Transcript

(papers flipping)

(big band music)

(engine rumbling)

I'm in my fifth decade of life.

But I have only just learned how to drive.

And despite having been anti-car,

and ostentatiously pro-bike for all those years,

I have to admit that I love being in the driver's seat.

The rush of freedom and possibility,

the sense of autonomy is overwhelming.

You get in, and you go.

This, in turn, made me realize what I had only

intuited before, that guns, for many Americans,

are a sort of secondary, symbolic car,

another powerful symbol of autonomy and independence.

The attachment to them that so many Americans show,

unique among the civilized peoples of the world,

and at a cost so grave that the rest of that world

often turns away, appalled, is nonetheless understandable

to anyone who comes late to driving.

To have potentially lethal power in your grasp

is an immensely powerful drug.

But cars are not, or not only, symbols of autonomy.

They are, in every sense, vehicles of it.

Guns, however, have an almost entirely symbolic function.

No lives are saved and no intruders are repelled.

The dense and hysterical mythology of gun love

has been refuted again and again.

The few useful social functions that guns do have,

in hunting or in killing varmints,

as a country man, like my father, has to,

can be preserved even with tight regulations,

as in Canada.

Yet meaningful restrictions on guns seem beyond our grasp.

The NRA assures us anew, after each massacre

at a school, theater or office,

any limit would curb only our freedom,

not the senseless killing.

If you limit the American public's access

to semi-automatic technology,

you limit their ability to survive.

(guns cocking)

Imagine we live in a city where children are dying

of a ravaging infection.

The good news is that its cause is well understood,

and its cure, an antibiotic, easily at hand.

(emergency operator speaking)

The bad news is that our city council has been

taken over by a faith-healing cult

that believes the infections come from evil

and will go to any lengths to keep the antibiotics

from the kids.

We will filibuster any legislation.

We do live in such a city.

More than 2,500 children and teens die annually

from gun violence in the United States.

The overwhelming majority of those children

would be saved with effective gun control.

We know this is so because in societies that have

effective gun control, like Scotland, Australia and Canada,

children almost never die of gunshots.

Let's worry tomorrow about the problem of evil.

Let's worry more about making sure that when evil appears

in a first-grade classroom, it is armed with a pen knife

instead of a semi-automatic weapon.

To make that happen may be hard

but there's no doubt or ambiguity about

what needs to be done,

nor that, if it is done, it will work.

One would have to believe that Americans are somehow

uniquely evil or depraved to think that the same medicine

that works on the rest of the planet won't work here.

Making cars safe was difficult.

So was limiting, and then effectively banning,

cigarettes from public places.

At some point, we will become a gun-safe,

and then, finally, a gun-sane society.

It's closer than you think.

(flipping pages)