The Weekly Screed (#618)

The NRA’s stealth swing to liberalism
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — As the American Left waxes wroth over the stubborn opposition of the National Rifle Association (NRA) to even the weakest measures that might curb the flood of anti-personnel weaponry, it has overlooked the NRA’s remarkable embrace of a liberal shibboleth.

By naming mental illness as key to America’s spree-killing spree, the NRA has endorsed the “root-cause analysis” of a major social problems. Root-cause analysis (RCA) is an empirical approach that seeks to dig beneath a problem’s symptoms, e.g., huge private stockpiles of deadly firearms, and attack the complex and systemic causes of the problem, e.g., white suburbs infested with anti-social teenage psychos who suffer from a wide range of deep-seated pathologies.

RCA is a style of liberal thinking that traditionally got nothing but catcalls and mockery from the Right. But now, the NRA’s enlightened focus on mental health changes everything. Suddenly, one of the right wing’s most powerful groups teeters atop a slippery slope that leads straight to the floodgates of compassionate rationalism in social policy. This could compel a complete conservative re-think on dozens of thusfar intractable controversies.

Education, for (a big) example. Liberals have long asserted that most inner-city schools will continue to fail until we act to end poverty, the root cause of these schools’ troubles. Poor kids start school with handicaps that range from drug-infested neighborhoods and shattered families to malnutrition, learning disabilities, emotional disturbance and the inability to work and play well with others.

Conservatives scoff, insisting that poor kids lack the work ethic they would’ve learned if their single moms weren’t shiftless welfare queens. These poor kids can be saved — according to “reformers” like Michelle Rhee — by firing about a million overpaid public school teachers and replacing them with teachers who are younger, cheaper, less secure and less trained but somehow better, and installing them in profit-centered charter schools run by educational mega-corporations.

I know. Empirically, this conservative pipe dream sounds silly. But its partner in silliness is the boilerplate liberal argument about gun control. While the Right, talking about schools, says, “Get rid of bad teachers, period!” the Left, talking guns, says, “Ban bad guns — now!” Both positions ignore root-cause analysis.

It’s easy to compose a rough equivalency here. If it’s OK to ban a “bad” gun — say, an AK-47 modified for automatic fire with a 30-round mag — then it’s OK to fire a “bad” (unionized) teacher who gets low approval ratings from her pupils. Following this parallel, a public school with a union faculty and seniority-based administrators would be the firearms equivalent of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, or a suicide vest packed with Semtex and three-inch nails.

Clearly, any such comparison makes no sense, because the underlying arguments are dumb — which is why the NRA’s shift from dumb to liberal, in the form of root-cause analysis, is such a breakthrough. In the wake of the Newtown horror, the gun lobby is saying, “Let’s forget about the symptoms of violence in our society. Let’s look beyond mere guns, and do something instead about the root cause of why people kill people — mental illness!” NRA superstar Wayne LaPierre made the obvious point that anyone who goes and out and massacres tiny little tots must be crazy. But, sweet Jesus!, said Wayne, we don’t do nearly enough, as a society, to identify these wackos, get them help, heal and soothe their twisted brains and return them to the general populace purged of the urge to kill.

Wayne’s right, darn it. And he’s hinting at a possible grand bargain that could kill two birds — public schools and private guns — with one hollow-point slug.

On the one (right) hand, conservatives would agree to quit bellyaching about organized labor. Michelle Rhee and her corporate sugar daddies would end their war on public schools. Right-wing Congressmen would stop trying to divert federal funds to Bible academies, online classrooms and home-school hermits. Instead, Congress would launch a new war on childhood poverty, focusing on tactics like pre-school education, nutrition, family intervention. It would impose a formula to equalize funding for every school district, regardless of its property tax base. All that corporate dough now being squandered on union-busting and charter-school lobbying would go toward textbooks, safe streets, school lunch and salaries for teachers appropriate to their education, professional status and social importance.

Meanwhile, on the other (left) hand, liberals would concede that America is chin-deep in overkill ordnance and will never grow up. They’ll admit that most gun owners are more or less responsible and that 30,000 deaths a year (mostly accidents and suicides) are the unique price we pay for having a Second Amendment in our Constitution. Liberals would accept, with a sigh, that right-wing paranoia about gun confiscation is a harmless fantasy, like lottery-betting and believing in angels.

Money spent by pro-gun and anti-gun lobbies lobby would flow instead to a Cabinet-level Department of Mental Health, which would be tasked with a massive expansion of mental health services in America. This would include diverting drug criminals to treatment programs, studying objectively the long-term impact of gory video games, and spotting potential grade-school gunslingers before they can obey the orders of the demons in their heads. Plus, America’s down-at-the-heel shrinks could do all sorts of cool psychological research that they couldn’t afford before.

Think about broader implications of the NRA’s progressive brainstorm. Not only would this two-pronged RCA-based deal save millions wasted on gun propaganda and educational “theory,” it would silence two huge sources of the political name-calling, cultural division and general rancor that poisons public discourse and stifles the hope of sensible compromise on dozens of other issues.

Thanks, Wayne, you bleeding-heart son of a gun!