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Jabin Botsford

“The end of the day, it’s, <a href="https://wapo.st/4770Jp7" target=_blank>the problem is the human heart</a>. It’s not guns. It’s not the weapons. At the end of the day, we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves, and that’s the Second Amendment.”

— <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/27/mike-johnson-sean-hannity/" target=_blank>House Speaker Mike Johnson</a>, asked by Fox News’s Sean Hannity about demands for more gun laws or more legislation in the wake of mass shootings

Human hearts! That is the problem! In America, we are uniquely badly positioned because of our human hearts. Why don’t we have stone hearts like the French; or efficient, wood-burning hearts like the Germans; or the Teflon hearts that I hear Elon Musk will soon be pioneering to an elite crowd of subscribers? (I, for one, cannot wait! Anything to divert his attention from X!) Why don’t we have alien hearts with extra ventricles, splendidly green and impervious to pain; or efficient, 3D-printed e-hearts; or anatomically inaccurate paper hearts? So many better kinds of hearts to have! It isn’t the guns. The problem is the human heart. Weak, feeble, pitiful heart. Put it up against a gun, and it loses every time.

Five things Mike Johnson said in his first national TV interview as House speaker

The problem is the human heart. Gun violence is an unchangeable, immutable fact of the human condition. That is why it is localized so strongly to this country and this time period. This is not a problem with a solution. It is the price you pay for being human. This is not unique to the United States, although you see it only here. Maybe it’s something to do with the water. Not laws, though; as we know from our efforts to impose vicious lawsuits and increasingly draconian restrictions against anyone who seeks an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/abortion/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">abortion</a>, it is pointless to legislate about a problem. Some things, you are just born with and must accept; guns are one of them.

The heart is a uniquely American problem. Johnson, I hear, had his removed long ago, which allows him to look on the suffering of his fellow man with equanimity and detachment, because of his serene awareness of the Divine Plan. Some people’s hearts are simply bad (learned too much Darwinism, or too little prayer, or too much bodily autonomy). Johnson has been saying things of this kind for as long as he has been in the public eye. The problem is never guns. The problem is abortions. (“When you <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/mike-johnson-abortion-school-shootings.html" target="_blank">break up the nuclear family</a>, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, then you do wind up with school shooters.”) The problem is not guns; it is teaching evolution. It is the <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-johnson-blamed-shootings-teaching-evolution-abortion-1234863223/" target="_blank">theories of Charles Darwin!</a> “Because we’ve taught a whole generation — a couple of generations now — of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed.” Imagine thinking that the only reason to protect the human heart was allegiance to your God! The valiant little muscle clenching inside your chest, keeping you alive, powering your moves through the world, letting you see birthdays and graduations and beating faster when you see something you love — what could be more obviously worth protecting?

Alexandra Petri: We will stop at nothing to protect the children

But the problem is never the gun. Hearts stop all the time, for myriad reasons. They are vulnerable to poverty and despair and anxiety, and the United States has all of those in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2023/american-life-expectancy-dropping/" target=_blank>ample supply</a>.

Obviously the problem is the human heart. The human heart cannot stand the strain of living in the United States (a nice place, were it not for the nagging suspicion that any time you gather in a public place you might be gruesomely murdered with a gun). The human heart was not built for this low whine of anxious terror. It is the human heart’s fault — not strong enough. Sometimes the human heart just stops. (Only in America, like this.) You never see a gun get stopped by something as routine as despair. You never see a gun get stopped by anything.

The problem is not guns. It’s not weapons. We have to protect ourselves. (From what, Mike? From what?) We must have our guns, to protect ourselves. (Then what are we arming the police like this for? Why are they laden with all this military-grade equipment, if protecting myself is not something I’m supposed to be outsourcing to them?)

Alexandra Petri: The day God gave us guns

The problem is the human heart. It breaks a little bit each time we see another mass shooting. If only they were a harder target. That is the problem. That so many hearts are aching for something to change, for a framework of laws that does not accept gun violence as inevitable.

Think what a different country we would have if we wanted to protect the human heart instead of the gun.

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Alexandra Petri is a Washington Post columnist offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Alexandra-Petris-History-Important-Documents/dp/1324006439/">"AP's US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up).</a>

Alexandra Petri

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‘The problem is the human heart. It’s not guns.’ How Johnson is right!

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