Joe Nocera: Stop Worshipping Guns

This article is part of a Free Press series on “Repairing America in the Age of Political Violence.” Read the other entries, including from Abigail Shrier, Coleman Hughes, Sam Harris and others, here.

The most important moment in the modern history of gun rights took place on the afternoon of April 17, 2013. Four months earlier, a deeply troubled 20-year-old man, using an AR-15–style semiautomatic weapon, killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty of Adam Lanza’s victims were young children—5 and 6 years old.

There had been many mass shootings prior to Newtown, of course. But the massacre of so many innocent children roused the public like nothing had before.

That public anger convinced gun-control advocates that they might finally pass measures to reduce gun violence. Bills were introduced to expand mandatory background checks, ban assault weapons, and outlaw high-capacity gun magazines, among other things. But that April afternoon, in a victory for the National Rifle Association, which cast these modest measures as an attack on the Second Amendment, the bills were rejected by the Senate.

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I was in the Senate press gallery that day, and I’ll never forget the shock and dismay of the Newtown parents as they watched the measures fail. I also remember someone saying that if the mass murder of little children couldn’t move Congress to pass laws to reduce gun violence, nothing ever would.

Which is basically how things have played out, even as mass shootings have become so commonplace they rarely rate as front-page news anymore.