Last night, just as President Obama was finishing speaking about the unspeakable in Newtown, two Topeka police officers were shot and killed, three blocks from the house where I lived for most of the 1970s.  Two murdered Topeka policemen, 28 dead in Newtown, 10 shot in Chicago during the weekend, over 32,000 dead last year from gun violence in America.  As I type that sentence, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, life-long NRA member with a 100% pro-gun voting record, is saying that this is a time for a national conversation about guns in America.  We've talked for decades.  Dialogue is delay.  We don't need a conversation; we need action.

The pro-gun lobby makes several arguments, all of them specious.  One of the most common--and most ridiculous--is that we need more guns, not fewer.  If only everyone was armed, violence would be reduced.  At the moment, the Kansas legislature is considering a bill that would end the exemption for colleges and universities to our concealed carry law.  Last session, moderate Republicans managed to kill the bill in the Senate.  But all but one of them was purged during the Republican primary, and chances are slim that with the wingnuts in control, the bill can be stopped.  I know I'd have felt safer as a professor with the knowledge that any number of my students might be legally carrying a concealed weapon.  If the six- and seven-year-olds in Newtown had only been armed...

The NRA and its allies argue that laws regulating guns don't work.  The guns in Newtown had been purchased legally and Connecticut's relatively strict gun laws didn't stop the killing.  But that's not an argument against gun laws; it's an argument about how weak they are.  Over 40% of guns are purchased at gun shows, where there are no background checks or waiting periods.  Semi-automatic guns are legal, as are clips with over ten bullets.  As long as guns laws are inconsistent from state to state, are full of loopholes, and end up regulating almost nothing, the problem with such laws is not that they exist, but that their existence has almost no effect.

Perhaps the favorite argument is based on the "slippery slope": if government can regulate any guns, it will be able to regulate all guns.  (In virtually every freshman comp class, the slippery slope argument is among those discussed as a logical fallacy.)   And they argue, of course, that the second amendment prohibits regulation of gun ownership.  Even conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger said after he had retired that that argument was the greatest "fraud" perpetrated in Constitutional law.  When in 2008 the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia's gun laws in the Heller case, it seemed a decisive blow against gun laws.  But the Court ruled only that gun owners have a legitimate right to use guns in self-defense in their homes.  Perhaps in some perverse way, District of Columbia v. Heller can be used as a sort of dam to end the slippery slope argument.  The government cannot take away all rights to gun ownership; that's been settled and leaves space for a slew of sensible regulations. 

(The slippery slope tactic is also a favorite of those opposing same-sex marriage.  As Sen. Lindsay Graham, always a paragon of clear thinking, said last week, if a same-sex couple can be allowed marriage in the name of love, why not an owner and his dog? one man with several wives?  But why not go one step back up the slope: if a heterosexual couple can be allowed to marry in the name of love, why not a man and his dog?  The most egregious example of such "logic" is probably Justice Scalia's argument that approving same-sex marriages would lead to moral and legal approval of bestiality, of murder.  When challenged recently about the offensive and inane comparison, Scalia said disingenuously that it wasn't a slippery slope tactic but reductio ad absurdum.  But surely as a product of the best Catholic education with its tradition of teaching logic, Scalia knows that the reduction to absurdity is an argument you use to demolish your opponent's stance, not your own.  The sentence about arming six-year-olds--that's a use of reductio ad absurdum.  Yes, Scalia's statement was absurd all right, but that's to his shame.)

As we think about gun violence in America, one fact should not be overlooked: of the 32,000+ Americans who were killed with guns last year in America, over 18,000 (about 55%) were not murders but suicides.  I've had little experience with gun violence, but the one time I was confronted with it was indelible.  Over two decades ago, when my colleague and co-author Virginia and I were working on the letters of Karl Menninger, four of us were scheduled to attend the funeral of a Menninger psychiatrist, a man who had led a long and productive life and who died a sudden and painless death, a "good death," as it were.  But Barbara, one of the four, didn't show up to meet her driver.  Barbara had a long history of depression and hospitalization.  I told the person who was to drive her to call the police, but Laura said she couldn't do that.  So on a hot, gray, rainy day, I went to Barbara's house.  The windows were open despite the rain, the lights were on, her car was there.  No one came to the door when I knocked and called.  Instead of calling the police, I got the keys to the house from a neighbor.  When I entered, I saw a carton of cigarettes, still in a brown paper sack, on the living room table.  I felt a sense of relief.  I turned right to enter the bedroom.  Perhaps Barbara had taken an overdose, and I would find her on the bed, hopefully in time to call 911.  She wasn't there, and my relief heightened.  I left the bedroom, turned right and glanced into the bathroom.  There was Barbara in the bathtub, the wall splattered with her blood.  She had shot herself in the head.  That image I will never forget.  I found the phone, but it took several attempts to dial the police.  The dial itself seemed sticky; I felt as if I couldn't get it to turn.  When I did succeed and the police arrived, I had to do the interview on the porch because I was going to vomit if I had to remain in the claustrophic house.  Depressed, Barbara had walked to a gun shop, looked over the selection, changed her mind, stopped at a grocery store (the same one where the two Topeka policemen were killed last night) to buy a carton of cigarettes.  Once home, she had changed her mind again, returned to the gun shop, and with no background check or waiting period, bought the gun with which she had taken her own life.

Over 18,000 Americans last year made the same choice.  Over 18,000 Americans bought, borrowed, or stole guns.  There is no good death.  There is no good ending to this story.  We can hope only that it's not a story that closes with "to be continued."