A Kansas City crowd acted in a way gun debaters never have: Collectively

Didn’t you feel a twinge of something deeply gratifying — and inspiring — in the way ordinary crowd members chased down a suspected gunman and collectively smothered him? They undertook momentary personal risk and sacrifice and then found greater safety in numbers, as helper after helper piled on until the suspect disappeared under their collective weight.

That’s real authority, and it didn’t come from a law or a cop.

There is no easy resolution to the gun debate. It’s estimated that there are about 398 million guns in the United States, and about 397.9 million of them are kept peaceably and responsibly for home protection or sport. Maybe gun haters need to start talking to those gun owners as allies rather than enemies.

No one captured this fracture better, or was a more interesting commentator on it, than the late author and columnist for Harper’s Dan Baum. Both a gun enthusiast and an advocate for gun control, Baum wrote, “Shooters see their guns as emblems of a whole spectrum of virtuous lifestyle choices — rural over urban, self-reliance over dependence on the collective, vigorous outdoorsiness over pallid intellectualism, patriotism over internationalism, action over inaction — and they hear attacks on guns as attacks on them, personally.”

So perhaps the smarter conversation about how to manage public risk in this country is the one in which people put aside their personal feelings and rights for a moment, to make a couple of concessions in favor of the majority public interest.

Perhaps gun haters could concede that too many anti-gun screeds push gun owners into a “defensive crouch,” to quote Baum, and that too many gun control proposals betray ignorance about specifics of actual guns. But in that conversation, perhaps gun owners could concede their guns are not a bulwark against a tyrannical government and in fact that gun recklessness is becoming a source of tyranny by the minority.

Surely, both reasonably can agree that guns should be kept locked up and gun owners liable for failing to secure them, seeing as how so many gun crimes are committed with stolen ones.

The alternative is … what? No police force, no law, can truly enforce public safety. It has to be a mutual compact, a moral blockade.

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