OUR CHILDISH GUN DEBATE

When Marco Rubio is likened to shooter Nikolas Cruz, we’re not being serious.

By William McGurn

The Wall Street Journal
February 26, 2018

“Do you want to do nothing? Do you want to do nothing? Do you want to just do nothing? Just leave it the way it is?”

The words belong to Geraldo Rivera. He emoted them Thursday on the Fox News Channel during a live broadcast of Sean Hannity’s show from the Conservative Political Action Conference. In a perfect encapsulation of what the gun debate has become, Mr. Rivera was yelling at the crowd for booing his assertion that the National Rifle Association needed to back raising to 21 the age for purchasing an assault weapon—even though he’d just admitted “it won’t solve the problem.”

Still, the mini-drama on “Hannity” was nothing compared with the Two Minutes Hate on CNN the evening before. At a CNN-sponsored town hall held in Broward County, Fla.—home to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the latest school shooting occurred—the NRA’s Dana Loesch was greeted with shouts of “murderer” as she tried to argue her point of view.

The rest of the broadcast was just as elevated. A high-school junior who survived the shooting said that when he looks at Florida Sen. Marco Rubio it’s hard not to see shooter Nikolas Cruz. A freshman said she wanted to ask the NRA: “Was the blood of my classmates and my teachers worth your blood money?” Meanwhile, Sheriff Scott Israel pointed fingers at everyone but himself—this of course before America learned that as many as four of his deputies opted to stay safely outside the school rather than go inside to engage the killer.

In short, the public debate about how Congress ought to respond to this latest mass shooting is guided by two broad principles. Dubious on their own, they are even more witless when combined. The first is the idea that the most important thing is to “do something.” The second is that we ought to look to high-schoolers for the answer.

As goes CNN so goes the nation. The high-schoolers who survived Mr. Cruz’s Valentine’s Day massacre are taking to Twitter , TV and Tallahassee statehouse rallies to pressure politicians to “do something.” In response, some on the right, entirely missing the point, have accused them of being “actors” or “scripted” by the news media.

These teens do not need to be scripted. Their youth and earnestness makes it all but impossible for any adult to advance a counterargument without looking indifferent to the horror these kids have been through. If you don’t agree with what they want, they seem to suggest, you’re OK with mass shootings—as Mr. Rubio and Ms. Loesch found out the hard way.

Quick show of hands for those with children: How many of you look to your teens for political wisdom, whether it’s the daughter obsessing over her Snapchat streaks or the son who would spend his day eating Doritos and binge-gaming “Grand Theft Auto” if you let him?

This in no way diminishes the barbarity of what happened to the Parkland students. It is, however, to insist on the obvious: As terrible as their experiences were, the attack gives them no special insight into the complex array of public policies that might have prevented the slaughter.

Ditto for the “do nothing” accusation. Is it really so unreasonable to insist that those pushing specific legislation or regulations provide evidence that the something they want done will in fact produce the results they claim?

Even keeping the focus solely on school shootings, the challenge here is daunting: how to pick out potential school shooters from the thousands of young men who post ugly things on social media, have no fathers, or have an unhealthy fascination with guns—especially if they have no criminal records and haven’t been diagnosed as mentally ill. Are we confident government has the Solomonic wisdom to sort through the 8.4 million boys in high school and identify the ones who would shoot up a school?

Surely the facts invite skepticism. The FBI call center didn’t forward a January warning to its local Miami office. Sheriff Israel’s deputies answered nearly two dozen calls regarding Mr. Cruz before his rampage, and then hid outside the school when he went active. Some callers said they thought this kid would be a school shooter. Will a new law fix this?

It’s not just conservatives who have doubts. In an October 2016 article in GQ, the Guardian’s full-time gun-politics reporter conceded she was “shocked by how little evidence there was behind some of the most prominent gun control policies.” The year before, right after the San Bernardino killings, the Washington Post fact checker backed Mr. Rubio’s claim that gun laws would not have prevented any of the major shootings the nation had seen in recent years.

Maybe there are “common sense” gun restrictions that could do some good. But that would first require an honest debate. Instead, ours holds up teenagers on national TV who tell us they can’t distinguish between Marco Rubio and Nikolas Cruz.