If the polls are correct, most Americans believe in gun ownership but also desire in sensible laws governing that right, that responsibility. Studies even show the bulk of NRA members in agreement with background checks and not selling arms to those on terrorist watch lists and such. It’s always puzzled me that moderate gun owners don’t splinter off from the NRA, the second-most powerful fringe group in America (congratulations, Republican Party!). 

In a Financial Times essay, the novelist Richard Ford, a longtime gun owner, thinks what I’ve just described is a fairy tale, that the majority of us do favor insane gun laws. Perhaps, though it seems most of us have been removed from a discussion that goes on in Washington between lobbyists (with money) and lawmakers (with pockets). Ford himself looks at our facacta political landscape and believes it’s time to stop being locked into being loaded. An excerpt:

America is getting nuttier and nuttier. Every election cycle I notice how less governable it seems. Now the thuggish Donald Trump or the gargoyle-ish Ted Cruz may be our next president. What’s that about? Congress basically doesn’t work any more. Hundreds of our citizens were killed or wounded in mass shootings last year. Thanks to President Barack Obama and a lot of other right-thinking people, relations between blacks and white Americans (frictive, violent and unjust for centuries) are now prominently and more accurately in our view, and are improving. But white, undereducated men (the core group of handgun owners in our country), are living less long, are suffering increased alcoholism, drug abuse and stress. Black Americans know this experience very well in their own history. These white men don’t feel they’re keeping up with either their parents’ generation or with the people they normally compare themselves to (often African-Americans). Nine per cent of these men are unemployed. They’re cynical — with some reason — about their government. They feel too many things in the country aren’t going their way, and that they can’t control their lives. They fear change. Yet they sense the change they fear may have already occurred. Crime and gun violence are actually down in the US. But gun ownership is up. The NRA would say the latter statistic occasions the former. Me . . . I just say it feels dangerous over here.

I don’t cite these facts to engender undue sympathy for any particular American demographic slice. I personally do have some empathy for these white men, as well as for black teenagers mercilessly murdered by white police officers. And for lots of other people, too. I’m a novelist. Empathy is kinda my job. My version of liberty in the American republic is consonant with the view held by the cunningly named US appellate judge Learned Hand; which is, that the spirit of liberty is that spirit which is not too sure it’s right. What I feel, though, is what many Americans feel now — people I agree with and people I decidedly don’t — namely, we sense we’re approaching a tipping point in our liberties, a point at which good is being intolerably held hostage by not good, a point we need to back away from while we still can.•

I read Richard Ford’s most famous novel, The Sportswriter, when I was a teen and liked it, but I was probably too young to fully appreciate it. (The same goes for Saul Bellow’s Herzog.) I always felt old for my age on the inside, but some cultural experiences require life experience. Ford presents a clutch of ideas about America in a new Financial Times diary. His take on the condition of the modern Republican party:

“Before President Obama scored his unhappy ‘own goal’ in the first debate, I was thinking about what might happen to the Republicans if they lost the election. More than in most political seasons, the rightwing has staked it all on being able to create an ‘entity’ out of comically ill-fitting parts – nutcase birthers, gay-marriage haters, anti-government and anti-tax fanatics, gun nuts, a smattering of reluctantly legitimate Romney supporters, plus a few grumpy GOP moderates who can’t think of what else to do with the vote they inherited from their old man. Quite a colourful circus tent. Nobody, including the Republicans, thinks this comprises a real political party – the kind where members sort of think the same about stuff. All they jointly hold dear is a race-tinged abhorrence of our not-inept, but not-entirely-ept-either, chief executive, whom they can’t believe was ever elected in the first place. But if Obama gets elected again, and their cocked-up contraption teeters over on to its side, then I was thinking they don’t really have much left for the future, except cross-eyed bitterness. But I now think that’s wrong. They’ll just throw a few of the noisier birthers and gay-bashers over the side, spasm smilingly back toward the middle and call that ‘new unity.’ This may bespeak an actual virtue of a vast, ungovernable country like ours, able to absorb most discords into an accommodating mediocrity. Though there’s the new question now: what happens if the bastards win? Do they actually govern? How?”