Any time an event occurs which ruptures the fabric of civilized life so grotesquely as what happened in Uvalde, Texas last week, it is instinctive to seek answers. It seems that many in the public light are rather hoping that the dust settles exclusively on guns.

I am not an absolutist on the Second Amendment, any more than I am on any other amendment, and at times like this I rather wish it were as simple as guns, but of course it is far from it.

Pure Political Theater

Beto O’Rourke channeled his inner Lauren Boebert Wednesday. He pulled a similar stunt on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at a press conference that Boebert did to O’Rourke a few years back. Boebert used her confrontation with O’Rourke over gun rights at a campaign event to propel her into Congress — O’Rourke, who is running for Governor of Texas, probably hopes for the same sort of return. It was purely political theater. What, specifically, did he accuse Abbott of doing (or not doing) that would have averted Tuesday’s tragedy?

Nothing, because there is nothing that Abbott has done, or could have done, to prevent it. Gun purchase laws have not changed in Texas for decades, save for federal laws that have actually tightened rules.

The reflexive cry is for an ambiguous “something” to be done. Former President Barack Obama said on Twitter, “It’s long past time for action, any kind of action.”

I may be anachronistic in my thinking, but wouldn’t a more responsible plea be for “action that may help solve the problem?”

A Convenient Scapegoat

In terms of guns, what would that be? Red Flag laws (which I happen to support, provided they are structured appropriately) did not work in northern New York a few weeks ago. Background checks would have made no impact in this case, as the creature who carried out the murders did not have a criminal record. Calls get resurrected for bans of weapons, but those are nearly impossible to enforce, run into legitimate constitutional issues and are ineffectual in any case — the things cannot be un- invented, and if one is twisted up sufficiently to be motivated to shoot 8-year-olds, they will find the means to satisfy their malignant ambitions.

Guns are a convenient and easy scapegoat, in part because in instances of violent tragedy for which there is no clear answer (how can there be) we instinctively need a hobgoblin to blame. But this sort of “cherchez la femme” reductionism does not serve us well.

The Common Threads

Instead, we ought to be prepared to look deeper: what demon possesses a young man (it is almost always young men) to shoot his grandmother and stroll over to an elementary school and kill 8-and-9-year-olds? It will take time to gather the relevant evidence and history, and we may never know the full picture, but it is a worthwhile enterprise to try and discover the common threads; but it is also an extraordinarily frustrating one, seldom if ever offering much satisfaction.

Early reports suggest some common themes — social isolation, bullying, dysfunctional family life. But many experience those things and don’t shoot up schools. The correlation between the increase in the rate of illegitimate births and a Pandora’s box of social ills has been well documented empirically, and may or may not have been a factor here; but it wasn’t, for instance, with the Columbine shooters.

In the aftermath of that particular school shooting, the potential role of violent video games was raised, and has been suggested here and there that this monster may have been obsessed with them as well. It is, perhaps, impossible to prove that a person commits violence because he saw a violent film, or played a gratuitously violent video game. But correlations, someone once wrote, are phenomena that justifiably arrest the attention. And it is worth pointing out that since Columbine, video games have become more graphic and violent, music lyrics more explicit; we of course run into the shields of the ACLU when charging down that path, but if dismissal of an absolutist application of the Second Amendment is tolerable in the face of tragedy, should not the same standard apply to the First?

The Moral Erosion of Our Society

If there is a specific issue with existing gun laws that this tragedy has illuminated, by all means, let’s address that. But let’s address the other, more germane issues as well. Because in the wake of senseless violence we can either take a hard diagnostic look at the moral erosion of our society in an effort to arrest the occurrence of a similar tragedy, or we can self-satisfactorily talk about guns. Insomuch as it is an election year, I wager we will do the latter.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.

Originally published at ColoradoPolitics.com. Republished with permission.