A Call for Compromise

53 weeks ago Congress failed the people it swore to protect. It was then that, in pathetically predictable fashion, Congressional leaders couldn’t muster the strength to take action in the face of a national plague of gun violence. As much as I wish it were, that wasn’t the only time they failed us. Indeed, Congress fails the American people every day it chooses not to act against the gun violence which leaves 30,000 dead every year.

On December 14, 2012, 28 people were shot and killed in Sandy Hook, Conn. Of them, 20 were students at the local elementary school and another six their teachers and supervisors. There were 15 other mass shootings that year, including in Aurora, Colo. where over 80 people were shot at a midnight premiere for The Dark Knight Rises. But just looking at these mass shootings isn’t enough; guns killed another 12,000 Americans that year, not to mention the 18,000 firearm-assisted suicides.

Given a national media devoted to headlines (see: MH370) in place of news (see: Russia invades Ukraine), it should come as no surprise that it would take a single mass shooting to wake the public up to the tragedy of guns. As unfortunate as this dichotomy is, such rhetoric did appear to provide a platform for the fight for safer and more sensible gun policy. And while we somehow failed to respond as such in the wake of Aurora, it seemed that Sandy Hook would finally galvanize the public into a state of collective action.

Op-eds were written by the dozen, and for every voice calling for tighter gun measures there were two others, assuredly louder, echoing the truism, as destructive as it is absurd, that ‘guns don’t kill people, people do’. The weeks since Sandy Hook grew in number, and the images of children being rushed out of the school were forgotten. By April, Congress had spent six slow months negotiating broad reform down to a relatively benign vote on expanding background checks. That the measure was benign isn’t necessarily a cause for concern in itself. Indeed, the vast majority of Americans support background checks on the purchase of firearms, and such a law would certainly have had a positive impact on gun violence. No, the cause for concern lies in the fact that this measure couldn’t make it out of the Senate.

Public health is a field ripe with low-hanging fruit. In development, low-hanging fruit, or goals than can be easily achieved with little effort, are the gold standard defining policy decisions. Tomorrow is World Malaria Day, and while we need to remember that 600,000 people die every year from this disease, it is also important to recognize that since 2000, malaria mortality has been cut by 42 percent. This stupendous achievement, though far from eradication, is the result of a policy approach that focuses on low-hanging fruit. From insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor residual spraying to the simple delivery of medicine, ending malaria is an achievable goal. Broad-based and multi-faceted approaches are the stuff of development policy, but why do we never see the same level-headed strategies employed here in the United States?

The answer is simple: partisanship precludes such policy. Let’s reconsider the debate over gun control. More than three-fourths of the guns used in mass shootings are acquired legally, including the Bushmaster .223 — a so-called civilian version of the military’s infamous M-16 — Adam Lanza used when he murdered twenty children in Sandy Hook. But, when people on the Left suggested we reconsider our policy on assault weapons, those on the right of the aisle argued that banning assault weapons won’t end murders and pointed instead to human flaws in the system surrounding mental health. To be sure, a more robust mental health system is critical to improving our nation’s gun problem, but so is taking militarized weapons out of the hands of civilians. Ensuring that criminals can’t fire 30 bullets in a crowd of people without having to reload should be a low-hanging fruit, but the deep divisions in our political climate ensure that it is not.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that we as a people are not as divided as those who represent us. Oxymoronic, I know. Consider, for example, that extremists are more likely to vote in primaries and donate to campaigns. This plays out on both sides of the aisle, but especially on the Right, where ideology too often trumps reason. For a balanced analysis of this phenomenon, I would suggest you read It’s Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas Mann of the liberal Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Compromise, a shibboleth of democracy, is nowhere to be found in today’s Washington. If you don’t have the full solution you are seen to have no solution at all, as with the example of gun control. Progress has always been the product of accepting incremental success, a game of give-and-take. When the opposition is seen as the enemy, we lose sight of the true goal. We focus on preventing victory on the other side rather than achieving it on our own. It’s time we work together to tackle the low-hanging fruit of the world; progress is an achievable goal.