Good vs. evil vs. reality

This column was brought to you by gun control, but this is not a column about gun control.  

Last week I participated in a class discussion about how gun control affects our liberty as U.S. citizens.  

Students voiced various arguments, many of which are chanted religiously by pundits, some of which I wish were chanted religiously by pundits.  

One all-too-familiar argument is this: Criminals will get guns anyway, so what’s the point in making more gun control laws? You will only infringe upon the liberty of good, law-abiding citizens.

The easy counterargument to this claim is, “Then why should we have any laws ever?”

But this claim also reveals a very flawed worldview Americans tend to have.  

For some reason, many of us are under the impression there are good people and there are bad people and these two groups occupy circles that never intersect in the Venn diagram called life.

While this worldview is comfortable, it leads to deeply problematic assumptions.

Because we think that only criminals can commit crimes, we are blind to the systematic societal problems that make ordinary everyday citizens into criminals.  

The failure to pass gun control legislation that would have expanded background checks in the Senate on Wednesday is just one example of how our conviction that only bad people do bad things likely prevented common-sense measures to stop violence and make our country safer.

Earlier this year, conservative pundit Sean Hannity revealed how such a perspective cripples any progress in the fight against rape culture. Guest Zerlina Maxwell had the gall to argue that the onus should be on men to not rape, rather than on women to not get raped.  

Hannity responded, “Criminals are not going to listen to that,” and later, “Evil exists in the world.”

Boiling the world down to such simplistic terms makes many incorrect assumptions about how rape works and who is committing it. Seventy-three percent of rapes in the U.S. are committed by someone known to the victim.

In fact, most violent crimes are carried out by people known to the victim.

When it is your family, your friends, your co-workers or your acquaintances who are committing crimes against you, it is difficult to brush these occurrences off as just bad things done by bad people.  

This thinking not only stops thoughtful preventative measures from being enacted, but it is one of the fundamental reasons our prison system is so poor.

Correctional facilities put little emphasis on

“correction,” punishing rather than rehabilitating and further dehumanizing those who have already committed antisocial acts.

We cannot afford to continue separating our populace into “good” and “evil” as though there is absolutely no vacillation between the two, as though criminals are non-humans lurking in the shadows.

People commit crimes for a host of reasons ranging from the understandable to the unconscionable. Not every criminal is an inherently bad person.  

Ignoring the nuance means ignoring a host of possible solutions for the difficult problems we face.

­— casefarr@indiana.edu