TUESDAY, JUNE 7 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23
A
fter a new round of well-armed
hate crimes and child murder,
the congressional process to
pass gun regulations remains
the harvesting of low-hanging fruit. The
minimalist outcome (if there is an
outcome) will be advocated under the
stirring slogan “better than nothing.”
Which would be true. Any kind of
agreement would be good for democra-
cy, demonstrating that the creaking
machinery of self-government can still
turn. But the triumph of legislative
incrementalism is unlikely to feel equal
to the real-world provocation: the effect
of advanced weaponry on small bodies.
And it will not answer the lingering
question: Is the slaughter of innocents
the unavoidable price of freedom?
A significant group of Americans
believe it is. In a recent CBS-YouGov
poll, 44 percent of Republicans agreed
that mass shootings are “unfortunately
something we have to accept” in a free
country. It is the “unfortunately” that
gets to me.
This is a case involving unequally
distributed peril. For most observers,
such misfortune amounts to reading a
depressing newspaper article. For the
families involved, it means suffering
beyond measure and grief beyond re-
lief. Government cannot take all the
risk out of life. But is it permissible to
“accept” the risk of murder on behalf of
other people’s children? Is it moral to
make our peace with such evident evil?
Any consideration of gun regulation
in the United States immediately in-
volves a debate about our fundamental
law. Through most of American history,
the prefatory clause of the Second
Amendment — “A well regulated Mili-
tia, being necessary to the security of a
free State” — determined the meaning
of the operative clause, “the right of the
people to keep and bear Arms, shall not
be infringed.” This made sense in a
country where the entire western fron-
tier was ragged and bloody with danger.
Every able-bodied man was expected to
possess a useful weapon to fight for the
security of his state. And at least part of
the reason to stay armed was that many
people feared and opposed the accumu-
lation of federal power.
The Virginia Constitution made this
connection explicit, saying “that a well
regulated militia, composed of the body
of the people, trained to arms, is the
proper, natural and safe defense of a
free State;... that standing armies, in
time of peace, should be avoided as
dangerous to liberty; and that in all
cases the military should be under strict
subordination to, and governed by, the
civil power.”
The conservative legal revolution of
the past few decades has sought to
decouple the two clauses of the Second
Amendment. The prefatory clause has
been dismissed as but one application
of the operative clause, which establish-
es an individual right of gun ownership
for purposes of self-defense. Some have
called this a conservative application of
the evolving Constitution. But since
District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008,
the Supreme Court has upheld gun
ownership as a right, not just as a
precondition for the common defense.
Heller overturned D.C.’s prohibition
of nearly all handguns, affirming these
as the weapons of choice for Americans
engaged in self-defense. But the ruling
made clear that the Second Amend-
ment does not create an absolute right
to gun ownership.
It is still permissible, Heller states, to
restrict the gun rights of felons and the
mentally ill. It is still allowable to
prohibit the carrying of firearms in
government buildings and schools. It is
still lawful to ban particularly “danger-
ous and unusual weapons.” (Sorry, no
grenade launchers or guided missiles.)
And it is worth noting that since Heller ,
lower courts have generally upheld the
gun restrictions they have considered.
This means that one of the main
pro-gun arguments — that reasonable
gun restrictions violate sacred, natural
rights — is somewhere on the far side of
laughable ignorance. The right to keep
and bear arms does not mean the right of
18-year-olds to buy assault rifles. Many
Republicans seem intent on combining
the stability and wisdom of teenagers
with military-grade firepower.
This issue is also pregnant with
paradox. For years, judicial conserva-
tives have tried to reposition the Second
Amendment as protecting an individual
right to gun ownership. But now, some
MAGA Republicans want to return to
the prefatory clause, with a twist.
Like some Jeffersonians, they fear
concentrated federal power as a threat
to liberty. But what does it mean when
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)
refers to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the
Capitol as a “1776 moment” or embraces
the Second Amendment as permission
for insurrectionary violence? Does this
indicate that the future targets in a
MAGA war against tyranny might be
police officers and tax collectors, sol-
diers and FBI agents? Merely playing
with such ideas is an invitation to the
unstable.
It is past time for Republican politi-
cians to embrace some risk in the cause
of life — and end their dance with
death.
MICHAEL GERSON
The GOP spin
on gun rights
is m orally and
legally wrong
BY VIVIEN BURT, ROBIN BERMAN
AND SONYA RASMINSKYIn a news conference last week after
the shooting at Robb Elementary
School in Uvalde, Tex., Gov. Greg
Abbott (R) proclaimed that “Any-
body who shoots somebody else has a
mental health challenge, period. We as
a government need to find a way to
target that mental health challenge and
to do something about it.” Uvalde May-
or Don McLaughlin (R) echoed Ab-
bott’s sentiment: “Maybe we could have
caught it. Maybe if we had the counsel-
ors, maybe if we had the mental health
people, we could do it.”
As psychiatrists, we have a message
for Gov. Abbott and Mayor McLaugh-
lin: We wish more than anything that
mental health professionals could
solve this problem. But sadly, we’re
just not that powerful. We’re clini-
cians, not clairvoyants. We’re trained
to listen, to diagnose complex disor-
ders and even to assess risk of immi-
nent harm to self or others. But despite
our training, we cannot predict a per-
son’s future actions.
A diagnosis is not a prophecy. Risk
assessment is about probabilities, but
probabilities cannot tell us what a
person will do on any given day. We
know that a history of violence increas-
es one’s risk of future violence, but we
cannot know what form that violence
could take, or whether it will happen
tomorrow, five years from now or never.
Most troubled teenagers and young
adults do not become violent. In the
spirit of protecting individual freedom,
we cannot detain young men simply
because they have troubling thoughts
and abstractly fit a profile of a poten-
tially violent offender. And who would
decide which young people should be
identified as future perpetrators ofschool violence? Teachers? Social work-
ers? Fellow students? Mental health
counselors or psychiatrists? What
would we do with those who are select-
ed? What forms of individual monitor-
ing or restraint are compatible with a
free society? Do we have the means and
available professionals to work with all
of the teens selected as potential
threats in schools?
Since psychiatrists cannot reliably
predict on an individual basis who will
commit violent acts, what do neurosci-
ence and epidemiology teach us about
teens and young adults that can help us
develop workable policies to make our
schools more secure? MRI and other
scientific studies have shown that the
male brain (in particular the prefron-
tal cortex, which is responsible for
reasoning, good judgment and im-
pulse control) does not fully develop
until the mid-20s. From epidemiologi-
cal data, we know that young people
are at greatest risk for psychosis (often
with symptoms of paranoia, delusions,
mania, hallucinations and impulse
dysregulation) between 18 and 25. We
also know most school shooters are
under 21.
So there is a more effective solution
than asking mental health providers to
predict the future: establishing a high-
er minimum age to purchase firearms.
Public health policies have reduced
risk in other contexts by setting age-
based rules for certain groups to pro-
tect the general population. States that
established a minimum legal drinking
age of 21 in the United States saw a
16 percent median decline in motor
vehicle crashes. And recognizing that
poor judgment increases the rate of
accidents, many car rental agencies
limit their liability by forbidding those
under 25 to rent their vehicles. In
California, drivers under 18 may notdrive alone between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.
for their first year of licensure because
of their elevated crash risk.
These regulations benefit the com-
munity at large, even though they limit
young people’s freedoms. Doesn’t it
seem reasonable to limit the possession
of guns for those under 25, given the
data for brain development and im-
pulse control? The safety benefit of
restricting firearm purchases by young
adults would be a significant step
toward reducing the alarming rate of
mass school shootings.
As psychiatrists, we agree there is
value in having more mental health
practitioners available to treat troubled
teens and young adults, and more re-
sources need to be allocated toward
this end. But it’s a fallacy to believe this
will solve the gun violence epidemic.
The sad irony is that living through
school lockdowns, hearing about mass
shootings and experiencing regular
shooter drills at schools are contribut-
ing to the epidemic of depression and
anxiety in school-age children.
Our children are begging us to save
them — and not only during 911 calls
when a deranged gunman storms their
classrooms. Children all over this coun-
try need us to protect them, not with
armed guards that remind them that
they are at constant risk of being at-
tacked, but with laws that are based on
science and epidemiology. Limiting ac-
cess to guns for those whose brains are
still developing would save lives.Vivien Burt is a professor emeritus of
psychiatry at the David Geffen School of
Medicine at the University of California at
Los Angeles. Robin Berman and Sonya
Rasminsky are both associate professors of
psychiatry at the David Geffen School of
Medicine at the University of California at
Los Angeles.Sorry, but mental healthprofessionals are not clairvoyantJAE C. HONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Matthew Solano leaves sunflowers at a memorial on June 1 to honor the victims killed in the s hooting in Uvalde, Tex.Republican legislators in Arizona
have offered more than thoughts
and prayers to the innocent vic-
tims massacred in Uvalde, Tex.
They have praised law enforcement for
their actions despite ample evidence that
the police waited far too long to intervene,
blamed the violence on the absence of God
and renewed their push to bring more
guns into schools.
Take state Sen. Kelly Townsend, a far-
right Republican whose nonsensical ideas
include, most recently, using vigilantes to
watch over ballot drop boxes in the up-
coming midterms. Four years ago, in the
days following the rampage at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School in Park-
land, Fla., she compared mass shooters to
women who have abortions: Neither, she
said, has any regard for human life.
After the killings at Robb Elementary,
Townsend suggested that we arm “whoev-
er at our schools, whether it’s veterans
who are volunteering, whether it’s the
police, whether it’s arming the teachers.”
Her colleague, state Sen. Rick Gray, the
GOP majority leader, said school shoot-
ings happen because “for decades, we’ve
been teaching our children in school that
there is no God.”
Meanwhile, calls by Democrats for ac-
tion on 13 stalled gun control bills — one of
them includes prohibiting some domestic
violence offenders from owning firearms,
which sounds like a no-brainer to me —
have been wholly ignored. Such is the
predicament for Democrats of being the
minority in both legislative chambers in a
deeply polarized purple state where ex-
tremists are not only the loudest, but also
increasingly the prevailing voices in Re-
publican politics.
Case in point: Gov. Doug Ducey, a con-
servative who has not fallen off the deepend, has not had any luck passing a piece of
legislation that would allow judges to take
away guns from people who are consid-
ered to be a danger to themselves or others.
His fellow Republicans in the House have
twice refused to move it forward.
I talked to state Sen. Raquel Terán (D),
whose path to elected office grew out of her
role as a community organizer fighting for
immigration reform at a time when Ari-
zona became a national symbol of intoler-
ance. She framed the dominant version of
Republican politics in Arizona these days
around control — “control of our bodies,
control of what we read and talk about in
schools.” (Gun control? Not so much.)
That brings up an interesting irony.
Some Republicans say that teachers
should be able to carry guns in the class-
room and teach lessons on religion, yet
they cannot be trusted to openly talk to
students about issues of race and ethnic-
ity. According to a bill recently approved
by the House, violators could lose their
teaching license. As state Sen. Christine
Marsh (D), a former teacher of the year, so
eloquently said, “Give me a break.”
Arizona is far from the only battle-
ground state, but it might be the one
where the pendulum has swung the most
rightward since 2020. That’s when Ari-
zona voters chose a Democrat for presi-
dent for only the second time since going
for Harry S. Truman in 1948 (the other was
Bill Clinton).
Former president Donald Trump still
enjoys a strong following in Arizona,
though. With term limits, Ducey is serving
his second and last term, and the leading
Republican gubernatorial candidate, a
journalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist
named Kari Lake, features Trump’s image
and endorsement on her campaign signs.
Terán, whose Senate district is one ofthe most diverse in the state, grew up in
Douglas, a small Arizona city on the
U.S.-Mexico border that is similar to Uval-
de. They are both working-class commu-
nities with about 16,000 residents who are
mostly Hispanic.
She stood silently on the state Senate
floor the other day holding a picture col-
lage of the 19 children murdered in Uval-
de; two teachers died as well. She told me
that she worried she would break down, so
she let other Democratic colleagues do the
talking.
She did cry when we spoke a few days
later, telling me about her mother, who
works in a school cafeteria, and her nieces
and nephews, whose faces remind her of
the children slain in Uvalde. “My neigh-
bors in Douglas, my constituents, they’re
the people of Uvalde,” she said.
She lists some of their needs: a reliable,
sustainable water supply; a strategy to
mitigate the wildfires that are a mortal
threat in parts of the state; and affordable
housing. Phoenix and its surrounding
communities saw, in April, the biggest
cost-of-living increase in the country com-
pared with the same month last year and
have logged one of the highest rent hikes
since the start of 2021.
“People can’t afford a place to live,”
Terán said.
I asked what she would do if she had a
magic wand. She paused, talked about
meeting basic needs, but then settled on
something less tangible, but, in many
ways, more important: “I’d protect our
democracy.”
The threat is real. On Thursday, Trump
endorsed Republican Blake Masters in
the U.S. Senate race to unseat Arizona
Democrat Mark Kelly. The former presi-
dent extolled Masters for supporting his
stolen-election fantasy.FERNANDA SANTOSThe Arizona GOP’s revealing response to UvaldeIf Congress and the president enact
watered-down legislation that seems
likely to have only a minimal effect on
gun violence, does that count as prog-
ress? Shamefully but realistically: Yes.
The bipartisan group of senators trying
to reach a compromise has reportedly
ruled out all the common-sense measures
that might meaningfully reduce carnage
like we saw in Uvalde, Tex. No renewal of
the assault weapons ban that expired in- No raising of the minimum age to
buy an assault rifle from 18 to 21. No
universal background checks, including
at gun shows and in private sales.
According to reports in The Post and
other media outlets, the senators are
focused instead on red-flag laws that
would let authorities keep guns away
from individuals deemed a threat to
themselves or others — not necessarily a
federal red-flag statute but perhaps car-
rot-and-stick incentives to encourage
states to pass such measures. The sena-
tors are also said to be talking about
putting more armed security officers in
schools and increasing federal funding
for mental health services.
That’s not quite as futile as trying to
stop a rhinoceros with a flyswatter, but it’s
close.
I’m all for red-flag laws, which are
already on the books in 19 states and D.C.
A CBS News report Monday quoted Mont-
gomery County, Md., Sheriff Darren Pop-
kin as saying that his state’s red-flag law,
used nearly 400 times last year, helped
avert a specific threat to a Bethesda high
school made by a student. “This is not a
theoretical approach,” Popkin said.
Florida has issued nearly 9,000 “emer-
gency risk protection” orders since enact-
ing its red-flag law in 2018, after the
Parkland school massacre. But New York,
with a similar population and much
tougher gun laws, issues only about
500 such orders to confiscate guns per
year. The accused shooter in last month’s
Buffalo massacre reportedly had shown
warning signs of a potential spasm of
violence. However, red-flag laws require
not just that family members, friends,
acquaintances and others pick up on
those signs but also that they report their
concerns — and that a judge be persuaded
to sign a confiscation order.
If all states had such laws and enforced
them aggressively, some lives would sure-
ly be saved. But warning signs often are
recognized as such only in retrospect. Is a
teenage boy who starts dressing in all
black and listening to Marilyn Manson in
crisis? Or just going through a goth phase?
Likewise, I’m all for spending money to
make mental health services more widely
available. But only a small fraction of
individuals diagnosed with a mental dis-
order commit acts of violence, and over-
taxed mental health professionals are not
clairvoyant. Mental health screening and
treatment would likely prevent some po-
tential mass shooters from becoming so
detached from reality that they act out
apocalyptic fantasies or so depressed they
enact mass shootings as a form of suicide.
But how many?
As for beefing up school security, no
one can oppose doing everything possible
to make school buildings safe spaces. But
would an armed security officer have
stopped the massacre in Uvalde? Nine-
teen trained police officers in body armor
didn’t have the wherewithal to do so. And
any society that chooses to turn schools
into bunkers and playgrounds into prison
yards rather than stopping gun violence
at the source needs to take a long, hard
look in the mirror.
That said, if Senate negotiators come
up with anything along these lines that
10 Republican senators will vote for —
and that’s a big if — Congress should go
ahead and approve it.
This isn’t a case of half a loaf being
better than none; we’re likely to get a
couple of slices, at best. And I believe
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has
fought so tirelessly for so many years to
get meaningful action on gun violence, is
being overly optimistic when he predicts
Republicans will somehow realize they
can be on the righteous side of this issue
and still survive in today’s GOP.
The reality is that they can’t — at least,
not on the national level. For the time
being, any truly meaningful action on gun
violence will probably have to happen in
the states. Florida got more serious about
preventing mass shootings after Park-
land. Texas officials and legislators need
to be held accountable after Uvalde.
Since so many firearms used in juris-
dictions with tough gun-control laws are
obtained in states with lax controls, we
need comprehensive national legislation.
I’m convinced that will happen someday. I
shudder to think how many more victims
have to die before that day comes.
For now, the only choice is doing some-
thing inadequate vs. doing nothing at all.
We might as well try the former. We know
the latter doesn’t work.EUGENE ROBINSONAn inadequatedeal i s betterthan no dealon gun controlIf all states had such lawsand enforced themaggressively, some liveswould surely be saved.