A “Satisficing” Solution For Our Children
I would hardly call myself an experienced practitioner of public policy, but I have studied it full-time over the past two years as a graduate student. Good policy that leaves even a slight majority of people satisfied in a diverse polity like the United States is really, really, hard to come by. One word I learned over the past couple years in studying theoretical frameworks for understanding public policy is satisficing. Satisficing is “a decision-making strategy that aims for a satisfactory or adequate result, rather than the optimal solution.” The idea that we collectively possess enough rationality to come up with the maximal or optimal solution to each problem is a fantasy. We cannot reason our way to immutable truth, no more than we can craft flawless legislation or regulatory policy.
In the American experiment, we are all doing the best we can to coexist. Satisficing means accepting this reality. Compromise has become a dirty word, but I believe solutions which leave some of us on both sides of an issue unhappy or dissatisfied can be good policy.
When someone was shot and killed outside our home in Savannah six years ago, I immediately got my weapons permit. In a world filled with bad guys with guns, I fully understand the feeling of security that having a gun provides. I wouldn’t call myself a gun enthusiast, but I do own guns. On deployments, carrying a loaded weapon becomes second nature. Back stateside, I have open carried and concealed carried. I don’t say this to claim NRA-level bona fides. I’m just saying I’m not the guy who is uncomfortable with guns.
I’m also a father. In a couple years, my three-year-old will go to a school like Sandy Hook Elementary. You might think that shooting would have changed me 10 years ago or motivated me into taking action. 26 killed, 20 children between the ages of six and seven, all within a 30-minute drive of where I grew up? But it didn’t — I did nothing. Sure, I talked to my family about how tragic it was. How bad it must have been for those other families. A shoulder shrug and right back to my regularly scheduled programming.
It’s sad that it took me having a child of my own to fully grasp the gravity of this situation. I’m disheartened by my own lack of empathy in the past. But my heart broke in a visceral way yesterday hearing the desperate pleas of parents who hadn’t yet heard whether their 10-year-old children were safe. I physically felt the weight of that helplessness on my chest.
To try to get people to actually read this, I wanted to keep this short. I can’t solve this problem in an 800-word essay. Gun control, mental health, school security, and the many tangentially related topics are far from my academic focus area. Admittedly, I haven’t done the work. I don’t know what the perfect solution is. I will pour through the research. My senators and House representatives will hear from me, respectfully.
Universal background checks outlined in H.R. 8 are certainly a good starting point. Studies of Connecticut’s permit-to-purchase laws and Missouri’s repeal of similar laws offer strong evidence to support that background checks work in reducing gun violence. To be fair, one comprehensive literature review found mixed evidence and another found little significant evidence to support the effectiveness of background checks. Let’s assume they don’t work (for the record, I think they do). So what? It certainly can’t make the problem any worse. Furthermore, several surveys conducted over the past few years suggest that most of us (83–93%) already support universal background checks to buy a gun anyways.
Luckily, we all agree that dead children in the hallways and classrooms of our schools is a bad thing. We may disagree on how to stop it. If we do something, I suspect it will be imperfect. Votes in a democracy are rarely unanimous. As a lover of nuanced and creative policy solutions, I will almost certainly dislike some aspect of whatever we come up with — and I’m okay with that. Trying sub-optimal solutions is still trying. At this point, it’s hard to do worse than status quo.
Sadly, this will happen again. For a three-year-old, my son is pretty intuitive. It’s getting increasingly difficult to shield his innocence from the harsh realities of this world. I suspect it won’t be long before he hears about another Columbine, Red Lake, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe, or Uvalde and asks me to help him make sense of the senseless. On a philosophical level, I fear I am ill-equipped to adequately explain mass murder. But I will tell him what actions I took. Hopefully I can tell him that we did something about it, even if we didn’t get it 100% right.