There is something about a mass shooting in an elementary school, about the massacre of children like those in Uvalde, Texas, that clarifies the true nature of American gun policy.

Nearly 10 years ago, days after the massacre of young children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, National Rifle Association Vice President Wayne LaPierre gave a defiant press conference where he vowed to not giving an inch on gun control. To justify the absolutism of the NRA, LaPierre uttered a phrase that would become one of the defining phrases in the gun debate.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said.

Of course, the children lying dead in Connecticut could not have taken up arms in their own defense. Nor the children who died in Texas. Instead, LaPierre was advocating for putting more guards in schools — a policy that has been repeatedly shown not to deter or prevent mass shootings.

Yet immediately after the Uvalde shooting, gun rights advocates like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Jeanine Pirro, Fox host repeated LaPierre’s proposal – although there are in fact armed police outside the elementary school who hired the shooter before his massacre.

There is something deeply dangerous at work here. It’s an ideology rooted in the very idea of ​​gun rights as envisioned by people like LaPierre, Paxton and Pirro: a view that armed citizens, not the state, are the ultimate guarantors of freedom and civil peace.

This gun rights ideology has become embedded in both Republican politics and the culture of gun ownership in the United States: an all-consuming political identity that has shattered American politics. Gun rights ideology represents a dark vision of society – essentially the abolition of collective security and a state monopoly on violence in favor of individuals acting as laws to themselves.

For some, this works very well; for many others, including vulnerable people like children who cannot defend themselves, it can amount to a death sentence.

The ideology of gun rights and its dangers

The American Institute for Peace (USIP) is a US government-sponsored think tank that works to advise and assist war-torn countries in making the transition to peace. In a post on how to achieve a secure post-conflict environment, he highlights the “legitimate monopoly of the state on the means of violence” as a “necessary condition”. If the government cannot bring armed individuals and groups to heel and control the violence, a return to civil war and anarchy becomes increasingly likely.

This advice comes not only from close observation of post-conflict situations, but also from our most basic theories about the purpose and nature of government. The existence of a government means in part that it has a monopoly on legitimate violence: that is, the power to use law enforcement and the military as the final and widely accepted arbiters of the social order. A state that lacks this ability does not actually control the territory it governs; regardless of one’s opinion of the role and size of government, the state’s monopoly on violence is the starting point.

Gun rights ideology takes the opposite view: society is not based on the state controlling violence, but rather on violent individuals controlling the state. From this point of view, government, by its very nature, always poses the risk of degenerating into tyranny. Citizens have the absolute right, if not the obligation, to arm themselves to defend themselves against the excesses of the state. The state can never have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; the second he does, we run the risk of totalitarianism.

Gun rights ideology permeates American gun culture and, by extension, the Republican Party today. Judge Antonin Scalia codified it into constitutional law in his 2008 opinion in DC vs. Heller, writing that one of the purposes of the Second Amendment is “to secure the existence of a ‘citizen militia’ as a safeguard against tyranny”. During the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump referenced it when he suggested that a President Hillary Clinton could legitimately be assassinated.

“If she gets to choose her judges, there’s nothing you can do, folks…although the Second Amendment folks – maybe there are,” the future president mused at a rally in North Carolina.

The dividing line between Scalia’s scholarly opinion and Trump’s crude commentary is the idea that people should be perpetually ready to engage in armed rebellion: to rise up, as they did on January 6, but with guns. This is not the same as the core belief that active citizenship should engage in collective protest against the policies and governments they oppose. Instead, it’s the idea that the survival of freedom depends on people being equipped to use violence against an ever-rampant tyranny – a belief rarely found among citizens of other democracies. advances.

The popularity of this notion goes a long way to explaining why the United States has gun policies so different from those of virtually all developed countries: proponents of gun rights ideology see almost every measure gun control, however innocuous, as a potential stop on the road. to serfdom.

Gun rights ideology makes the United States vulnerable just as USIP has observed in post-conflict societies. When guns are everywhere, the people who own them become capable of using violence in any way they choose.

It is easy for terrorists and mass shooters to slaughter as they please; the same goes for gang members and violent spouses. The state cannot control them more or less on purpose. If the government could adequately restrict gun ownership, according to gun rights ideology, then freedom would be precarious.

Instead, argues the gun rights ideologue, the responsibility for public safety rests with individuals: the “good guy with a gun.” If well-meaning armed individuals are everywhere, then they can kill criminals instantly. Armed citizens complement the police – and, in some life-and-death situations, replace them entirely.

Research on this theory is not promising. Concealed carry laws do not appear to significantly reduce homicides or other violent crimes; placing armed guards in schools does not protect them from mass shootings. In fact, one study found that schools with armed guards were more likely to have a higher death toll in a mass shooting.

Instead, the ubiquity of guns creates a society ruled by fear: a country where violence could erupt at any moment, forcing us all to reshape our lives accordingly. Schools, which should be places of learning and play, are becoming fortresses equipped with metal detectors. Students are forced to engage in healing active fire drills; posting armed guards in schools reinforces their fear and can inhibit learning.

The ideology of gun rights demands that America redouble its efforts in this chilling vision – even after an event like the Uvalde mass shooting has proven its limits.

In an interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson just hours after filming, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (R) said that “we need to toughen these targets [schools] so no one can enter – ever – except through a single entrance. The idea that schools are “targets” that need to be “hardened” as if they were military bases only makes sense in a world where all of society has been militarized – where widespread gun ownership has thrown us into a conflicted state where public authorities have no real ability to prevent mass killings.

Elementary school students do not fit well into this cosmology. CM1 students cannot safely handle weapons; there is no “good kid with a gun”. But this is the country that gun rights ideology has created: a country where the murder of little children becomes the price we pay for their vision of freedom.