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The Conversation

Our Stupid Gun Debate

The marquees on the Las Vegas Strip went dark on Sunday to honor the victims of the mass shooting there.Credit...Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Bret Stephens: I know we’ll have to bring this conversation around to the Twitter feud between President Trump and Senator Bob Corker. But I don’t think we can begin with any subject other than Las Vegas. Everyone seems to want to understand the murderer’s state of mind. That strikes me as largely beside the point. What do you think?

Gail Collins: Bret, you wrote an amazing column last week about repealing the Second Amendment, which would certainly do a lot more to stop mass shootings than psychoanalyzing the gunman. However, since that’s not going to happen, I do find it useful to at least try to figure out what creates this kind of person.

Bret: No doubt we’ll find out more about Stephen Paddock’s state of mind as time goes by, but perhaps the most noteworthy point about him was his utter normality. Even his reported use of prostitutes and supposed remarks about being “born bad” are just, well, relatively ordinary bad male behavior. He was the “banality of evil” incarnate.

Conservatives often say that the way to stop mass shootings isn’t by limiting access to weapons, but by doing more to make sure mentally ill people don’t get their hands on them. It’s a weak argument. For starters, even the most competent government agency would be hard-pressed to spot and stop deranged people — whose dark fantasies occur in the proverbial dark — before their rampages. And then you have these same conservatives block efforts to stop crazy people from purchasing guns on the grounds that they mustn’t have their Second Amendment rights removed without due process.

Gail: Yeah, and these are the same people trying to squeeze mental health coverage out of the Affordable Care Act.

I have an all-purpose theory for understanding American cultural polarization. We’re really two different countries — the crowded one and the empty one. It’s easy to understand why if you live in, say, rural Wyoming you are going to want to have some rifles. Also it’s obvious why in New York City we have thrived by making it stupendously difficult for anybody but the police to legally have weapons. But our current laws make it impossible for us crowdeds to keep guns completely out. That’s because the laws on gun sales reflect the financial needs of gun dealers and gun manufacturers.

Bret: I’m no expert on gun manufacturers, though I can guess their financial motives. But the deeper problem is ideological. The N.R.A. is powerful not because it’s rich, but because it has successfully peddled the idea that our civil liberties rely principally on the possession of guns. What fantasy. Does anyone really think that when the agents of Leviathan show up at your doorstep to deport you to the gulag, your trusty Smith & Wesson will see you through?

Gail: Don’t discount the economic end. The N.R.A. is totally about the gun industry, which has a problem in that everybody who wants to have a gun for anything except criminal activity already has one. Or more likely several — 3 percent of the population owns half the guns, and they’re the best sales target.

So the only way for the makers and dealers to grow is by selling the idea that you need every new wrinkle. Like silencers or, God help us, bump stocks.

Bret: Look, I would never want the government to stand in the way of any responsible adult with a legitimate reason to own a gun. I don’t just mean the hunter in Wyoming but also the protective father raising a family in a high-crime area or the woman who has to walk through a deserted area late at night.

Gail: Those household guns are less likely to end up shooting an intruder than another member of the family. But go on.

Bret: That’s a reason to own one gun, maybe even two, but not several dozen rifles kitted out to resemble fully automatic weapons. And I don’t think we can establish that kind of limiting principle while we have a Second Amendment.

Don’t resign yourself to the idea that this will never change, Gail. A good argument is always worth making.

Gail: The problem with your argument is that we’re agreeing too much.

Let’s switch to a subject we can fight about. I know I can always drive you crazy by insulting Lindsey Graham. Last week he introduced a Senate bill to ban abortions at 20 weeks. We haven’t really discussed abortion much — do you think Senator Graham’s fighting the good fight or trying to impose his religious principles on the rest of the nation?

Bret: I hate to break this to you, Gail, but I’m basically pro-choice. Always have been. I’m opposed to late-term abortions and think they should be severely restricted. I believe in religious liberty and don’t think, say, Catholic hospitals should be required to provide abortions.

Otherwise, I subscribe to Bill Clinton’s line that abortion ought to be safe, legal and rare. It’s great that the abortion rate has this year dropped to its lowest rate since abortion became legal nationally in 1973. That’s thanks in large part to the vastly greater availability of contraception — another reminder that cultural conservatives often advocate positions that are at cross-purposes with their stated intentions.

Gail: Everybody can rally around the idea that late-pregnancy abortions should be avoided whenever possible. Which means to me that people who try to ban them while also trying to defund Planned Parenthood and other programs that work to prevent unwanted pregnancies are hypocrites.

Also people like Graham are interfering with painful decisions that are often made by couples who are eager to have a baby but discover late in the pregnancy that the fetus is terribly compromised and won’t survive if carried to term.

Bret: That’s an awful situation for any parent. I guess my rejoinder is that a late-term abortion means certain death for the fetus; bringing the child to term means at least the hope of survival, however faint. Regarding Planned Parenthood, though, we agree again.

Let’s switch the subject to the Corker-Trump feud. The president’s relationship with Senate Republicans reminds me a bit of Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana Spencer. We knew it was bad, but it took a while to figure out how bad. Corker’s disdain for the president isn’t revealing for what it says just about him, but probably about the Republican caucus as well.

Gail: Well, Corker has made it pretty darn clear that almost everybody in the caucus is huddled under the stairs talking about what a nut case the president is. Which we sort of suspected. And that everyone’s afraid Trump will fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Given the fact that Tillerson seems incapable of appointing people to his department’s key jobs, if he goes I guess our allies will have to discuss North Korea with the janitorial staff.

Corker’s a very important figure on foreign policy matters. I wonder how his rebellion will affect Trump’s attempt to get out of the Iran compact. What, by the way, do you think about the withdrawal idea? I think it’s crazy — we made the Iran deal along with our partners in the developed world, and none of them is going to resume the sanctions.

Bret: Disagreement at last! I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately. I fought the Iran deal when it was being negotiated, and I think the Obama administration came away with a lousy agreement. Iran’s behavior is worse now, because it has been enriched and emboldened. Declarations that Iran is fulfilling its end of the bargain ignore serious concerns that it is cheating incrementally. At the end of the day Iran will emerge from the deal with an internationally recognized right to enrich unlimited quantities of uranium. We are setting ourselves up for another North Korean fiasco, which also began (under Clinton) with a supposedly negotiated solution.

Gail: We have our argument!

Bret: My problem is that I don’t trust the Trump team to execute a competent exit strategy from the agreement. For all the anti-Iranian rhetoric, Trump has done more than Obama to facilitate Iran’s grip over Syria, first by withdrawing support for U.S.-backed anti-Assad insurgents, then with a foolish cease-fire arrangement with the Russians. Decertification alone is a symbolic step that doesn’t break the agreement but merely hands responsibility to Congress to decide what to do next.

As with anything and everything Trump, we’re being asked to take a ride with a drunken driver: we may need desperately to get to a destination, but there are no guarantees of getting there alive.

Gail: Hey, that isn’t fair. We’ve got a disagreement going and then you finish up with a fresh attack on Donald Trump.

Back to Iran. I think everyone agrees the Iranian deal is imperfect. Three arguments against ditching it.

One is that Iran’s enemies overstate Iran’s unique … evildoerness. It’s true that they finance terrorism in their neighborhood. So do many of the richest and most powerful people in Saudi Arabia. ISIS isn’t an Iranian production.

Second, the only way for us to survive over the long run in this incredibly dangerous world is by working together with other nations that hold the same basic values we do. If we drop out of this international agreement, we turn our backs on our allies and we undermine the spirit of cooperation that all of our recent presidents have worked so hard to cultivate.

Third, it won’t do any good. Allies will continue to do business with Iran, whatever power the bargain has over Iranian nuclear development is weakened.

Three strikes and you’re out.

Bret: Now we’re talking! Disagreement down the line.

Iran is in a class by itself in the awfulness department. It openly vows to annihilate another U.N. member state. It provides financial and military support to terrorist groups both Shiite (Hezbollah) and Sunni (Hamas). It campaigns against ISIS but gave shelter to Al Qaeda. It continues to arm Shiite killing squads in Iraq. It is Bashar al-Assad’s best friend in his genocidal campaign against his own people. It has the death of hundreds of American soldiers in Lebanon and Iraq on its hands. It has conducted terror attacks as far away as Argentina and tried to blow up a restaurant in Washington in order to assassinate the Saudi ambassador. It denies the existence of gay people within its borders and then hangs them when it finds them. It holds Holocaust denial conferences and cartoon competitions.

I don’t think it is out of the question that we can get our allies to be tougher on the enforcement front, even if we don’t renegotiate the deal itself (which would require Iranian consent). We still have the whip hand, since we can make companies like the French energy giant Total or the German engineering firm Siemens choose between doing business in the United States or in Iran.

I agree that we need to be mindful of our alliances, but this agreement was never ratified by the Senate and doesn’t have the status of a treaty. And, ultimately, we are better off in a world in which Iran doesn’t have a bomb and the European diplomatic corps hates us than one in which the reverse is true.

Told you I was conservative!

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