This weekend’s mass shootings come as the country mourns the victims of its deadliest mass shooting this year. Days earlier, 18 people were killed in a shooting in Lewiston, Maine.
This weekend’s mass shootings come as the country mourns the victims of its deadliest mass shooting this year. Days earlier, 18 people were killed in a shooting in Lewiston, Maine.
Right, but it’s how you address guns that’s interesting, especially when taking into account the 2nd amendment.
I’m just trying to convince people we should attempt something, any kind of gun control. So many people on America are stuck on this, there’s just no helping it, nothing we can do, thinking. The onion headline “no way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens” bears constant repeating.
If that involves needing to get rid of the second ammendment, so be it. I think it’d be fine to stay with effective regulations if the current conservative courts didn’t have such an insane understanding of it, basically forbidding any form of gun regulation.
Right, and to do that, you need specific data that indicates what the change in the law is attempting to fix. A lot of the gun control efforts have been around banning “assault weapons,” which largely just means “scary looking semi-auto rifles,” and that doesn’t really impact most of the numbers. Suicides, gang violence, and 1st degree murders tend to use handguns, and that’s where the bulk of your combined numbers are going to come from, so banning “assault weapons” doesn’t actually reduce those numbers. Likewise, background checks (which are done already) won’t decrease gun crime when most gun crime seems to be done with stolen weapons.
So in order for policy to actually be effective, it needs to specifically address some class of gun crime, because “feel good” legislation doesn’t solve anything, it just annoys gun owners.
I agree a lot of the “assault weapon” bans are poorly done. Handguns should be the main focus if you look at the statistics. A lot of these efforts are poorly done because of courts blocking more effective alternatives. See DC vs Heller. Another problem is states with no controls letting guns flow easily to states with more controls, effective controls have to be at the federal level.
Background checks won’t catch every problem, but they’ll catch a lot of them. So what if sometimes people steal guns, that type of thinking is exactly what I’m talking about! We shouldn’t have background checks because there might be some way to circumvent them sometimes? So just ditch it altogether? And we don’t have universal background checks yet, because organizations of gun owners and gun manufacturers fight tooth and nail to keep gaping loopholes open. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/us/gun-background-checks.html. We have more guns than people in the United States, it would be way harder to steal guns, if there are less guns to steal in the first place!
I think a great place to start would be the policies enacted by Australia in 1996 that resulted in a dramatic free fall in both mass shootings and homicide rates:
“Under the 1996–7 Australian Firearms Buyback, 643 726 newly prohibited semi-automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns were purchased by the federal government from their civilian owners at market value, funded by a levy on income tax.1 Tens of thousands of gun owners also voluntarily surrendered additional, non-prohibited firearms without compensation.2 In total, more than 700 000 guns were removed and destroyed from an adult population of about 12 million. Australia’s revised gun laws also require that all firearms be individually registered to their licensed owners, that private firearm sales be prohibited and that each gun transfer through a licensed arms dealer be approved only after the police are satisfied of a genuine reason for ownership.”
Or just look to the gun control laws of literally any other developed country. There are tons of solutions out there, people just don’t want to hear em.
Yeah, DC vs Heller was essentially a blanket ban on handguns. I’m a little surprised that they also struck down the requirement that rifles and shotguns need to be stored unloaded or trigger locked, but perhaps that’s because it was combined with the prohibition on handguns.
That link really doesn’t have much information, all it says is that there are problems with it (the only specific thing it mentions is adding in juvenile records). I hear this a lot, but I have yet to see a list of actual problems.
The one issue I’m aware of is that private sales don’t have to go through background checks, and I think that could be a legal requirement consistent with the court’s statements on the 2A. So if you want to sell a gun, you need a gun retailer (or potentially a police officer) present to check whether the buyer can legally buy it before the transfer can proceed.
I’m not a fan of a gun registry, or at least not one that gov’t employees can easily search, mostly on the grounds that it could lead police to treat suspects differently if they can confirm that they own guns. However, if it requires a search warrant, it could be effective and preserve privacy. The only valid search here IMO is to confirm whether person X owns gun Y, which is necessary for processing sales (i.e. can the owner actually sell the gun?).
This part certainly wouldn’t fly here in the US, but a lot of the rest might.