And I refer again, Hitler’s party was National Socialism. Don’t let them take the country into Socialism. So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. If we had our guns, we would have fought a bloody battle. Conservative Kitty Werthmann says the following in a panel entitled, “How to recognize living under Nazis & Communists”: Take, for example, a speaker at a 2009 conference called Take Back America. And importantly, that’s where some in the audience - some would-be Loughners sitting there listening - are bound to go. 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. 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.
Would more civic speech reduce the probability of political violence? I think it would. Mill said, is “government by discussion.” We can make that demand because speech is what makes our democracy work. 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. 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.
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. In the language of deductive logic, both access and desire are necessary, but neither is sufficient. For to shoot someone, you have to have both access to a gun and the desire to actually shoot it.
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.
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