There was another mass shooting today, this time at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. According to preliminary reports nearly thirty people are dead – more than twenty of them young children.

How long will America continue to tolerate this madness?

As a public policy matter, the problem of mass shootings is not difficult: Large-capacity gun magazines should not be available to the general public.

Gun-control opponents like to say that the problem is not guns but people. It is an argument designed to confuse the dimwitted. Mass slaughters occur because madmen obtain dangerous weapons. The simple reality is that it is possible to control guns, but not possible to control emotionally disturbed people. We can’t always identity them, and even when we can, we can’t always predict if they will be dangerous. We have three choices: (1) We can lock up a lot of people who we think might possibly be dangerous, and keep many of them locked up indefinitely. (2) We can continue to put up with horrors like the one today. (3) We can control guns.

The Supreme Court has declared that citizens have a constitutional right to possess handguns for self-defense in their own homes. It’s not a ruling I agree with, but it is the law of the land. So be it. But we can restrict the number of rounds that guns – both handguns and long guns – can accommodate. We should ban guns and gun magazines that hold more than, perhaps, five rounds. Under those circumstances, someone would have to switch gun magazines six times to fire thirty rounds. Today gun magazines that hold thirty rounds are common. Some magazines hold seventy-five rounds.

I just heard President Obama say, “We are going to have to come together to take meaningful action, regardless of the politics.” Let us pray that this time Americans – including politicians long intimidated by the gun lobby – make the President’s words come true.

UPDATE (December 15, 2012): Gail Collins put it this way in her New York Times column today: ""Every country has a sizable contingent of mentally ill citizens. We're the ones that gives them the technological power to play god.""

Another of my family’s traditions this time of year is debating who should be named Time Magazine's “Person of the Year.” Originally, Time’s selected the person who – for good or evil – most influenced the course of history during the year. That’s the criterion my family sticks to in our discussions, though Time has modified its formulation to the person who “most influenced the news” for better or worse. Last year, focusing on the popular uprisings in the middle-east, Time gave it to “The Protester.”

My own choice this year is for the head of our predator drone program. This program is certainly changing history. It used to be that American armed forces went after our nation’s enemies, putting their lives on the line in battle to do so. They still do, of course. But now we increasingly kill our enemies – sometimes along with innocent bystanders – with unmanned drones. It’s so much easier. The human who carries out the attack does so by working a joy stick miles away in safety, even at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

But is it too easy? I don’t presume to know the answer to that question. I certainly don’t want to put American lives needlessly at risk. Yet I am deeply troubled by this new reality. Our predator drone program is not a small. Since 2009, we have carried out 300 drone strikes, killing thousands of people. Increasingly other nations, including Israel, are doing the same thing.

Moreover, identifying enemies used to be uncontroversial. Our armed forces went to war – more or less approved by Congress, if not by a formal declaration of war then through a resolution empowering the president to take military action – against the uniformed armed forces of hostile nations. Now the president, in secret, often signs assassination orders against individuals who do not wear uniforms, and those orders are executed not by our armed forces following the rules of war but by our espionage agency.

Is this how a democracy should operate? How much damage are we doing to ourselves by becoming technological assassins? Are the deaths of innocent bystanders – which are inevitable in such a program – causing so much blow-back that we create more enemies than we eliminate? By what standards does the president decide whom to kill? What checks are there on his power? What oversight does Congress provide? What's the line between war and murder? How do we know if that line is crossed? Are we giving too much power to the CIA?

The New York Times reported that the Obama administration worked frantically to draft rules for the program to constrain a new administration, should Romney have won the election. Clearly the president himself is troubled about how this program might operate. We all need to remember that in a democarcy even those of us who trust the president should never trust him too much.

I don’t know the answers to the questions I’ve posed. But I do know that we aren’t discussing the questions enough. Our predator drone program has changed history. We'll never put this genie back in the bottle. Civilized warfare (if that term isn't an oxymoron) has permanently changed; and even if, in some ways, the changes are good, surely they are evil as well.

Everyone’s talking about how – unless it changes – the Republican Party is doomed by demographics. Much attention is focusing on Hispanics and Asians. They are the fastest growing ethnic groups in the country, and 70% of them voted for President Obama. This is leading many Republicans to suggest that their party needs a different approach on the immigration issue. Although that’s certainly true, it is even more significant that 60% of voters under thirty supported the Obama-Biden ticket. If there is any group that is going to grow year by year, it’s the one composed of all voters born after 1982 – and the GOP is not going to win them over by repositioning itself on an issue or two.

A far more fundamental change is necessary.

Let’s focus on a few facts that illustrate the deep core of the problem: According to the Gallup poll, 67% of Republicans believe that claims about climate change are exaggerated (compared to 20% of Democrats), notwithstanding that climate change has been established to a reasonable scientific certainty. This is but one illustration that Republicans have become accustomed to denying reality when it clashes with their ideological preferences. Clinging to a belief in trickle-down economics – that cutting taxes on the wealthy, regardless of how low their taxes may currently be, stimulates economic growth, benefits everyone, and ultimately increases government revenues – is another example of ignoring unpleasant facts, e.g., the exploding deficits that followed the Reagan and Bush tax cuts.

Some of the party’s denials of reality are even starker. Gallup reports that a majority of Republicans believe that “God created humans in present form within the past 10,000 years.” Other surveys show that most Republicans still believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, notwithstanding that all facts are to the contrary – not only his birth certificate but birth announcements published at the time by both of Honolulu’s major newspapers.

The problems within the party have been getting worse. As previously mentioned, two-thirds of Republicans now believe that claims about climate change are exaggerated – but eight years ago, it was 35%. Political scientists have shown that the Republican Party has moved much further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. (See, e.g., Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics 159 (2010). And yes, I consider moving extremely far to the right part and parcel of the Republican problem.) 

This is a political party with far deeper problems than its position on immigration.

Those problems are not going to disappear because President Obama just won reelection. They have festered for a long time, and are now deeply ingrained within both the Republican leadership and rank-and-file. This year, five of the eight candidates for GOP presidential nomination said that they don’t believe in climate change, and four said they don’t believe in evolution. Within Republican circles, these are mainstream views. A political party doesn’t change because tacticians decide that its ideology isn’t selling. Political parties are not selling commodities. They are selling ideas – and they sell particular ideas not because they consider them to be saleable but because they consider them to be right.

Should Democrats like me be pleased that the Republican Party’s right-wing ideology has become so extreme and detached from reality – not to mention inflexible, intolerant, and mean-spirited – that the party is doomed in the long run? No, we should not be pleased. The present state of the Republican Party is not just bad for the party; it’s bad for the nation. Our democracy cannot function well without two sound political parties. The governing party needs to be balanced by a loyal opposition that provides intelligent criticism and offers sound alternatives. In addition, when one of the two national parties and many of its prominent leaders advocate particular positions – even demonstrably flawed positions – it gives those positions some aura of respectability beyond the confines of the party. Over the past eight years, for example, the percentage of independents who believe that claims of climate change are exaggerated has risen from 35% to 42%. Republican problems make it difficult to solve national and global problems.

While the Republican Party may be fated to change or die in the long run, it may remain politically viable – more or less as is – for quite a while. After all, the Republican presidential candidate just captured nearly 48% of the popular vote, and the party holds 45% of the incoming Senate, a majority of the House, and 60% of the nation’s governorships.

What’s required to bring the Republican Party back to health? (By the way, is it presumptuous for a Democrat to talk about GOP reform? Because we are all Americans first and foremost, and all Americans have good reason to want two healthy national parties, I think that even a Democrat like me can offer views and prayers for Republican reform.)

David Brooks has suggested that what’s necessary – and, in fact, already happening – is a debate about how conservatism should be redirected. This is surely one of the things that are necessary. I hope that one group of theorists – the Burkean Revivalists – will be particularly influential in the debate. We are also now witnessing some moves toward moderation by a number of Republican leaders, such as denouncing Romney’s statement that President Obama won reelection by giving “extraordinary financial gifts” to various groups, or expressing a willingness to abandon the Grover Norquist pledge to never raise taxes. But I do not believe that these developments, by themselves, are sufficient to the task.

What’s required is an organized movement – or, more probably, organized movements – dedicated to reform. One thing I learned from studying the creation of the modern conservative movement for my book Buckley is that individuals who build a community prevail over individuals who act independently. The Burkeans, for example, need to get together regularly in conferences or seminars to discuss and debate their ideas. They need an opinion journal, a website, and a blog to provide them with a dedicated soapbox and link them with an audience interested in those ideas. They need public relations to help find ways to project their ideas widely and expand their community. They need an organization to accomplish – and raise funds for – those things.

But I doubt that efforts to revise conservatism are enough. The Republican Party needs to rebuild a moderate wing. This too probably requires a formal organization. There was a time when the Ripon Society – which started as an organization of progressive Republicans – may have provided that vehicle; but the words “moderate” and “moderation” have become so disgraced within Republican circles that the Ripon Society appears to eschew them.

Finally, the task of reforming the Republican Party might be advanced by a reality-based pragmatist following Ron Paul’s model. Ron Paul ran a successful campaign in the GOP presidential primaries. His goal was not to win the nomination but to promote the libertarian wing within the party. He obtained visibility through the debates, and he drew enormous crowds on college campuses. Libertarianism is stronger for his efforts. What this model requires, however, is a candidate who advocates a defined cause – perhaps moderate Republicanism – and makes that cause the principal objective. This is what Ron Paul did; although he may never have said he was running, not to win, but to advance libertarianism, his objective was clear. A Republican reform candidate might concentrate on open-primary states, where independents can vote in party primaries, as well as college campuses. The objective would be to bring new people into the Republican Party. For this effort to be successful, however, the cause would have to be clearly defined and have its own organization, which would last beyond the candidate’s campaign.

However it’s accomplished, a reform effort is necessary for the good of the nation.