I know I won’t get a lot of love here for this, but I thought I’d share a post I made to discuss the gun issue in response to a friend who posted about wanting to ban Ar15s.
It’s just my thoughts and ideas, if you hate them, that’s cool. For those of you like-minded people though, check out r/liberalgunowners if you use reddit, or consider joining the Liberal Gun Club.
Here goes:
1. Before anything else, people calling for gun control should take just an hour or two to learn about the firearms they want to regulate. When you imitate politicians and say things like "A515 assault rifle", you immediately alienate law abiding gun owners already heavily skeptical of your intentions. It makes it clear you don't know what you are talking about, yet want to tell them what they can and can't do. I'm not picking on you, this is a common problem. I used to do it too not that long ago, when I was very much for gun control and before I did all my homework.
2. You have to acknowledge the reality that evil cannot be totally legislated away. Since 1990, 150 people have died in school shootings (more in general mass shootings of course). On the one hand, even a single such death is too many. On the other hand, the problem is statistically minuscule, so small that it probably can't be effectively dealt with through public policy. The BEST way to deal with it is improving the systems already in place - law enforcement doing their jobs and keeping NICS databases up to date. Two mass shootings in the last few months are directly the fault of law enforcement dropping the ball. In Texas, someone passed a NICS check who should not have because his domestic charges were not uploaded properly to NICS. In Florida, the FBI ignored a tip they got.
From a law-abiding gun owner's perspective, it sure seems like more laws are being proposed to restrict them (which criminals and sick people will ignore regardless) when the very same government can't do their jobs anyway. It is security theater, not true reform.
3. Ok, so what can be done? For one, universal background checks should be a thing. All private sales should have to go through an FFL as we do in California. OR, make NICS a phone app so people can run a background check on the person they are selling to, and its a felony to sell it to them if they do not.
I understand why some in the gun community are skeptical of this. What is called the "gun show loophole" (a dumb name, most private sales aren't at gun shows) used to be the COMPROMISE. In the 90s, gun owners were skeptical of NICS, fearing it was a slippery slope to a gun registry. So, they agreed to it, with the compromise being that if a private citizen wanted to sell a gun to another citizen, the government didn't get involved (it is still a felony to knowingly sell to a prohibited person of course).
So to them, it seems like yesterday's good faith compromise will just be tomorrow's "loophole", and they don't want to give up more ground. True compromise would be passing conceal carry reciprocity in exchange for universal background checks. Hell, throw in a bump stock ban if you'd like too, I'd be cool with that. People with conceal carry permits are statistically among the most law-abiding group out there, because if they aren't, they lose their permit to do so.
4. Guns save lives much more often than they end them. The most anti-gun estimate, done by an anti-gun group, found that there were about 70,000 incidents of defensive gun use per year. Other estimates are 2-3 million (truth is probably somewhere in the middle, as always). But even if we took that most antigun estimate of 70,000, that is still 7x more common than gun homicides. Of course, I admit that I'm not sure of the stats when counting gun injuries, that may likely tie or pass the 70k figure, but again, that figure is the smallest estimate from a group with a clear agenda.
5. Universal mental healthcare must become a thing. This may not stop all or even most mass shootings, but it will help, and it will also help bring down the far bigger problem that CAN be addressed with public policy - suicide. Two thirds of our gun deaths are suicides. Conservatives oppose universal healthcare because they don't wanna pay for someone else's costs, but on this we can argue it provides a collective good, with less troubled people endangering the public along with themselves. And to be clear, people usually only do harm themselves. We should not demonize people with depression or other issues as would-be mass murderers, as that would just discourage them from getting help and being open about their problems.
6. Half our homicide, HALF, is done by about 6% of the population, black males. That should stun everybody, yet I rarely hear it mentioned. We need to address the core reasons why so many young black teens and men turn to gangs. If we magically made every mass shooting stop happening tomorrow, only about 1% or so of our homicide problem would be addressed, guns or otherwise. Being focused on mass shootings would be like being focused on shark attack deaths while thousands of people are drowning each year. Yes shark attacks are far more dramatic and newsworthy, but they are a small problem that we can't really solve with public policy. Whereas drowning, teaching people how to swim would bring down those numbers. So too with the real cause of our homicide problem - urban blight. This is why I fear nothing will actually ever change. Fixing these neighborhoods won't come cheap, and if we leave it to just private enterprise, the neighborhoods will gentrify sure but the people in them will just take the issues somewhere else. It's not an easy problem to solve whatsoever, but it is the key.
Remember, if you didn't count our gun homicides and only counted every other kind of homicide we have here, our homicide rate per capita would STILL be higher than most of western europe. It's more than just a gun thing, easily.
7. Armed security at schools. Seriously. We have armed security everywhere that we consider valuable, but not schools? It's absolutely ridiculous. This is the closest we can come to actually reducing school shooting fatalities through public policy.
8. State by state, there is no correlation between number of gun owners and homicide rate. None. In fact, it's a very slightly negative correlation, though not enough for me to sit here and declare more guns equal less crime (but that is indeed the case in some states). California has tons of gun control, whereas Arizona is the most pro-gun state in the nation. Most years, homicide per capita is about the same. The most recent year I could find, 2015, Arizona was actually LOWER per capita than California, 4.5 vs 4.8 per 100,000. If your goal is to just make it so that less people have guns, you are wasting everyone's time while trying to curtail a civil liberty. Oh and by the way, Washington DC has very low rates of gun ownership, tons of gun laws, and leads the nation in homicide (25 per 100,000, nationally it is about 5 per 100,000).
9. Gun control aside from background checks does. not. work. You can yell at gun owners and try and guilt them into "do something!" all you want, what you are really asking for is security theater and legislative therapy so you feel better when nothing actually got done. Rifles are always picked on, especially the Ar15, when they are responsible for a tiny fraction of gun deaths. My brother had to put a bunch of dumb shit on his , including blocking his thumb from gripping it properly, because of California's laws. None of that made the gun any less deadly, it just irritated him because he had to spend money on stupid shit to comply with the law (which criminals won't do) and made him even more skeptical of the gun control crowd. Meanwhile my dad's mini 14, which fires the exact same round, didn't have to be changed because it looks like a hunting rifle so no one cares.
The 1994 "assault weapons" (made up term) ban has been shown to have had no statistical effect on gun crime in the 10 years it was around. You want to reinstate that so you can say we did something, restrict legal gun owners, and people in poor neighborhoods keep killing each other at alarming rates with pistols and knives? It's worse than doing nothing, it's a bandaid that lets you avoid dealing with the real problem that is much harder to solve.
10. End the war on drugs. Liberals say it hasn't worked because people who want drugs won't follow the law anyway, and they are correct (but hilariously don't apply this same logic to gun control). The war on drugs has just made drugs an underground black market. More gun control would do the same for guns.
The war on drugs is a conservative pipe dream which is probably the biggest root cause of our homicides. Let it go.
11. Finally, our homicide rate has been cut in half since 1980, despite more and more guns being sold every year. If guns caused homicides to increase, the reverse should have occurred. Mass shootings are up, but they are a much more modern phenomenon which probably has more to do with disturbed people seeking media glory than anything else. They did happen in the past, but much more rarely despite the fact that we had much less gun control.
12. This one I’m just including here on Kos. There are many, MANY people who vote just based on guns and would be open to the Democratic Party otherwise. It’s an issue that costs us elections. Given how close three states were in 2016, I think it’s safe to say if Hillary weren’t antigun, she would have won PA, WI, MI, and thus the election.
Ok, hope that was somewhat productive. Have a good one all!
