by Tom Pantera
Columnist

When you feel strongly about an issue, but things don’t go your way, when is it time to surrender? When do you cry uncle and figure that whatever happens happens?

I don’t know where that exact point is, but recently it’s happened to me on an issue about which I feel strongly: gun control.

I give up. We will never have meaningful gun control in this country. If it didn’t happen in the year after Newtown, when our worst fears came true, it will never happen, or at least not until long after most of us are dust. America is going to remain a free-fire zone; every traffic accident will be a potential shootout, every loner with a squirming brain will be a candidate for walking into a school and killing children whose lives have barely begun.

The fight is over, folks. The good guys lost. The bad guys – and the bad guys who actually pulled triggers are a small part of the total number – have won.

Pretty depressing, I know. There isn’t really a silver lining that I can see.

Of course, my decision to give up is of startlingly little consequence. It’s more of a personal thing. It’s not like I have any real influence on the issue as an individual. Nobody’s going to read this column, scream “hot jiggedy Moses, he’s right!” and change his position on the issue. It’s more of a decision about where how I want to allocate my mental energy. I mean, I’ve given up on hoping that I’ll live to see the Vikings win the Super Bowl, but I keep watching them. Hope does indeed spring eternal.

But hope won’t stop bullets from penetrating a 6-year-old’s skull.

I think maybe the turning point for me was last week’s incident in Colorado. When that happened, I noticed that I no longer had that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I got after every other similar incident. It was more a feeling of, “Well, of course.”

It’s not even outrage fatigue. I can still get mad about things, but we are so very far from a solution to gun violence in this country that it’s just no longer worth the expenditure of mental and spiritual energy.

There are a lot of reasons why my side has lost the war. And they’re not hard to find. William Butler Yeats saw it back in 1919, when he wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/
Are full of passionate intensity.” That’s a big part of the problem.

For some of the bad guys, like the NRA leadership, the passionate intensity is all about money. It’s a gun manufacturer’s lobby, folks. Every reasonable regulation they stave off is another dime in their pockets.

But for the great mass of us, what has made gun violence an insoluble issue has to do with a difference in world views that is so basic as to be insurmountable. Basically, it is this: Those who favor unrestricted gun ownership believe that their Constitutional “right” – a misreading of the Second Amendment though it is – is more important than the lives of innocents. There’s much more to it, of course, but you can’t argue with people who think something supersedes the very right of others to live. They’ve made a calculation that there are things more important than other peoples’ lives. They’ll never admit that, of course; that’s the other reason I’ve given up. It’s as though people on my side and people on their side are seeing an entirely different world; in theirs, the skies are red and sturdy yeomen with old shotguns can defeat a standing army.

We who believe in gun control have nearly all statistical evidence on our side. Just to pick one, it’s much more likely that someone who keeps a gun for home protection will be shot with it than that they will shoot an intruder. But the pro-gun folks have a “Death Wish” fantasy that won’t allow them to believe that and even if they did believe it, they’d consider themselves the invulnerable exception (as we all do when it comes to the risks of life). And they’ve bought lock, stock and gun barrel the propaganda of people who make money off of making folks afraid.

It’s not that I think all gun owners are bad people. Quite the contrary, I have friends and relatives that own guns and they’re wonderful people. None of them is ever going to do anything stupid with a gun, much less shoot up a school. None of them, if asked, would say that the Second Amendment is more important than life itself. But there are enough idiots and crazies out there with free access to firearms that it’s going to happen again and again and again. People are going to die needlessly. Some lives will be ended and others will be forever shattered. There will be more graves dug because a minority of this country fetishizes a Constitutional provision written when many people still had to worry about bears breaking into the cabin and eating the family.

So what does it mean that I’ve given up? I don’t even know. Maybe I just won’t engage people in the discussion anymore, because almost more than anything else, I’m tired of the sophistry of those who don’t understand it isn’t just a theoretical debate, that there are lives at stake. I might engage them occasionally, if I’m feeling pugnacious and don’t have more important things to do, but my heart won’t be in it.

So I leave the fight to those who are not as exhausted. I hope you win, guys. But I have almost no expectation that you will.

tpantera@yahoo.com