While most people have never heard of that book, it was the key to everything. Smith realized that the free market could never work unless people first understood morality and human nature. When a breakdown in the free market occurs, it’s not the market’s fault; it’s the fault of individual participants who’ve lost their way. The same principle holds true for guns. The Second Amendment, like all of our rights, is reliant on a moral and virtuous people. Without that, nothing else matters. Man cannot rule himself if, as Smith put it, moral sentiment is missing. That, I contend, is the answer. Not just to gun violence, but to many of the other problems that plague us. We must stop looking to assign blame to the choices we are offered—whether it’s guns or large sodas or tanning beds—and instead take personal responsibility for our choice and our lives. It’s clear to me that if we raise children with no moral compass, we are planting the seeds of our own destruction.
