Our Kids Don’t Need Gun Control Laws; they Need Fathers

I’ve noticed that the answers in life are often simple but rarely easy. For instance, if I want to lose 10 pounds, the simplest but hardest solution is to eat less and jog more. The most complicated but easiest solution is to consult with doctors and take pills and complain about my thyroid and eventually give up and start a “fat acceptance” group. A lot of people these days choose the latter. It’s time consuming and it won’t accomplish much, but at least it can be done from the couch.

We tend to see this mindset manifest itself in dramatic fashion following any sort of national tragedy. We search desperately for answers, and the people tasked with providing them generally come up with a lot of complex laws and policies and political proposals, but nothing that even comes close to addressing the actual problem.

That’s what happened yet again this past week, after Chris Harper-Mercer walked into a community college in Oregon andslaughtered nine people. Immediately, the usual suspects manned their usual battle stations and started spouting their usual talking points about “gun control” and “mental health” and so on. Obama gave a speech mere hours after the attack and called for greater restrictions on the Second Amendment. Many others joined in his chorus.

Of course, the problem with this answer is that it isn’t an answer. Even if we could completely remove the pesky issue of constitutional liberties from the equation, even if it were possible to cure violence by getting rid of one particular type of weapon, even if we ignore the fact that the deadliest school attack in historyhappened 90 years ago and was carried out not with guns but with explosives, and even if we look past thestudies showing that gun control laws are counterproductive, gun control would still be basically impossible.

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