Gun control works on gun violence as surely as antibiotics do on bacterial infections. Gun violence, and the work of eliminating gun massacres in schools and movie houses and the like, is not one of them. There are complex, hand-wringing-worthy problems in our social life: deficits and debts and climate change. Let’s worry more about making sure that when the Problem of Evil appears in a first-grade classroom, it is armed with a penknife. Let’s worry tomorrow about the problem of Evil. We know that this is so, because, in societies that have effective gun control, children rarely, rarely, rarely die of gunshots. The overwhelming majority of those children would have been saved with effective gun control. Some reports say their bodies weren’t shown to their grief-stricken parents to identify them just their pictures. Twenty more, including Olivia Engel, who was seven, and Jesse Lewis, who was six, were killed just last week. Five thousand seven hundred and forty children and teens died from gunfire in the United States, just in 20. (The faith healers’ proposition is that if there were a faith healer praying in every kindergarten the kids wouldn’t get infections in the first place.) A few Tartuffes would see the children writhe and heave in pain and then wring their hands in self-congratulatory piety and wonder why a good God would send such a terrible affliction on the innocent-surely he must have a plan! Most of us-every sane person in the city, actually-would tell the faith healers to go to hell, put off worrying about the Problem of Evil till Friday or Saturday or Sunday, and do everything we could to get as much penicillin to the kids as quickly we could. Some citizens would doubtless point out meekly that faith healing has an ancient history in our city, and we must regard the faith healers with respect-to do otherwise would show a lack of respect for their freedom to faith-heal. The bad news is that our city council has been taken over by a faith-healing cult that will go to any lengths to keep the antibiotic from the kids. The good news is that its cause is well understood and its cure, an antibiotic, easily at hand. We live, let’s imagine, in a city where children are dying of a ravaging infection.
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