Such offerings from politicians are not, in the least, comparable to the heartfelt cry for prayer from the woman caught in the midst of an outrageously dangerous situation, the woman described in the article’s last paragraph. Instead, they are disingenuous and, worse, they are dishonest.

Saying “our thoughts and prayers are with you” is a lie. The politicians who say it aren’t thinking at all ... if they thought the least little bit, they would think of ways to regulate gun ownership. They also aren’t praying; real prayer leads to action (“Never pray for anything you aren’t willing to work for,” my grandfather taught me.)

The Bible most of them claim to follow says very clearly: “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:15-17)

If a nation is riddled by daily gun death, and one of you says, “I’m praying for you,” and yet you do nothing to end the gun violence, what is the good of that? So prayers, by themselves, if they have no attendant action, are a lie. These politicians cheapen both thought and prayer into meaninglessness.

Another reader invokes Scripture to craft a very different argument:

Jonathan Merritt takes some time out of his day to castigate Jerry Falwell, Jr. and any Christian who feels they have a right to arms or self defense, using broad brush strokes to illustrate that Jesus would rather they didn’t. But to do so, he had to skip an awful lot of the Bible and its remarkably complex nuance on violence.

He references the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ demand that his apostle stop attacking the people who had come to abduct him, but he ignores why that apostle had the sword in the first place—Jesus told him to put it on earlier that day:

Luke 22:36 He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. 37 It is written: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors’[b]; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.”

38 The disciples said, “See, Lord, here are two swords.”

“That’s enough!” he replied.

This is Jesus very literally saying “Hey, I’m about to be a criminal and you hang out with me. You probably should get armed.”

Is that a biblical demand that every single Christian carry a gun? No, probably not. But it does show that Jesus was probably disapproving of attacking law enforcement officers on official duty rather than self defense as a concept.

The rest of the Bible is similarly nuanced. Exodus 22, for example, makes it perfectly clear that a person who kills a home invader in the dark when his intents can’t be read is blameless. The Bible is clear that violence has its place—a soldier can kill in war, but a murderer cannot; a man may kill in self-defence, but not for vengeance. Violence isn’t taken lightly by any means, but sometimes it’s taken nonetheless. A simplified version of the Bible may be very comfortable to a leftist Christian, but whitewashing away nuance does not make that nuance disappear; it simply reveals one’s bias.

Most of the people I know who have guns keep them safely secured and most are not paranoid. Some of them even mock those who can’t leave the house without a gun on their hip. The full-blown and paranoid gun nut is also a very sophisticated engineer who had lived in urban, suburban, and rural areas at different times in his life. He’s a libertarian more than anything else. So, I’m always careful to recognize that things aren’t as simple as a rural/urban divide.

Yet I think we have crossed a line into utter madness. When it comes down to the daily barrage of mass murder, what I believe is that we have turned our country over to terrorists of every religious stripe and no religion at all. The latest murderers may very well have been inspired by ISIS [CB note: breaking news just now suggests so]. But last week’s murderer in Colorado Springs was clearly inspired by the violent rhetoric of the Christianist far right, including the rhetoric of some of the Republican candidates for president.

Adam Lanza and the Oregon shooter and James Holmes may just have been inspired by the demons in their heads, but all of them were able to do what they did because of easy access to legal and illegal weapons. When we live in a country where people on terrorist watch lists and clearly paranoid individuals can buy whatever weaponry they want and the entire right wing of the United States refuses to even consider some basic limitations, I truly fear for what we have become as a nation.

We have given in to the paranoids and the terrorists who kill every single day. We are truly sick as a nation. I wish I saw a way out, but I simply don’t see it any longer. I have no doubt that the people who wrote the Second Amendment are turning over in their graves.

A very different view comes from a reader who grew up in Redlands, California, which is right next to San Bernardino:

Trying to defeat terrorists by making government even more centralized multiplies our vulnerability to asymmetrical warfare and transforms us into a less free, less secure society. Our best defense, ironically, might be to encourage and urban sprawl. A Progressive state such as California, which makes it extremely difficult for citizens to carry a handgun for self defense, leaves citizens easy targets for terrorists who know that their victims will not be shooting back. “Make yourselves sheep,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “and wolves will eat you.”

Update from a reader, who points to a perceived gaffe from Attorney General Loretta Lynch:

As bad as the empty bromides from various politicians are, do you know what is worse? This:

Those will come later from local authorities who are on the scene, but I do want to express my deepest condolences and ask that you join me in standing with our colleague, friends and partners in San Bernardino suffering with this and add all of our thoughts and prayers here today now at this time. Because we’re at the point where these issues have come together really like never before in law enforcement thought and in our nation’s history and it gives us a wonderful opportunity and a wonderful moment to really make significant change.

What manner of person thinks in these terms? Egads.

Some people view guns as a source of danger, while others view guns as a source of protection. That’s why after a mass shooting, some people (like myself) want to enact far more restrictions on guns, while others run out to buy one. However, it’s hard for me to believe that more guns will lead to less crime.

Finally, the cause of our gun problems are rooted in a divide over how to interpret the Constitution in 2015. When the document was written, America did not have a large, permanent standing army that protected the country from foreign enemies. American towns also didn’t have a police force like they do now. And so when the Second Amendment was written, it was explicitly pointed out in the amendment that a well-organized militia was necessary for the security of a free state. However, times have changed. America has a very large standing army now. American cities have a police force to respond to criminal activity.

And the power and accuracy of weapons has changed dramatically. When the Framers gave the people the right to bear arms, guns couldn’t fire 60 rounds per minute, just like nuclear weapons did not yet exist. Would the Framers have given every American the right to buy a weapon that could fire 60 rounds per minute, online or from a private seller at a gun show without a background check? You’d have a hard time convincing me of that.

However, these divisions on guns have not changed much in recent years. Those in rural areas, those who view guns as more of a protection than the cause of danger, and those that interpret the Constitution like it’s still the 18th century will continue to insist that people in the cities “enjoy” the same rights they think they are entitled to. However, I am not so sure that people in the cities are really enjoying these rights. In fact, these rights seem to be killing us.

Your thoughts on yesterday’s shooting or guns in general? Drop us an email.

I believe that students should be trained and drilled on how to respond to a mass shooter. Look at how Israeli civilians respond to an armed terrorist. Much of their action is due to military training, but there's no reason why our kids are wholly unprepared for this kind of thing. Could be useful as an adult, too.

Instead of arming every teacher, how about entrusting one teacher or the principal with that responsibility? Like an Air Marshall.

Moreover, there must be “lockdown” technology that can be easily implemented. An easy and automatic alarm that triggers when a gunshot is heard. Reinforced classroom doors. Designated shelters. Maybe some kind of teargas that could incapacitate everyone in a room, including the gunman.

Lara N. Dotson-Renta touched on some of those points in her piece for us today on teachers facing the possibility of a shooting:

A teacher in the United States is now likely to […] dutifully practice ever more realistic lockdowns, a safety measure that ultimately feels as though it’s placing shootings on par with fires, earthquakes, and natural disasters. At the elementary-school level, my daughter’s teachers devise quiet lockdown games and crouch-down-under-the-desk dances for their little first-graders, while a group of teachers in Iowa has even devised and marketed a locking mechanism that allows doors to be closed from the inside.

If you have any strong views on the best way for educators to protect themselves and their students, drop me an email and I’ll post. Meanwhile, this list of “unsuccessful attacks related to schools” is interesting to skim through. For example:

De Anza College student Al DeGuzman planned a Columbine style school shooting at the school. An employee at a Longs Drugs store developed pictures of DeGuzman posing with his guns and homemade bombs. She and a coworker called police. DeGuzman was arrested when he returned for his photos.

A remarkable number of those averted attacks—at least seven out of 24—involved would-be killers directly inspired by Columbine. I also looked around for examples of educators who stopped gunmen with their own guns, along the lines of the Air Marshall analogy mentioned by our reader. I found this AP story from 1997:

Luke Woodham [is] the 16-year-old who is charged with slashing his mother to death with a butcher knife and then opening fire on his classmates with a rifle. He is accused of killing Lydia Dew, 17, and his former girlfriend, Christina Menefee, and wounding seven other students, leaving them bleeding on the polished floor of the school cafeteria. [...]

Fearing Woodham would come for him next, [principal Roy] Balentine ran to his office to call the police. As he dialed, more shots rang out. More students fell.

Minutes later, Assistant Principal Joel Myrick chased Woodham down outside the school, held him at bay with a .45-caliber automatic pistol he kept in his truck in the school parking lot. He forced Woodham to the ground and put his foot on the youth’s neck. “I think he’s a coward,” Myrick said. “I had my weapon pointed at his face, and he didn’t want to die.”

Though I guess it’s questionable whether Woodham had already done all his damage before Myrick pinned him down. If you know of any better examples, please let me know.

Pro-lifers, which generally are politically conservative, rail against Roe v. Wade as the preeminent example of judicial activism that invented the constitutional right to abortion out of thin air, and that the ruling had no basis in any “original” understanding or reading of the Constitution. Yet, in D.C. v. Heller, conservatives applauded when the Court, through naked judicial activism, overturned 200-plus years of precedent and history and decided for the first time in history that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual rather than a collective right to firearm possession.

Similarly, gun-control activists, which are generally liberal, abhor “originalism” as an interpretive theory for obvious reasons. They embrace Roe v. Wade and its view of the Constitution as a “living document” and applaud judicial efforts to read the Constitution in broader, more modern terms to promote greater conceptions of justice, equality and personal liberty. Yet, when it comes to the Second Amendment, suddenly they’re all Originalists, arguing that it was only intended to protect a collective right to bear arms for purposes of a Militia; and thus the Heller decision was decided incorrectly (in their opinion).  

Well, you can’t have it both ways!  Gun-control activists (i.e. liberals) cannot be Originalists only when it suits their preferred policy outcome. But perhaps that is to be expected if, as Jim Elliott put it: “gun control advocates and pro-life advocates work upon first principles.” Apparently, there’s no harm in being a hypocrite if it’s in defense of your principles.

Update from Jim Elliott:

I have to take slight issue with your reader who asserted that the Supreme Court, in Heller v. D.C., invented “from whole cloth” an individual right to bear arms. A right to individual self-defense was held in common with the idea of a well-regulated militia—you could not have the latter without the former—and was incorporated into the state constitutions of a number of the original 13 colonies.

In 1776, Pennsylvania stated explicitly in Article XIII of its constitution “that people have the right to bear arms for the defence [sic] of themselves and the state.” This language is similar to that of Virginia, also from 1776. A further Pennsylvania provision gave an obligation to Pennsylvanians to keep and bear arms, or provide a fee if they refused due to conscience. Vermont also incorporated similar language. North Carolina and Massachusetts (the first in the Americas) were explicit in the obligation to keep and bear arms as well, linking it directly to the defense of the commons, because at the time there was no distinction between the two.

As early as 1650, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware required all men 16 and over to keep and bear arms. Rhode Island did not require you to own a gun, unless you wanted to attend a public meeting or travel more than two miles, in which case you had to appear with one. South Carolina, while not specific that “armes” meant guns, did require men to be able to appear with them, and in 1743 required every man to carry a gun when attending church. Georgia’s law is confusing but clearly levies fines for failing to appear at the militia’s muster without your own firearm and equipment. From the time of its transfer from the Dutch, New York required all men from 16 to 60 to be keep arms. In Maryland, you could not own land unless you could prove you were armed. Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina required masters to give firearms, shot, and gunpowder to indentured servants upon the completion of their service.

Indeed, since the beginning of colonization, individuals armed for the defense of the commons was a hallmark of regulation, just as much as the secure storage of them was also regulated. I mean, let’s remember why the British were coming to Lexington and Concord: To seize arms after a spontaneous militia in Massachusetts had prevented John Gage from imposing his will in Boston. While the original states all expressly tied the keeping of arms to an obligation to defend the commons, and there were laws regarding their use (i.e. Pennsylvania actually had a separate article regarding hunting, and Boston had laws regarding careless discharges of firearms), none inhibited the personal possession of arms or their use in self-defense.  

There is also the little matter of the fact that, were your reader correct, the Second Amendment would become the only amendment within the Bill of Rights where “the people” did not have both a collective and individual application. There is no “collective” right to free political speech or religious expression without protection of the individual’s, nor security in one’s own papers and person in some collective sense. It would be sophistry to claim that only in the case of the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms solely based in a need for common defense.

The Supreme Court has made many rulings directly and indirectly affecting the right to bear arms. In Guorko v. U.S., the court struck down jury instructions that told the jurors to consider deliberately arming oneself as indication of premeditation to kill, so long as the individual had armed themselves for the purposes of self-defense. This was re-affirmed by the same court in Thompson v. U.S. Where Heller arguably deviates is from precedence from the Supreme Court (Presser v. Illinois, Miller v. Texas, U.S. v. Miller) that affirmed the ability of states to regulate the carry of firearms.

They rely predominantly on public confusion and disgust to pass, even though they make no practical difference. But any ban, no matter how pointless or incremental, is welcomed.

Stuck in the middle all of this is the American public. People desperately want to believe that there is a way to preserve a broad 2nd Amendment right to gun ownership, while keeping the guns away from the bad people.  The two goals are almost certainly mutually exclusive, so what we end up with is a bunch of meaningless tinkering around the edges.

By “no practical difference,” our reader likely means that the percentage of homicides from assault weapons is very small—less than 3 percent—similar to the percentage of abortions that are “partial birth”—about 0.02 percent. (Those percentages translate to 322 deaths in 2012 from any kind of rifle, and about 2,600 deaths in 2006 from “partial birth abortion.”) Here’s Lois Beckett on the “assault weapon myth”:

In a poll [in December 2014], 59 percent of likely voters said they favor a ban. But in the 10 years since the previous [assault weapons] ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference. It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.

Another reader, like the one above, illustrates “How Pro-Life Activists Are Like Gun Control Activists”:

1. They seem to think degrading their opponents help their cause.

When a Pro-Life activist refers to a scared, young woman seeking an abortion as a “whore,” “slut,” or “baby-killer,” most people, even those who may hold a more moderate Pro-Life views, will be repulsed.  Said scared young woman is unlikely to be deterred; she will just become resentful towards those who verbally abused her, and this will probably drive her to resist their cause even more than she would have otherwise.

Gun Control activists do the same thing. “Ammosexual.” “Arsenalists and ‘tactical’ fetishists.” “Domestic Terrorist.” While most people would agree these terms are not nearly as harsh as the ones above, it is pretty clear that anyone who uses these terms hates the people who own firearms (or at least the “wrong” kind of firearms), and takes a certain amount of glee in denigrating them. This name-calling will make someone who values their right to own a firearm wary of anything a Gun Control advocate proposes, regardless of how reasonable it may be. In both cases, the insult says more about the one issuing it than the one receiving it.

2. The Constitution guarantees a right they don’t like, so they make it as difficult as possible to exercise that right.

Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago confirmed the 2nd Amendment applied on an individual basis. Overturning either would require a Constitutional amendment that will not pass in the foreseeable future, so the tactic is to make exercising these rights as difficult as possible. From overly complicated requirements to get an abortion, to “may issue” concealed carry laws that require political connections to get a concealed carry license, both sides pass laws that do whatever they can to infringe upon rights they don’t agree with.

3. They sound like idiots to their opponents

As someone who leans conservative, I cringe a little bit whenever a geriatric Republican man starts talking about abortion, or women’s health in general.  I either laugh or shake my head in disbelief whenever a Gun Control activist starts talking.  From little things like misusing “bullets” and “clips” (when they really mean “cartridges” and “magazines”), to the now classic “the shoulder thing that goes up [see the embedded video above],” it’s hard to take someone seriously who clearly knows nothing about what they’re talking about.

4. Getting what they want will make the problem worse

If Pro-Life activists get what they want, women will go back to coat-hangers in back alleys. If Gun Control activists get what they want (and most of the more prominent activists want a complete ban, even if they do everything they can not to say it), the only people who will be disarmed are the ones you didn’t have to worry about in the first place. Both will create unfavorable situations.

5. They aren’t as popular as their opponents.

Two of the most popular organizations in the United States: Planned Parenthood and the National Rifle Association.

The email address is hello@theatlantic.com if you wanna join in.  

Safety training isn’t something I have any problem with—even California’s test for a permit to buy a handgun is so simple you basically can’t be trusted with the pencil you use to fill it out if you can’t pass. Many states do have more rigorous safety courses for people applying for carry permits, as well they should.

This brings us to the ever-ubiquitous “assault rifle” argument, which was essentially given to the United States by some divine and perverse creature to make sure no one agrees on anything, ever. Definitions of assault rifles are primarily cosmetic; a semi-automatic is a semi-automatic at its basest function whether it is America’s most popular rifle—the .22 caliber Ruger 10/22—or the wet dream of some mil-spec fetishist’s custom AR-15: Detachable magazine, self-loading and cocking, pull the trigger and it (theoretically) works. Rifles, as a whole, historically make up about 2.5 percent of the firearms used in homicides.

So, again ... tinkering.

Gun rights advocates know these figures. They know that if you want to make a substantial, serious impact on homicide and suicide in this country, you need to get rid of handguns. They’re the most-commonly purchased, most-commonly stolen, most-commonly used to harm oneself or another. Full stop.

A gun control advocate who doesn’t want to stop the sale and possession of handguns in their entirety is either fooling themselves or someone who doesn't really care beyond the conversation they’re in at that moment. Now, I don’t particularly care for slippery-slope arguments, and I think the NRA is so afraid of this one they prevent extraordinarily useful tinkering—because saving lives, even around the edges, is a worthy goal. But the logic is inescapable if you’ve bothered to study the issue.

Bringing me to your second reader. If, indeed, she has enough experience to “like and respect” me, then she has been here long enough to know I already know and agree with their point. Medical progress has gifted women with the ability to choose whether or not they will bear the life-long consequences that come to their body from bearing a child, and not acknowledging those consequences is so cavalier it should render one ineligible to discuss the topic.

Let me be clear: While health is a crucial concern in choosing abortion, this does not diminish the fact that this very liberty—to choose not to bear the consequences of pregnancy, to set the course of one's own life—is what is at stake. It’s not liberty “to own a gun” that is at stake, any more than it is just a woman’s choice to be a parent or not that is at stake: It is the liberty to defend the sanctity of one’s own body and its course.

A woman is choosing the course of her life over the potential life inside them. And that’s fine. If I’m going to pick my belief in the human right to the tools of self-defense over potentially-ended lives, I have precisely zero truck to be able to criticize a woman over that choice, and any gun rights advocate who claims otherwise is just engaging in the time-honored human tradition of refusing to apply their own logic to a situation they don't want to because they know it makes them wrong. And vice versa.

Any remaining thoughts on this thread? Drop me an email.

The number of nonfatal firearm-related crimes has dropped from a high of 1,287,190 in 1994 to a bottoming out of 331,618 in 2008. And even though that number has since increased, it remains at around a third of its peak. In 1994, the firearm crime rate was 7.4; in 2011, it was 1.8. And, interestingly, firearm use in non-fatal violent crime remains consistent with its historical range of between 5-8 percent of overall non-fatal violent crime.

But those facts won’t matter.

I could point out that murder and non-negligent manslaughter are down from a 1994 peak of 23,326 to 14,196 in 2013, according to the FBI. I could point out that, also according to the FBI, 8,454 of those deaths in 2013 were caused by firearms—just under 60 percent of them—and that this remains consistent with the historical average of the percentage of murders that are done with firearms.

But that won’t matter.

I could point out that this coincides with a period in time where there has been a monumental growth in the number of people with concealed carry permits, or that such individuals are not any more likely to commit violent crime. For example, out of the state of Texas’s 584,850 permit holders in 2012, 120—0.021 percent—were convicted of a misdemeanor or felony, with only a few of them charged in murder or negligent homicide.

But that won’t matter.

I could point out that your chance of being criminally killed by a firearm is 0.000267 percent. I could point out that accidental firearm deaths account for 0.6 percent of all accidental deaths in the U.S., and that such deaths are down from a peak of over 2,000 in 1981 to fewer than 600 in 2013.

But that won’t matter.

It won’t matter because I’m basically being an ass: Behind every one of those data points is the story of a life lost. There’s a mother or father who’s not coming home, a son or daughter who won’t be tucked in tonight. How do you argue with the moral equivalent of Dick Cheney’s One-Percent Doctrine couched in the image of a woman screaming in the parking lot of an elementary school [in Newtown, Connecticut, in the photo seen above]? You don’t. Unless you’re a complete ass.

Gun rights activists have to realize this. We don’t have a good answer. We may not even have a right one. We can either avoid this discussion by flinging first principles at one another like good fundamentalists, or we can recognize that the gun control folks aren’t wrong. Unlike with abortion, we can’t fall back on different axiomatic definitions of what a zygote is. Gun control advocates are responding to the loss of what are indisputably innocent lives. We have to respect those lives by recognizing that.

Update from a reader:

But here’s the crucial difference: Most—almost all—anti-abortion activists are very open about wanting to make all abortion illegal. They’re very vocal about how abortion is murder in their eyes, and thus not a negotiable practice.

But most gun-control supporters fall in the middle of the bell curve, just wanting background checks, a cooling off period, maybe some basic training in gun safety, and no assault rifles. And I don’t think they’re being cagy about it. That’s really all most of them want.

So the unwillingness of the pro-life crowd to negotiate makes sense, while the intransigence of the NRA is something else.

Another reader:

Jim Elliott’s comparison of pro-choice activists with gun-rights activists is deeply flawed. He writes:

Pro-choice advocates [...] weigh the potential for life against the liberty of a life already existing and choose the latter, whereas gun rights advocates weigh the potential for death against the liberty of a life already existing, and choose the latter. When you’re essentially arguing against a moral axiom such as life, you’ve just picked the losing team.

Let me be blunt: It is wrong to suggest a woman’s liberty is the only thing at risk when she is denied the right to have an abortion, given that many women need an abortion to save their own lives. It almost pisses me off that I have to point this out to Jim, whom I like and respect, but it’s disheartening so many men seem to skip over the whole thing about our bodies being part of their risk-analysis equation. A woman’s liberty to control what happens to her own body, and the lifelong consequences of denying her that liberty, are profoundly different than those involved with a person’s liberty to own a gun (and I think even pro-life advocates would agree with me on this point). While there may be some shared concerns about preserving life, these issues are much too complex to be analogized.

Update: Read this followup note for Jim’s response to the two readers.  

In this case, the guy isn’t oversensitive because you are implying he’s overcompensating (well, sometimes maybe) but because you are implying that other men with guns should come and tell him it would be a very good idea for him to not have those anymore, or face jail time. That’s being floated about.

And then when he gets down to thinking about it, he realizes that a lot of shootings happen with numbers of guns as small as one, and never much larger than three. So he then gets to thinking: Maybe when it comes time to ban arsenals, someone will say, “Well, what we really meant was multiple guns, because just two or three is all it takes to multiply the risk from a single shooter.”

When pro-life people come in and try to incrementally restrict access to abortions in arbitrary ways, do you pretend what they’re doing isn’t going for a full and total ban, eventually? Nobody seriously does, because it’s clear what they’re doing is trying to restrict access in any way they can, any opportunity they get, because they are working towards the endgame of banning abortions. It’s transparent.

I don’t own guns, and I don’t enjoy shooting. That being said, what you are asking these people to do is either accept arbitrary regulation that doesn’t do anything (less than ten guns is still plenty to do a mass shooting with) or ignore the fact that what the people who mention “arsenals” and “assault rifles” without defining those terms really want as an endgame is no guns, at all, for anyone.

Thoughts? Email hello@theatlantic.com.