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Subject: SNET: A MILLION MOMS WITHOUT A MIND AMONG THEM
Date: 14 May 2000 10:48:57 -0400
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            A MILLION MOMS WITHOUT A MIND AMONG THEM

By J. Peter Mulhern

The Million Mom March is coming to town.  For the sake of brevity
let's call it the M3.

M3  represents  the  triumph  of  alliteration  over  arithmetic.
Nobody  believes  that much more than one hundred thousand people
will march in Washington this weekend.  Not all the marchers will
be mothers.  But hey, what's an order of magnitude among friends.

Arithmetic isn't a  strong  suit  for  the  marching  moms.   The
organizers  of  M3 persist in publicizing the absurd factoid that
14 "kids" fall victim to gun violence every day.   One  can  only
approach  this  figure  by  including  statistics from the entire
population under the age of 20  and  lumping  together  suicides,
accidents and gang-related violence with all other shootings.  If
one corrects for these distortions it turns out that M3's PR  is,
once again, off by an order of magnitude

M3 enthusiasts have tried to defend their sensational claim of 14
dead  kids  per  diem by arguing that a death is a death and that
teenagers are,  after  all,  quite  young  even  if  they  aren't
strictly   speaking   children.     This   doesn't  disguise  the
deliberately deceptive nature of the M3 PR.

M3's boosters are trying to make people  believe  that  homicidal
maniacs commonly mow down innocent children.  The statistics tell
a different story.  Most of the young people  killed  by  bullets
are  old  enough  to have placed themselves in harm's way and old
enough to have known better.

The 14 per diem statistic is grossly misleading for reasons  that
go  beyond the age of the cadavers it counts.  Most of the deaths
that make up that statistic are irrelevant to any  discussion  of
gun control

The statistics on gun accidents shouldn't alarm anyone.  Guns are
involved  in  a  trivial  percentage of serious accidents.  Cars,
bicycles, and matches are involved in many more deaths than guns.
We  should  refrain from making gun accidents a national priority
until we've dealt with the long list of far greater dangers.   If
there's been a Million Mom March Against Matches I missed it.

In the debate over gun control, suicides are also largely  beside
the  point.   The  argument that gun controls can prevent suicide
assumes that many suicides result from impulse combined with easy
access  to  a loaded gun.  This trivializes the agony of terminal
depression.  Desperate people will never lack for  the  means  of
self-destruction.   Teen  suicide  may be a national problem, but
addressing that problem by passing gun control legislation  would
be a cruel joke.

Gang violence doesn't contribute to  the  case  for  gun  control
either.   Laws are irrelevant to determined outlaws.  If we could
keep firepower out of the hands of gang  members  we  would  have
done it long ago.

When you strip away all the irrelevancies, there is  very  little
left of the claim that we face a crisis that gun control can help
us resolve.  In 1988 27 per cent of  American  families  owned  a
gun.   By  1996 that figure had risen to 40 per cent. At the same
time gun ownership was soaring, gun  violence  declined  sharply.
The  simple-minded  proposition that more guns mean more death is
at odds with recent history.

That proposition is also at odds with common sense.   Ever  since
Australopithecus  first  brandished  a  femur, our ancestors have
armed themselves when they felt threatened, in  the  belief  that
doing  so  made  them  safer.  There is no reason to suppose that
belief outmoded.  As Yale economist John Lott argued persuasively
in  his  book More Guns Less Crime, a pistol-packing society is a
safer society.

The M3 marchers are no slaves to common sense.  They  are  coming
to  Washington to promote the view that disarmament is the key to
safety.

Their position is even sillier than this summary suggests.   They
won't,  for  the most part, have the courage to follow their view
to its  logical  conclusion.   If  guns,  particularly  handguns,
really  make us unsafe we should ban them. But any proposal to do
so would be  political  poison.    For  the  most  part,  the  M3
marchers will confine themselves to demanding trivial legislation
that is significant only as a small step toward the ultimate goal
of taking guns out of private hands.

M3, despite all the noise, is about nothing more than incremental
movement  toward  an indefensible goal.  Why would 100,000 people
with  children  to  care  for  come  to  Washington  for  such  a
ridiculous cause?

They have two principal reasons.  One is ideological.  The  other
is political.

The movement for gun control is closely connected with one of the
core  beliefs  of  modern orthodoxy -- all things have a material
cause.  Much of what passes for  education  in  this  country  is
propaganda for this belief.

For every problem, modern orthodoxy demands that there must be  a
material  solution.   Everything can be fixed by making the right
changes  in  our  physical  circumstances.   If  the  problem  is
sexually  transmitted  diseases, the solution is condoms.  If the
problem is violence, the solution is restricting gun ownership.

Many people have to blame violence on  guns  because  they  can't
understand  it  any  other  way.  We have been killing each other
since Cain and Able because we all participate in  original  sin,
but modern orthodoxy has no place for moral concepts like sin.

Attending a ridiculous protest rally is a small price to pay  for
keeping your entire worldview intact.

The  M3  marchers  also  have  a  crass  political  motive.   The
Democratic  Party  needs a significant majority of American women
to stay competitive in national  politics.   George  W.  Bush  is
currently  polling  ahead  of  Albert  Gore among women.  If this
persists Gore will soon have to find a real job.

Democrats are hoping they can save Gore's  failing  candidacy  by
getting  enough  of the women who think guns are icky out to vote
for Democrats.  M3 is part of that strategy.

The principal M3 organizer is a loyal, if  unofficial  Democratic
Party apparatchik.  M3 is just as scripted and as remote from the
grass roots as any other Gore campaign event.   In  the  end,  it
will probably also be just as sterile.

It will take more  than  a  protest  rally  featuring  the  stale
rhetoric  of  gun  control  to boost Gore's appeal among American
women.  He needs something much more dramatic.

Maybe cross-dressing would help.


J. Peter Mulhern can be reached at jpmulh@aol.com




  Published in the May. 15, 2000 issue of The Washington Weekly
              Copyright 2000 The Washington Weekly.
    Now Free Access to All Stories at  http://www.federal.com

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