Guns

On Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning show this morning, the topic was guns, and one of the guests was Eric Thompson, an online gun dealer whose customers have included Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, and Steven Kazmierczak, who last month shot and killed five students in a geology classroom at Northern Illinois University.  Host Kerri Miller, employing the bland, earnest, above-the-fray tone preferred on public radio, declared that her intention was to discuss "new thinking" on the gun issue, and to explore the possibility of compromise among those fair-minded persons not at the "extremes" of the debate.  Thompson, who has not exactly been disabled by remorse over the mass murders committed by his customers, seems to me an odd choice to advance this goal.  His solution to gun violence on college campuses is for more students and professors to carry guns.

I remember an episode of the "All in the Family" television series, aired in the immediate aftermath of a spate of airline hijackings in the 1970s, in which Archie Bunker announced to his son-in-law, the "Meathead," that the best way to address the problem would be to hand out loaded pistols to all passengers as they boarded the plane.  Who would try to hijack a plane, knowing that every passenger, pilot, and stewardess was packing?  So I don't think Thompson's views represent anything like "new thinking."  Thirty-five years ago, however, they were mocked in "All in the Family," while today Midmorning solemnly suggests that they are a specimen of "new thinking" that moderate people, though not of course the lunatic fringe, might want to endorse.