We can’t be exceptional without better gun control

Back in the 20th century, we didn’t use the word “exceptional” to delude ourselves into thinking that we were great at everything. But we took pride in our “can do” attitude. Most of us believed that for every problem there was a solution – maybe not a perfect one, but one that we could all help think through. Compromise was often the key to problem-solving breakthroughs.

A lot of people still feel that way. But to our mortification, the institution charged with turning good ideas into effective public policy, disagrees. Congress foists on us their “can’t do” attitude that, despite its unmitigated failure, its members seem to take pride in. It appears that their approach to problems is to demoralize the citizenry so they go away and stop distracting public servants from their vital appointments with benevolent lobbyists.

That gets us to gun control, an issue on which 80% of South Carolinians (Sun News 10/4/15) agree that we should take one small step further. Background checks, we say overwhelmingly, should be completed before gun sales are finalized. To our concerns, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s Congress offers two coarse rebuttals: (1) “Since you can’t do everything, don’t do anything;” and (2) “Now is not the time to discuss this issue.” And by implication, “neither is tomorrow or next week or next year, so shut up.”

By treating us as though we have the intellects of fruit flies, Congress is writing its own political epitaph. They think we are too uninformed to know that common-sense gun control would pass immediately if the Speaker allowed it to come to the floor. They think we are too crass to care about the wholesale murders that make America look insane even to lawless countries. They think that after our shock at the latest act of gun-driven mass homicide subsides, we will go back to being our own self-absorbed selves. They are wrong on all counts!

While it has not yet reached critical mass, there is such rapidly growing revulsion at Congress’s obsequiousness that this worm is sure to turn. When enough of us have arrived at the same inevitable conclusion, we will banish our current Congress to Newtown where they can lecture on why they oppose gun control. We will replace them with representatives who agree with us that the gun slaughter rate of 92 people a day, many of them children and college students, is not a practice we wish to prolong, even though it proves that, in the eyes of the world, we are exceptional.

This story was originally published October 12, 2015 at 11:37 AM with the headline "We can’t be exceptional without better gun control."