Opinion: It’s not ‘we can’t.’ It’s ‘we won’t’

Each of those numbers is -- more accurately, was -- a human being; each was the center of a universe, a world, comprising friends and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. Each of those worlds today knows a gaping, bleeding hole where once that person had been.

Then there are the Parkland living, those who now have to deal with the heartbreak and anger and what must be a gut-deep, bone-deep anguish. In addition, hundreds of schoolchildren who huddled in terror, who watched their classmates get gunned down, who whispered or texted what they feared would be their last words to their parents as gunshots rang out around them, have now experienced the trauma that children in places such as Syria and Libya are forced to endure.

But this didn’t happen in wartorn Syria or Libya. There were armed police officers on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Campus officials had trained themselves and their students on best practices should a campus shooter strike. The day before the shooting, Parkland had been recognized as one of the 15 safest places in America.

And still 17 died at the hands of one madman, all of those precautions undone by a 19-year-old with no military training, but armed with an AR-15 assault weapon and several magazines of ammunition.

The death toll should not surprise us. Yes, officers were apparently on the scene, but the capacity of a “good guy with a gun” to prevent such tragedies has been grossly romanticized. The weapon of choice of the Parkland shooter was designed precisely to do what it was used to do; it is a killing machine designed to drop multiple people in a very small window of time, and it is coveted by some for exactly that reason.

So now, again, we have a conversation about what to do. President Trump offered us his argument in a tweet Thursday morning: “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!”

Let’s be clear about the nonsense involved in that statement: If you were to take all the evidence that we gather in the next few days outlining the state of mind of the shooter -- all the minutia of the sort that can be collected about a person only in the aftermath of such a catastophe -- it would still not reach the level of proof needed to go into a courtroom beforehand and get that person adjudicated as too mentally ill to own a firearm. There would not have been a damn thing “the authorities” could have done, and that is by NRA-dictated design.

In fact, one of the first acts signed into law by Trump a year ago rolled back a gun-safety regulation adopted by the Obama administration. That rule was intended to make it more difficult for those collecting mental-disability checks from Social Security to purchase firearms, and the NRA wanted it gone. So it was gone.

We’re also already hearing the argument that tragic as all this might be, there’s really nothing much to be done about it. As much as we might want to fix it, we can’t.

Well, don’t feed me this “can’t” nonsense. It is not a case of “can’t.“ It is a case of “won’t,” and those are very different things.

“Can’t” is of course the more soothing explanation. “Can’t” relieves us of responsibility and guilt for those 17 dead people at Parkland, for the 59 dead and 527 wounded by one man in Las Vegas last October, for the 26 murdered at church worship in Sutherland Springs, Texas in November. “Can’t” is an excuse, a moral abdication. It’s a “Get out of guilt free” card that we issue ourselves.

“Yes, such shootings are so terrible, so tragic, Alas, we can’t do anything to stop it. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of (fill in the blank.) Hey, what’s on the Olympics tonight?”

If “can’t” were true, other nations would be having this problem. And other nations aren’t having these problems. With rare exceptions, this is a uniquely American issue, and the rest of the civilized world looks on in confusion at our self-imposed helplessness.

After the horror of Las Vegas, we did see a momentary flurry of rhetoric about addressing the availability of bump stocks, which the gunman used to legally convert semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic weapons. But that moment passed, “won’t” became “can’t,” and the only thing the talk accomplished was to inspire a rush to purchase even more bump stocks, profiting those who manufacture such idiotic devices.

Likewise, the makers of the AR-15 used in Florida are likely to see a bump in their own sales in the next few weeks, which explains why stock in gun companies are rising.

Under the law, the accused Parkland shooter can’t legally buy himself a beer, because at 19 he is deemed insufficiently mature, emotionally and psychologically, to handle that responsibility. There’s a fear that he might injure himself or others.

Yet under Florida law, as under Georgia law, that same 19-year-old is fully entitled to walk into a gunshop and buy himself an AR-15, which in its way is far more intoxicating and dangerous. Why? Because as a nation, we have reached the political decision that ownership of an AR-15 or other assault weapon is a civil right, a right as precious as the right to vote and to speak and pray as you wish.

Let me stress the point: It has been our conscious political choice, not a constitutional mandate, to treat civilian access to assault weapons that way.

A ban on the sale or transfer of assault weapons is not unconstitutional; that’s a “won’t” argument masquerading as a “can’t.” Several states have assault weapon bans on the books, and those laws have survived legal challenge; at one point, we had a similar law in effect at the national level, but we chose to let it expire.

Here’s a “can’t” argument that does hold up. Without an assault weapon and high-capacity magazines, people such as the Parkland shooter, the Vegas shooter and those shooters sure to come cannot inflict these absurdly large death tolls. Again, in Vegas, one man managed to kill 59 and wound more than 500 others before he could be stopped. Easy, legal civilian access to such firepower is madness.

And without the capability to inflict mass slaughter, without the scale of death, without the power that such weapons promise, would these people even be tempted to carry out such carnage?

It is not an accident that most of these mass killers choose to arm themselves with the same type of weapon. The mystique of overwhelming firepower is what sells these things. An alienated sadsack unable to function in society becomes master of the universe when you put an assault weapon in his hands, and if you don’t think people respond to that then you really, really have refused to pay attention not just to the shooters themselves, but to the way such weapons are advertised and marketed.

As sentient human beings, we have the constitutional right, the moral right, to weigh the benefits of easy civilian access to such weaponry against its costs, against the 17 dead at Parkland to cite just today’s case, and then decide that the costs are not worth it.

We just won’t, and in that “won’t” lies our guilt.