Why Do (Some) Americans Love Their Guns?

I happen to believe that the current debate about gun violence is the most uninformed and unaligned with reality of any debate on any public health issue of all time.

We know what to do about global warming. We may not have the political will to do it, but we know why it’s happening, and we know what to do.

We know what to do about hunger and famine. Again, there may be political exigencies that prevent us in every situation where famine threatens to do what needs to be done, but we know what we should do.

We also know what to do about viruses like Covid-19 and other epidemics.

But gun violence isn’t an epidemic. To quote our good friend Kathy Christoffel, gun violence has become endemic rather than just epidemic because we don’t know what to do.

And the reason we don’t know what to do about gun violence is because every time there’s a really bad shooting and the gun-violence debate erupts again, the two sides whose arguments create the debate demonstrate that they know anything at all about the only issue which really matters, and that issue happens to be the issue of guns.

Last week we had a Congressional debate about gun violence before the House voted up the assault weapons ban. At one point the expert from the Giffords group, Ryan Busse…