From the Editor

Chances are very good that whatever problems the New Year brings they will not be cataclysmic, but instead solvable problems and small annoyances. After all, if you are reading this—a pretty tiny cog in the Great Wheel of Things—then all systems are pretty much in order.

Here at our publication offices, for example, we have spent the last few months in a sort of gallows humor mode as we replace and upgrade computers. There have been occasional utterances at which you would no doubt look askance. But we have mostly gotten through them, as, I suspect, have you. Whether your own mode of dealing with the Millenium has been to buy a generator, wring your hands, stock up on spaghetti and Kevin Spacey movies, mentally tell yourself it doesn’t really start until NEXT year, or a combination of all of the above, is mostly besides the point.

We still have most of the means to solve problems—even those that loom large—individually; or at least in manageable communities. I predict with a deal of certainty that in early January 2000, the airwaves will be filled with Y2K stories. But that those stories will focus on small acts of common sense and common decency—folks inviting neighbors in for minestrone, cats rescued from chilly apartments, kindergarten classes entertaining old folks, municipal employees working extra shifts, 9th graders designing products for the next century, and on and on.

If my modest predictions come true (and if you get into the forecasting business, be sure to keep your first few divinations modest), I would hope that it would be duly noted that this model is the one that works best, regardless of subject.

The key to solving problems is not to magnify them into behemoths that can only be remedied by building solutions that would make Rube Goldberg blush. The key is to look at the problem rationally—and with perspective—and do your part. The 60s adage, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” may the most useful idea to come out of that decade.

When a spate of horrific workplace violence erupted this fall, the Big Thinkers, like the Violence Policy Center’s (VPC) Josh Sugarmann, were quick to demand a Big Solution to this Big Problem. “We recoil in horror and search for explanations, but we never face up to the obvious preventive measure: a ban on the handy killing machines that make the crimes so easy,” wrote Sugarmann in The New York Times, following deaths in Honolulu and Seattle.

Sugarmann goes on to explain that only a total ban on civilian ownership of guns, such as enacted in Britain and Australia (he forgets to point out, failing pretty miserably either as crime control or as examples of government competence), is the solution to the problem.

Well, I give Sugarmann credit for being a Big Talker—something many of his weasel-mouthed compatriots in the anti-civil rights movement will never be.

But these solutions are only apt to cause more problems, problems requiring bigger solutions, built on bigger ideas, until the whole thing spins out of everyone’s—even Josh Sugarmann’s—control.

Space was limited in The Times, so Sugarmann could only suggest a few modest steps to a total ban, most of which can be found on the VPC’s website (www.vpc.org).

Unfortunately he didn’t have time to detail how his Big Ban theory would work. He doesn’t say, for example, that gun bans don’t prevent nail bomb attacks in England, which last spring killed and maimed hundreds of people, or that it didn’t prevent the murder—by handgun—of a popular television personality there. He doesn’t say how Australia’s gun ban has been a Big Failure in any terms you might care to set, unless civil disobedience is the goal of the down-under government.

Sugarmann doesn’t even look at his solution as it is being implemented in this country. California’s “SKS” ban will probably result in the confiscation of thousands of legally-owned (and, their owners thought, by registering them during the last round of “reasonable” measures, legally-protected) firearms. But I’m willing to bet Josh right now—say $50 worth of the new Sacajawea dollars—that it will not take a rocket scientist to find an SKS in California after the government is done protecting themselves from its law-abiding citizens.

I suppose I could say I look forward to more Big Solutions from Sugarmann, but I don’t. I don’t want to see the plans for door-to-door confiscation. Nor the unveiling of The Giant Magnet (running presumably on solar power), that will suck up all the illegally owned guns.

Once again, hysteria, which can even be excused when it flares briefly after a tragedy, is allowed to be the basis for public policy. It should be little wonder, then, that hysterical solutions are proposed as remedy.

Those of us with a stake in this episode’s consequences would do well to remember that most people—even those who are not gunowners—are still reasonable, rational and approachable.