TO be Irish, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart. He summed up the tragedy of the Irish after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

We can imagine the leaders of our government currently sighing the same lament. Because hope, not bloodletting, is supposed to usher in the New Year.

Even with Pablo and the havoc it wreaked on a swath of Mindanao, the year 2012 was actually not a bad year. The expected sources of economic dynamism yielded real results. The constitutional democracy was unchallenged whole year round, even with the decision to impeach a sitting chief justice and prosecute a former president. Everything points out to a more stable 2013.

The Revolutionary Left started 2013 with its usual forecasts: great leap forward for the liberating armies and institutions such as the IMF tightening the screws on us. The truth is the PPW, or protracted people’s war, is an anachronism in the age of Twitter and Cloud. And institutions such as the IMF are too immobilized by their statistical mediocrity (and saddled by self-doubt) to even attempt to cast their policy net on nations. Just read the mea culpa of Olivier Blanchard on how wrong the IMF was on the Greek crisis.

On the economic side, there is no threat of a systemic collapse in a critical sector of the economy, a kind of stability not even enjoyed by the major economic powers. What did the stock exchange breach?

The forecasts of hyper growth may be part-hype and part-jazz, but even a scaled-down version of the optimistic scenarios laid down by experts is perfectly a welcome thing for 2013. In fact, there is this general optimism, a silent giddiness even, about the economy in 2013. In we can’t get a 7 to 8 per cent GDP growth, at least somewhere in the 5 to 6 growth bracket was achievable.

Yet, after a change of climes and a sudden gust of fresh wind, the leaders of government can’t even take time to smell the flowers or, at the very least, silently celebrate the strides. The reason is obvious – the heartbreaks came too soon. They came in the usual form, the dampener we are all too familiar with: guns and violent men.

In a season of hope and good tidings, the dark nature of men came blasting to break our hearts. To shatter the silent celebration. This was why we remembered Moynihan and his dark quip about the tragedy of the Irish.

Why can’t we, for once, be guided by our better angels? There are no easy answers. In fact, there are no answers at all. A society without guns? A tighter gun control policy? These are all illusory and they can’t apply in the real world. There is no society predisposed to violence that can calmly debate about gun control. While there is no Second Amendment written in our Constitution, there is no maturity and self-restraint within the broader society to pursue a successful gun-control policy .

The talk on gun control will fade after the headlines are, inevitably, reduced to little fonts and the news stories on the mayhem moved into the inside pages. After that, the groups against gun ownership will promptly hibernate. Legislators will rediscover their indifference to gun control. The newspapers will move into other headlines as screaming. Or, as scary.

Until, of course, the next heart breaker caused by guns and violent men.

There is a sense of desperation in our midst because more gun control laws are useless and the shunning of guns and violence as a moral and spiritual choice has a lesser probability of taking place than the success of the Left’s PPW.

The sense that the issue of gun control is a policy dead-end and nothing would come out of it except for the saliva expended is probably what is keeping the President from spelling out a list of policy options on reining in indiscriminate, rather, apocalyptic, gun use . Making guns off-limits to civilians through policy is inapplicable to criminals. Because they are criminals and outside of the laws’ applications and the police as an institutional deterrent has been a failure. A gunless society is a Utopian ideal. In real life, it serves as an additional incentive to criminals.

So what is the political leadership to do?

What has been proven is this. Countries with prosperity, adequate jobs for the citizens, less inequality, solid grounding of the citizenry on civics have negligible crime rates. Right now, we are in-between those countries, Switzerland for one, and Somalia.

The side story to the 13 killed in Quezon province is control over a jueteng territory and a cash hoard of P100 million now reportedly missing. The promise of an incentive is the major inducer to a criminal act. Except for the crimes of passion, it is about payoffs and incentives.

Whether it is the pirates of Somalia, or the Philippine police officers deep into the jueteng racket, it is the profit or money motive that primarily drives people to guns and violence. Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics, has a theory on this.

So the only option left to the political leadership is to step up the generation of jobs, the alleviation of mass poverty and the spread of prosperity to rein in the culture of guns and violence.

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