Jefferson who is awarded attribution for a statement that will undoubtedly be heard over and over in the coming days and weeks as we proceed with Congress’s attempt to pass some sort of gun safety legislation: “Half a loaf is better than none.” (n.b. It is likely that the real originator of this expression was the 16th century British writer John Heywood who had been famous for more than 35 years before the birth of the “Bard of Avon”).

When it comes to Congress trying to enact a bipartisan bill dealing with gun control (some prefer calling it “gun safety”) Jefferson (or unknowingly, John Heywood) are hitting the headlines of news articles and and being quoted in speeches and newscasts with great regularity.  Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson published a recent op-ed piece which just about says it all: We’ll get less than half a loaf on gun control. We should take it.  A few days after Robinson’s piece hit the streets, Senate negotiators announced that they had struck a bipartisan deal on a narrow set of gun safety measures with sufficient support to move through the evenly divided chamber.  The deal (the specifics of which we will look at in the next paragraph) included far, far less than gun control advocates and nearly all Congressional Democrats would have wanted. At a time in our political history when the walls of political partisanship are taller and and more impregnable than those which surrounded the Biblical Jericho, it nonetheless represented a significant step toward ending a years-long congressional impasse on the issue.  Or, in other words, half a loaf . . . or even less.  

The agreement, put forth by 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats and endorsed by President Biden and top Democrats, includes enhanced background checks to give authorities time to check the juvenile and mental health records of any prospective gun buyer under the age of 21 and a provision that would, for the first time, extend to dating partners a prohibition on domestic abusers having guns. It would also provide funding for states to enact so-called red-flag laws that allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed to be dangerous, as well as money for mental health resources and to bolster safety and mental health services at schools.  What it does not include are a majority of things a clear majority of the American public support: a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks. At the same time, it is nowhere near as sweeping as a package of gun measures passed almost along party lines in the House last week, which would bar the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under the age of 21, ban the sale of large-capacity magazines and enact a federal red-flag law, among other steps.

While Congress has not passed new gun-control restrictions in the wake of public mass shootings in recent years, hundreds of measures have passed in statehouse across the country during such moments. Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, high-profile mass shootings have been followed by a jump in state gun-control laws in the next year or two years, according to a Washington Post analysis of data on state legislation compiled by RAND, a nonprofit policy research group.

As much as the idealist in me rebels at the thought that this is the best 10 senators can come up with, the political and historical realist in me understands that this is likely the “new reality”, where even less than half a loaf is about as good as it’s going to get . . . at least for the foreseeable future. Unless and until the N.R.A. suffers a fall which even financial bankruptcy cannot touch, they will continue holding conventions, selling goods and continue working as hucksters for the weapons’ industry. They will continue getting their followers to mouth their disingenuous bromide about the only thing capable of stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, warning how the government is about to take away all their weapons, and willy-nilly buying up politicians left and (overwhelmingly) right.

To end on a positive note: the outpouring of public outrage after the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde has led to tens of thousands to take to the streets from coast-to-coast demanding that Congress - in the words of President Biden and so many others - “do something.” With this week’s announcement that the Senate might actually enact the “Half-a-Loaf” gun safety bill, perhaps it will light a spark which one day will see more fully realized measures passed into law - ones which finally resurrect the Assault Weapons Ban, rescind the legal immunity gun manufacturers currently enjoy (which makes it nearly impossible for them to be sued for crimes committed with the weapons or ammunition they sell), and put books and lesson plans back into the hands of the nation’s teachers instead of guns, guns, and more guns.

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone