Civility is being offered as a substitute for policy

From the Hortman's to Charlie Kirk, political leaders mourn each new shooting but refuse to touch the one amendment that fuels the cycle of violence.

Sep 11, 2025

Setting the Stage

Charlie Kirk’s name is added to the roll. Another week, another shooting, another press scrum, another bipartisan chorus of: “we must do better,” “turn down the temperature,” “violence has no place here.” Then the curtain drops and so does the urgency. No laws to shrink the arsenal. No executive actions to close the gaps. No votes that risk a seat. Just the same homily to civility—offered as a substitute for policy, as if polite words could catch bullets mid-air.

But that’s the con. Civility is being offered as a substitute for policy, vibes as a replacement for votes. If “turning down the temperature” worked, we’d have seen progress by now. What we have instead is a politics that treats gun violence as a tragic weather pattern—inevitable, ungovernable—while leaders of both parties recycle the same condolences and calls for personal restraint. The truth is simpler and more demanding: we aren’t suffering from a shortage of decency; we’re suffering from a shortage of law. Until elected officials are willing to propose, pass, and enforce concrete limits on the most lethal tools, “do better” is just another way to do nothing at all.

Project 2025—the policy blueprint meant to guide the second Trump administration—makes this passivity explicit. Rather than proposing reforms to address the staggering toll of gun violence, it calls for weakening oversight. The playbook suggests Congress should consider shifting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) out of the Department of Justice and back to the Treasury, a move that would limit its regulatory bite . This isn’t about strengthening enforcement of gun laws; it’s about sidelining the agency most responsible for them.

That fits into a larger pattern: conservatives often pursue “deregulation through defunding and restructuring.” By moving agencies, cutting budgets, or scattering authority, they don’t need to repeal laws directly. They just hollow out the institutions that enforce them. In the case of guns, that means protecting the Second Amendment not only from new restrictions but even from the enforcement of existing ones.

So while it seems like Trump is willing to stretch and warp nearly every other constitutional amendment to consolidate power, the Second is treated as sacred—untouchable, immutable, immune to even the pretense of reform. Guns are the one area where his executive bravado suddenly evaporates. And people will keep dying until something changes.

The Power at Play

Gun violence in America is not random chaos. It is the predictable outcome of a system that elevates one amendment above all others. The Second Amendment has become a sacred idol—untouchable by policy, immune to the same experimentation Trump applies to every other constitutional boundary.

This isn’t new. The NRA spent decades mainstreaming the idea that even modest regulation is a slippery slope to tyranny . Corporate interests—from gun manufacturers to lobbyists—fuel campaigns and line political war chests. Conservative media amplifies paranoia, warning that any step toward safety is a step toward confiscation.

We have normalized daily gun deaths in schools, in homes, in churches. Politicians refuse to address it not because solutions don’t exist—they do, as demonstrated in countries like Australia and the UK—but because the political cost of even trying is treated as greater than the cost of American children dying.

A Lens of Justice

Gun violence doesn’t fall equally. Communities of color endure disproportionate rates of shootings and homicides. Women face heightened risk from intimate partners when firearms are present in the home. Kids are growing up practicing active shooter drills rather than fire drills.

The violence is intersectional. It compounds poverty, racial segregation, and systemic inequality. And when lawmakers shrug and say “there’s nothing we can do,” they are not talking about themselves. They are talking about the communities already bearing the greatest burden, declaring that their safety is expendable.

Most people are only begin to recognize the danger when it touches them personally. But the truth is that marginalized communities have been living with this reality for decades.

Reframing the Debate

The conservative framing is that mass shootings are tragic but inevitable, like bad weather. Kirk himself offered the following in 2023:

I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."

This is what scholars call the “We Live in a Society” deflection —pretending systemic failures are just the way the world works.

Progressives must reframe: gun violence is not an immutable fact of life, it is the result of deliberate policy choices. We regulate cars, we regulate food, we regulate prescription drugs. To argue that we cannot regulate the one consumer product designed specifically to kill is absurd.

Instead of asking “how do we stop every shooting?” we must ask “how do we stop thousands?” Harm reduction, not perfection, is the frame.

Building the Conversation

When skeptics say gun laws don’t work, remind them:

Australia went 27 years without a mass shooting after its buyback.
The UK, Japan, and Canada all show dramatically lower rates of gun violence than the U.S.
Even within the U.S., states with stronger laws consistently have fewer gun deaths.

Conversations should anchor on shared values—safety, freedom, dignity. A story about a parent unable to send their child to school without fear cuts through abstractions. The argument isn’t about stripping rights; it’s about expanding the right to live.

The Counterpoint Trap

Let’s anticipate some bad-faith conservative arguments:

“Gun violence is the price we pay to keep the 2nd Amendment.” → We Live in a Society Deflection

This reframes mass death as unavoidable. In truth, it is the price politicians have chosen for us, not a natural law.
Takeaway: Emphasize that rights without responsibility are not freedoms—they are abdications of governance.

“Criminals will always find guns, even if you ban them.” → Hyper-Skepticism (Weaponized Doubt)

The claim implies regulation is useless. But fewer guns means fewer chances for criminals to get them, just as fewer drunk drivers mean fewer crashes.
Takeaway: Point out that perfect prevention is impossible in any system, but regulation saves lives.

“More good guys with guns will stop the bad guys.” → False Equivalence

This argument pretends that arming civilians is equal to effective public safety. Evidence shows the opposite: more guns mean more accidents and escalation.
Takeaway: Stress that the real proven defense is prevention, not firefights in classrooms and grocery stores.

Deeper Dive

For readers ready to explore more:

“Gunfight” by Adam Winkler – A history of the Second Amendment that traces how courts and politics reshaped it.
“Another Day in the Death of America” by Gary Younge – A devastating account of children killed by guns on a single day.
“The Second” by Carol Anderson – Examines the racial history underpinning the amendment’s modern mythology.

Each connects today’s paralysis to long-standing systems of power, race, and profit.

The Silent Part

Gun violence in America isn’t just about mass shootings or political assassinations—it’s also about the quiet, devastating epidemic of suicide. In recent years, well over half (around 55-60%) of U.S. firearm deaths have been suicides. Having a gun in the home sharply increases the chance that a moment of crisis becomes permanent, because firearms are uniquely lethal.

There’s a lesson from mid-20th century England: many people there died by suicide using domestic (coal) gas, which was rich in carbon monoxide. When Britain phased out coal gas and replaced it with cleaner, less toxic natural gas in the 1960s and early 1970s, suicide by gas dropped dramatically—and overall suicide rates fell at the same time. It wasn’t that despair vanished; it was that the ability to kill oneself easily through a common household method became far more difficult.

The same principle applies here: removing or limiting access to the most lethal tools—guns—saves lives. Not every life, but enough to matter. And that’s the deeper absurdity in our current debate: we’re told that freedom means keeping at hand the means of turning momentary pain or desperation into irreversible loss.

We Should All Be Upset

We should all be upset about what happened to Gabby Giffords when she was shot while meeting her constituents, and to Steve Scalise when bullets tore through a baseball practice, and to the Charleston Nine praying in their church, and to the first graders of Sandy Hook and their teachers, and to the students of Parkland hiding under desks, and to the Black shoppers gunned down in Buffalo, and to the concertgoers in Las Vegas running for their lives, and to the children and teachers in Uvalde whose parents waited outside in horror, and to the Covenant School kids in Nashville, and to the Hortmans in Minnesota, and to the families at Annunciation, and yes even to Charlie Kirk, because it does not matter if you are left or right or powerful or ordinary or young or old, the gunfire finds everyone and the grief binds us all together not in solidarity but in mourning, and every time politicians stand at microphones to tell us to “do better” or “turn down the rhetoric” without passing a single law, they prove again that it is not civility we are missing, it is courage.