The politics of “thoughts and prayers” by Sidney Shelton

There is something ritualistic about the response to a mass shooting. First comes shock. Then condolences and then invariably the sentence, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.”

Thailand has apparently decided to experiment with another sentence: “Let’s change the law.” After a 14-year-old boy killed his grandparents before going to school and shooting six people there, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul moved to tighten the country’s gun controls. New firearm purchase licences have been suspended, existing licences are being reviewed, and the government says it wants tougher rules governing guns and their circulation.

This is not revolutionary. It is, however, unfashionable in certain countries. The United States, in particular, has perfected political choreography in which the dead are mourned with eloquence while the living are left to negotiate lethal machinery. The country has produced a vocabulary for this performance: thoughts and prayers, healing, heroes, evil, mental health, “now is not the time.” The vocabulary is expansive; legislative results are often less so.

The peculiar achievement is that nobody has to admit nothing will change. Thoughts are wonderfully adaptable. They require no committee hearings, no votes, no constitutional arguments, no confrontation with a gun lobby, no examination of licensing systems, storage requirements or the difference between owning a weapon and carrying one into a crowded public place. Prayers have an administrative advantage. They can be dispatched immediately, require no budget allocation and cannot be accused of infringing anyone’s rights.

But a prayer cannot lock a gun in a safe. Nor can a candlelight vigil determine whether a teenager can obtain a firearm, whether an adult who owns one stores it responsibly, whether authorities know how many weapons are circulating illegally, or whether a licence should ever have been granted in the first place.

Thailand’s response deserves attention precisely because it is imperfect. No law will abolish violence, madness, despair or human cruelty. A determined killer will always look for another route. But this is a remarkably poor argument against making the easiest route harder.

There is also an uncomfortable lesson in the age of the perpetrator. Fourteen. A child old enough to kill, but still young enough to be legally incapable of many adult decisions. Yet the weapon was available. That should provoke questions about the adults, systems and assumptions surrounding the weapon.

Gun control is not really simply about guns. It is about deciding what a society considers an acceptable level of preventable risk.

Every society makes such calculations. We require seat belts. We regulate medicines. We inspect buildings. We license drivers. We put fences around dangerous machinery. We do not describe these measures as an attack on freedom because freedom without rules eventually becomes merely the freedom to be injured by someone else's negligence.

So when Thailand responds to a massacre with legislation rather than exclusively with lamentation, the rest of the world should watch. Especially those countries where the tragedy can happen again, the same flowers can be placed outside another school, the same flags can be lowered, and the same politicians can solemnly promise that they are praying. Perhaps, after enough funerals, prayer should be permitted to take a day off. Action could use the microphone.