Inevitably, CNN followed this with a report on how easy it is to buy guns in Philadelphia and how local politicians are reluctant to do anything about it. This is an argument only the experts could make: in the 1990s, the number of firearms in America went up by 40 million but the murder rate fell dramatically. If gun ownership were the determining factor, Vermont and Switzerland would have high murder rates. Yet in Montpelier or Geneva, the solution to a boy carelessly bicycling in front of you down a city thoroughfare when you're in a hurry is not to grab your piece and blow the moppet away. Once a relatively small chunk of the populace has decided it's okay with offing grade-school scamps, "gun control" isn't going to cut it: the societal safety lock is off.This is the intellectual problem of progressivism: it doesn't take man's freedom --including his freedom to be bad-- into account. Progressives think the law has more power than it has --pass a law and everything will be fine. (Social conservatives make the same mistake when they think to mend problems by passing constitutional amendments.)
The question for a republic is how to make men sacrifice for the common good rather than blowing annoying people away because they can. How we do we make men decent? Even atheists used to understand that religion was the key. And that, She Who Must Not Be Linked, is why Romney didn't mention atheists. It's not that atheists can't be good citizens or lack rights, but their creed can't form men into good men, except insofar as it retains the trappings of religion. Or, as the Pope puts it:
Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.
25. What this means is that every generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply completed. Yet every generation must also make its own contribution to establishing convincing structures of freedom and of good, which can help the following generation as a guideline for the proper use of human freedom; hence, always within human limits, they provide a certain guarantee also for the future. In other words: good structures help, but of themselves they are not enough. Man can never be redeemed simply from outside.
