Given how markedly public opinion has turned against gun control over the last generation, I was struck by how many liberal writers reacted to the Aurora shooting by treating the pro-gun control position as simply self-evident, needing no actual argument to defend it (“you can only shake your head and cry a little,” The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote in lieu of making such a case), and then went on to blame public resistance to gun restrictions on a distinctively American political madness. As I wrote in my Campaign Stops column this week, liberals may be right to see something peculiarly American in the public’s rising support for gun rights, but it’s the same peculiarly American quality — our general sympathy for rights-based arguments, heightened by the post-1960s trend toward what Robert Bellah has termed “expressive individualism” — that has advanced many left-wing causes as well, gay marriage chief among them. And in any case, take it from a social conservative with a fair amount of experience in potentially lost causes: When you find yourself on the losing side of an argument that you used to be winning, accusing your opponents of being lunatics and nihilists isn’t usually the ideal way to turn the tide.

Poking around in the post-Aurora liberal commentary, though, I did happen on a link to an actual sustained brief for gun control — from the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, which was published in the Washington Post following the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. Here is part of Foer’s argument:

It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns. What if, hours after the killings, McCain had stood at the podium and said instead, “Guns are good because . . . ” But what would have followed? Guns are good because they provide the ultimate self-defense? While I’m sure some people believe that having a gun at their bedside will make them safer, they are wrong. This is not my opinion, and it’s not a political or controversial statement. It is a fact. Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member, friend or acquaintance than to kill an intruder, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Guns on the street make us less safe. For every justifiable handgun homicide, there are more than 50 handgun murders, according to the FBI. The expanding right to carry concealed guns make us even less safe. So what right is being protected if it is not the right to be safe? The right to feel safe, at the expense of actual safety? Or perhaps guns are good because they facilitate hunting? It’s a constitutional red herring, but no coincidence or surprise, that the National Rifle Association is so closely aligned with hunters — they are the group’s most powerful contingent. Let’s just assume, for a moment, that hunting is good. Really, really good. (It must be, if militias and self-defense don’t explain guns.) How many of the nearly 3,000 children who are killed by firearms in the United States each year does the good of hunting justify? All of them? A handful? How many of the students and faculty at Virginia Tech?

The strongest part of this argument, in my view, is Foer’s focus on accidental gun deaths. The link between gun control and overall crime rates is murky and much-contested (my non-expert view, for what it’s worth, is that a less-armed America would have more fewer homicides but more crimes against property and more non-lethal forms of assault), and I’m very skeptical that stricter gun laws would do much more than slow down a would-be James Holmes, given how many different ways there are to plot a mass murder in a free society. But when you factor in the public health dimension — accidents, suicides, the risks to children, etc. — the argument that we’d be better off with more gun restrictions and lower rates of private ownership gets considerably stronger.

But liberals should recognize the parallels between even this stronger argument and the (once successful, but ultimately failed) public health arguments for Prohibition almost a century back. The consumption of alcohol, like the ownership and use of firearms, carries all kinds of second-order risks, and it’s easy to run a Foer-style argument against the claim that the happiness people derive from beer and wine and liquor is worth the toll that alcoholic beverages take on life and limb and happiness: (How many of the thousands of Americans killed by drunk drivers every year does your desire for a cold Dogfish Head justify? How many lives ruined by alcoholism? How much spousal abuse? Etc.) It’s true that gun ownership is not as culturally ubiquitous as drinking, but it’s pretty ubiquitous indeed: 47 percent of Americans report having a firearm in the home, and there may be as many as 270 million privately-owned guns in the United States. So if you actually wanted to put a real dent in accidental firearm deaths, you would need not just a ban on large magazines or stiffer background checks for gun purchasers, but an actual Prohibition-style campaign, complete with busts and raids and so forth, whose goal would be not only be a simple policy change but the rooting-out of a very well-entrenched aspect of American culture. And the experience of Prohibition itself suggests plenty of reasons to be dubious that such a campaign would ultimately be worth the cost.

This isn’t an argument that any phenomenon that’s culturally well-entrenched should be off limits to policymakers. Obviously slavery was well-entrenched, and segregation, and so on down a list of social evils that deserved (or deserve) to be combated regardless of the challenges involved. But even most pro-gun control liberals don’t think of guns and gun ownership the way the abolitionists persuaded Americans to think of slavery — as an intrinsic evil that has no justification whatsoever. They just think that the benefits, comforts, and pleasures that law-abiding, safety-conscious gun owners derive from their Second Amendment freedoms are outweighed by the dangers posed by allowing the reckless and the careless to own and carry weapons. This is not a crazy view by any means. But liberals should recognize the limits of their logic the next time they pour themselves a drink.