Church is uncomfortable at times. On Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, I went to church in the middle of the day. The season of Lent was beginning: a period calling Christians back to the church and a deepening of their faith, a call that is not so easy to respond to, given that we are errant and have only a cloudy notion of God.

The sermon, which the bishop, Jeffrey Lee, preached, was about how our personal enchantment with the world leads to spiritual misery, characterized above all by our estrangement from human society. (Lee spoke at length about Eustace, the fictional bad-boy of C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, who, in his eagerness to claim a great treasure found in a dragon’s lair, clasps a gold bracelet on his hand, only to find that his greed has transformed him into a beastly dragon, too.) Christians may resolve to “give up things” for Lent, as is customary, but without divine grace we cannot restore ourselves, nor can we hope that such measures will bring us to a right relation with other humans, a relationship that we innately desire.

Which is why (here the bishop leapt to a startling conclusion) the Christian mission is inevitably collective. We would be miserable even if we could attain salvation alone, but, as it is, we simply can’t. Moving away from the wrong and toward the right involves turning from individuality and toward the common good. It involves assuming responsibility for the many wrongs we witness each day. Lee argued, for instance, that we, his hearers, were in some way responsible for the death of a respected police commander here in Chicago, who met his fate at mid-day Monday while trying to apprehend a convicted felon in flight after committing yet another crime. The commander, who just a few minutes earlier had been on his way to a meeting at city hall, was shot dead in the stairwell of a downtown government office building.

I left church about 1:30, pondering how I could be responsible for this crime. At about the same hour, I later learned, a crazed nineteen-year-old entered the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida and, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and ample ammunition, began shooting dead the youngsters, teachers, and staff inside. After murdering 17 people, most of them in their teens, this ghastly creature slipped away to hide himself in the banality of a Walmart and Subway before being picked up by the police.

Fingers have begun to point, divisions to arise, as though this damning episode were a grand occasion for taking sides. But we are all on one side in sharing the responsibility for crimes so deeply rooted in who we are, whose sources are not just individual, but moral, legal, political, and communal. As inhabitants of a self-governing society, we are all responsible for the society we have. When it comes to gun violence, every person of conscience in the US can rattle off what needs to be done. That we fail to do it ranks as a tragedy, a national sin.

If our goal is to reduce gun violence, we must re-conceptualize the discourse around guns and focus more on the risks and responsibilities that go along with gun-owning.

As of 2 October 2015,
The Firearm Insurance Requirement Act
is the subject of a White House petition.
Sign the petition by clicking here.

We seldom talk about the responsibilities that positively accompany owning a gun. “Gun control,” the issue we argue about instead, quickly organizes itself around several fixed and immutable nodes, in which the same few phrases—”individual rights,” “2nd Amendment,” and “semi-automatic weapons”—invariably feature. If people from opposing camps talk about the issue at all, conversation quickly becomes so dichotomized it stalls. We need new ideas to get beyond the strategic and ideological stalemate. We need to stop focusing on inanimate objects (guns) and start talking about people.

We can’t even come to the point of agreeing that gun violence is a problem. People who have seen gun violence up close understandably want to rein in irresponsible use, but they too often fall into the trap of assuming that if gun ownership were limited, the problem of gun violence would go away. On the other side of the issue are law-abiding and responsible gun-owners (who make up a majority), who bridle at proposals that essentially criminalize and stigmatize their activities.

The huge population of Americans who own and use guns responsibly is not the problem. Gun violence results when guns are used irresponsibly: when a person is careless, criminal, crazy, or enraged. A gun is a tool. How guns are used in our society is a function of our culture as much as our laws.

While the Second Amendment makes it difficult to regulate gun ownership, we can hope to change how guns are used and treated in our culture. As Clarence Page has pointed out on the McLaughlin Group, some countries with high rates of gun ownership have low rates of gun violence. Becoming such a society should be our goal.

Is there something to be gained from “normalizing” gun ownership, while at the same time expecting at least as much from a gun owner as from a person who owns a car? The parallel is useful, because car ownership offers a positive instance of incorporating a potentially lethal instrument into our culture in a way that minimizes risk and maximizes safety.

Like guns, cars, though useful, can be dangers to their owners and to other people. Which is why we, as a society, require that cars be registered, and that their drivers be educated and licensed. Moreover, to ensure that those who wish to own and drive cars do so without cost to others, we require that owners buy auto insurance. Auto insurance companies ply a flourishing trade, because they have discovered just how to assess all the various risks and costs associated with a particular individual owning a particular car.

No one questions our “right” to own an automobile. There are millions and millions of vehicles and drivers on American streets. Meanwhile, however, a structure has evolved around car-owning intended to ensure that, to the greatest extent possible, we do it safely.

Get the insurance industry involved

Treating guns like cars, and insuring them, could have many benefits. Some of the benefits would accrue to gun-owners; others to society collectively. In particular, insurers could place an actuarial value on the specific hazards involved in the ownership of a specific gun. Individuals wishing to buy semi-automatic weapons would be free to do so, but the insurance costs would provide an incentive to think twice and go easy.

Individual gun owners would have an incentive to see that guns insured in their name were not used in the commission of crime. They would have a stronger incentive to report the loss or theft of a gun promptly. Nearly half of all firearms used in the commission of felonies are lost, stolen, or borrowed. Drawing a sharper line between criminal gun use and legal gun ownership would in itself encourage more personal responsibility.

A more market-oriented approach to reducing gun violence would open up a whole new field for the insurance industry, and might gain more support among lawmakers than does the state-heavy approach that most liberals tout now. This approach might also foster an alliance between legal gun owners and other law-abiding citizens, an alliance that is essential if we hope to minimize gun violence in our time.

REMEMBER: As of 2 October 2015,
The Firearm Insurance Requirement Act
is the subject of a White House petition.
Sign the petition by clicking here.

Top Image: Where felons get their guns, from this source.
(If you know of a more recent version of this figure, please contact me.)
Bottom image: World map of countries by number of guns per capita, from this source.

RELATED:
Nicholas Kristoff, A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths, NYT, October 3, 2015.
House Bill Would Require Gun Owners to Have Liability Insurance, The Hill, May 29, 2015.
Nicholas Kristoff, Our Blind Spot About Guns, NYT, July 2014.
Gun Deaths Exceed in Motor Vehicle Deaths in Ten States, Huffington Post, May 2012.
Suburban Shops Main Source of Guns in Chicago Crimes, Chicago Tribune, August 2012.
Alvarez: Law Could Discourage “Straw Buyers” of Guns, Chicago Sun-Times, September 2012.

This article was featured on the #Gun Crisis: Philadelphia website.