Banks: If we can’t pass gun laws, how about personal judgment?

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As much as it might seem otherwise, our nation is not breaking down into violent division. We’re at dismayingly sharp odds, for sure — mostly over values and too little over the practical considerations of policymaking. We default to emotional reasoning in normal times, so how could we not do the same given a run of events like those of this summer?

But the people who’ve turned it into violence — the ones who’ve perpetrated the deadly tragedies of the last several months — are literally firing from the fringes of humanity. The rest of us ought to remember that. We can’t help and must not avoid taking their presence seriously. We have to understand their origins. But we need not follow them down.

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have to remind myself to breathe as I’m thinking about these things. Not just because of the eruptions but the seemingly hopeless stalemates.

The gun debate that was resurfaced last month by the mass shooting at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis is an example. It’s more or less the same debate that’s been going on for decades.

What I’m about to do is the equivalent of assigning extra homework, but I’d like to invite you to read, or reread, a newspaper column I wrote several years ago (“No stranger to guns — just not good with them”). Online readers can follow the link; print readers can find it at tinyurl.com/banks-guns, and the rest of this current column will have fuller context if you are at least able to skim the earlier one.

The original column is from 2022, so parts of it are dated. And in light of recent events, it may seem soft. I’ll be clear: In my ideal world, we’d ban weapons that can be used to kill many people quickly. I’m in favor of steps that might at least slow an evil-hearted person down. In an era with a seemingly renewed commitment in some quarters to states as competing laboratories of democracy, a patchwork of laws may be the best we can do. Minnesota could join the one-fifth of states with assault weapons bans. And Texans could keep their big guns in hand to battle roving bands of feral hogs, one of the few serious justifications I’m aware of and a problem Minnesotans don’t have.

What if instead of a promise “to get serious about gun violence” that would be unencumbered by his recently announced bid for a third term, Gov. Tim Walz had chosen to spend his political capital — all of it if necessary — to get a Minnesota ban on assault weapons passed?

But I’m also a realist. I know that a person who is determined to do harm will find a way. I know that most people who own guns respect their power. I know that, even where there are majorities in favor, restrictions on weaponry are a hard sell in our system.

Whatever the case, not every solution begins and ends with the passage of a law. Along that line of thinking, I offer this:

There are two primary ideas about gun impact in our country. One is that we’d have more protection from depraved minds if guns were less readily available. The other is that we’d be safer if there were more guns around for deterrence and response. Both are forms of second-order thinking. But more guns is the one that’s been tried.

That can change. And the most likely way it might is household by household, individual by individual, making the personal judgments we all make, are entitled to make, are responsible for making.

That’s the message from my 2022 column that I’m most interested in renewing today — whether we’re talking about guns or any of our other divisions. Yeah, I know, I know: You first. I’d counter that all of us should be most concerned with what we do and less concerned about what they do.