I own only two firearms, both long guns and neither of which have been discharged in living memory. One is the rifle that my great-great-grandfather bore during the Civil War. The other is a shotgun my father received as a kid from his grandfather. I’m a sentimentalist and family history buff but not a gun nut. I do know how to shoot. There was a firing range in my high school’s basement. You could barely attend the school, at the time the best high school in the St. Louis metropolitan area, without knowing how to shoot.
Every time some mentally ill or morally depraved young adult goes on a shooting rampage in a school or church there’s understandable grief and rage, nearly always accompanied by anger that we haven’t enacted the “sensible laws” that would have prevented these incidents. The nature of these laws is generally left vague. Blame is levied at the National Rifle Association and the “gun culture”.
The NRA is without question a populist movement. It has a very large membership and to the best of my knowledge none of the horrors have been perpetrated by NRA members. Its political contributions are far lower than those by medical doctors, educators, realtors, or public employees’ unions. Its power comes from the interests and votes of its membership as well as some skillful and focused lobbying.
I’m on record as being in support of gun laws that ban the personal ownership of firearms including a house-to-house search on the single condition that the police be disarmed at the same time. Admittedly, that’s not a “sensible” strategy; it’s extreme. I’d also support less strenuous measures like bans on large-capacity magazines. But I’m confused.
What are these sensible, obvious laws? I suspect that none of them would be effective in doing much other than preventing peaceful, law-abiding gun owners from owning guns and would do little to end the sorts of tragedies they’re purported to address.
Let’s have a national dialogue. Sadly, these days “dialogue” has become an auto-antonym. It now means “lecture” as well as conversation. In this case I mean a conversation. What sensible, obvious laws would prevent school shootings? What would it cost to implement and enforce them? Would they eliminate these shootings or just ensure that they were committed using illegally obtained or modified firearms?
To place all of this in a little perspective, last year twice as many Chicagoans were killed with firearms than the total number of people killed in school shootings. Many if not most of these Chicagoans were in the same age demographic as those killed in school shootings. Nearly all were killed using illegal firearms.
Note that there’s a racial component to this sad issue. Nearly all of the perpetrators of mass shootings and their victims are white; nearly all of the shootings of young people in large cities like Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, or Detroit have both perpetrators and victims who are black.
Not even a question of stopping shootings. A country in which there is a restriction on how much ammo one could own, magazine capacity, and the type of rifles available would reduce the carnage of mass shootings. Granted, it’s too late now. Guns are not going to be seized. However benign gun culture allegedly is, it has taken things that are only weapons and turned them into things people care about, which is somewhat funny, I guess. Automobiles are very destructive but banning cars would alter everything. What would banning and seizing every gun in this country do? What would change? Guns are a fake way of life for people who have no lives.
So the real conversation would be about why are guns so important to people. And the answers, trust me, are not going to be reassuring. If it was just about hunting or self-defense, we would not be talking about AR-15s. They’re weapons, and they kill. But you can’t have that conversation without talking about American state power here and abroad, I think. And that’s never going to happen.
It’s depressing all around.
I’ve come to the conclusion this is a problem we won’t be able to address for decades at least. The cognitive dissonance and national split on this issue is pretty massive. Combine that with a sclerotic federal bureaucracy and I see little hope for any near-term change that will amount to more than a rounding error.
I still believe what’s needed is a movement along the lines of the temperance movement that, over a generation or more, might shift attitudes and move the Overton window, but few seem interested in making that kind of investment. What passes for the current anti-gun movement is an incoherent, contradictory and dishonest mess and it’s no wonder they can’t compete with the NRA.
I’m personally ambivalent about gun control and the 2nd Amendment, but I think policy must be actually effective and not simply a feel-good measure. The vast majority of proposals from the gun-control crowd don’t pass a basic efficacy test yet they are sold as measures that will prevent future school shootings.
While school shootings get the press, the real problem is young black underclass males. They are responsible for a majority of all violent crimes, including gun crimes and inter-racial hate crimes. On any long holiday weekend in Chicago, you will get almost as many shootings as in the recent school tragedy. Yet no one ever talks about disarming young black males. People who are not willing to discuss the black male problem are merely posturing and are not serious.
Not all young black males commit gun crime, not even those in the ghetto. The total number of gangbangers is likely less than two million. Large scale incarceration can solve a problem of that magnitude.
Massive Tax on all Ammunition.
I have to admit I find it mostly infantile to look for mechanical solutions in gun or ammunition control. Remember, heavy gun control law venues perform miserably in gun death statistics, US and foreign. Its the shooters, not the tools. There are perhaps a few sensible gun control initiatives, but the left has shown their hand, and to give on any of them is just to give ground while the next assault is planned.
Mental health solutions have a role, but its really about rigorous school lockdown. Sad, but true.
@ Guarneri , I mentioned that to my son yesterday, that there is probably a day coming when the schools will all have metal detectors and guards, just like the courthouses.
Guarneri, “Its the shooters, not the tools” You can’t have shooters with out the tools, you can’t have addicts without the drugs. It’s not likely we can end gun violence but is possible to reduce it. If there is a wild fire, you contain it. If its a flu epidemic you contain it. If it’s an unsafe car model you fix it. How many cars on the US roads, millions, how many mass murders by car…very few. Its political, we can fix it.
We have so many guns floating around that there isn solution to this. Just the price we pay for having so many. Drew is incorrect about heavy gun control. It has worked other places. It just won’t be accepted here.
Steve
A lot of schools in inner cities already have metal detectors and guards.
I think reducing the number of guns would reduce gun violence, but the scale of reduction matters. Said another way, I think reducing the number of gun by 95% would have a significant impact on gun violence. Reducing the growth rate for the number of guns by some tiny percentage ( as an assault weapons ban might do) would do nothing.
The devil is in the details. We know how Norway the UK and Australia drastically reduced the number of privately held weapons from numbers that were already low when compared to the US. The idea that we could simply do what they did – as many people I know personally suggest – is just a fantasy.
Andy, fantasies got us to the moon. Gave us the internet. so on and so on..This is an American issue, one I know we can fix, if we really want to. Guns are not toys, guns were made for killing.
Larry,
Getting to the moon is an engineering problem. Reducing the number of guns by 95% is a political problem. They aren’t equivalent. One requires math and resources, the other requires changing minds and convincing people that the policy is in their interest (or it requires less democratic methods).
Yes, “we” can fix it as long as enough Americans agree on a fix. Getting people to agree is not something engineering can solve.
Andy, What about social engineers…we got plenty of them, ask Google, Amazon, Facebook….gosh there are so many of them…
Larry,
We are fortunate that people have agency and engineering problems do not. Otherwise, Social Engineering would really be dangerous.
A question. If we breakdown violence with guns into its constituent components; there are 4 necessary factors. The gun, the bullet / gunpowder, training (time and space to practice using a gun), motivation.
Of the 4, which is easiest to make harder? Which is hardest to obtain if it became illegal?
I like that kind of analysis Curious. I think it’s situationally dependent.
Motivation also impacts the other factors.
As one example, the Santa Barbara shooter could not buy a weapon, so he bought an unfinished AR lower receiver (which are not regulated), completed milling it to make a functional receiver, and then bought the rest of the parts to assemble the weapon (which is not subject to background checks because, legally, the receiver or frame is the firearm, not the rest of the parts).
That kind of time, energy training and expense takes a lot of motivation, not to mention discovering that loophole exists in the first place.
Other than that, I don’t know which one is the easiest to make harder much less how hard one needs to make it before it alters the motivation.
The reason that the U. S. has this problem while European countries do not is that social cohesion is so poor here. Switzerland’s rate of gun ownership/possession is extremely high—higher than here. But their degree of social cohesion is high, too, so that there aren’t as many gun homicides as here.
You can’t dissociate our homicide problem from race. The white homicide rate isn’t tremendously different from that of many European countries. Once you factor in lower social cohesion our rate is completely understandable. The urban black homicide rate is what distinguishes the U. S. from other developed countries.
If your goal is to punish white folks you don’t like, impose gun control. If your goal is to lower the homicide rate, give black kids in cities something to live for beyond their gangs.
If your goal is to stop white kids from killing other white kids in shooting sprees at schools, change the way we’re dealing with mental illness.
PD
Yes, as I said, it’s a very sad commentary on our culture, but true.
That’s dumb (no offense) Larry. Just dumb. There are plenty of guns, knives, home made bombs, ramming cars and trucks etc for the deranged in society. They will find a way. If you want to attenuate the efficacy of guns a first step might be to stop absolutist and/or incremental gun control propositions. It’s self defeating. Dave taught me a new phrase which I think is widely applicable – gun control people want the issue, not the solution.
First of all, steve, if it won’t work here, well, it won’t work. So you are just flailing your arms. But call me crazy, the worst gun massacre occurred in Scandinavia in a total gun ban country. And unless I was hallucinating, terrorists have managed to bomb buses and trains and run down pedestrians with regular frequency.
We need to focus on mental health, the culture and what we consider draconian protective measures. Shorter – we need to cut the gun control bullshit and get serious.
@CuriousOnlooker,
I would add hardening targets or self-defense mechanisms. I’m not necessarily advocating them, but they are being discussed here and elsewhere. I wasn’t aware earlier that a victim’s mother was recorded yelling that Trump needed to put metal detectors in schools.
The other is I don’t see particular relevance of guns in the discussion. Is the problem to be addressed mass homicides or just mass shootings. However, one sees it, there would be more benefits from approaches that deal with both.
There is a common element in America in which our expectations in various areas like education, healthcare and crime prevention are all made difficult because they necessarily involve Americans. Americans were a violent, drug-abusing, mentally unfit people distinct from other nations when there were only flintlocks.
PD Shaw, to quote Maxwell Smart, “and loving it”.
On a serious note, those wanting action now, need to unite, decide what action they want taken and start banging on the 2018 (and onwards) candidates about it. MADD was quite successful in changing both culture (when was the last time a comedian made light of drunk driving?) and laws.
And lets remember that tiresome business about search and seizure, involuntary medical treatment is not prison, and other legal folderol that twitter frenzies will not change.
CO-It is incredibly easy to buy a gun. Ammunition is just as easy. Training is minimal. Motivation is plentiful.
Steve