Student activists of March for Our Lives who arose in the wake of the massacre of 17 students and staff at their high school in Parkland, Florida, last year released a comprehensive, idealistic proposal for changing America’s gun laws Wednesday. It’s called A Peace Plan for a Safer America: Created by Survivors So You Don’t Have To Be One. Jacqueline Alemany and Matt Viser report:
“I think similarly to a lot of the country, I’m in a lot of pain right now,” said David Hogg, 19, a co-founder of March for Our Lives and a survivor of the shooting in February 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. “You see these shootings on TV every day and very little happening around it. It’s painful to watch. And I think it’s been really hard for me and many of the other students and people that we work with to find hope in this time.
“But I think that this plan is something that we can truly — as a country and as Americans united against violence and fighting for peace — can get behind.”
Their plan puts in one place many of the ideas that have been raised over the past three decades and adds some new ones. It is not written as proposed legislation but more like a resolution around which such legislation can be shaped.
It embraces six major categories of change. Included in the specifics are: licensing firearm owners with renewals required every year; mandating training; creating a national gun registry; limiting the number of gun purchases a person can make to one a month; requiring safe storage of firearms; banning firearm and ammunition sales via the internet; banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines; enacting Extreme Risk Protection Orders to disarm people considered a danger to others; setting up a national buyback and disposal program (mandatory for assault weapons) designed to cut total firearm ownership by 30%; and establishing a National Director of Gun Violence Prevention.
The activists make clear that changes in gun laws and related reforms must be done with intersectionality in mind. They acknowledge that most U.S. gun murders don’t occur during mass shootings with assault weapons, as horrific as those massacres are. The plan states: “Gun violence in America differs dramatically by geography and demographics. African American men are 10 times more likely to die by gun homicide than white men, but white men are 2.5 times more likely to die by gun suicide than African American men. In short, what works in one community to reduce gun violence may not work in another.” Among the proposals for local action: community-based violence reduction.
Some presidential candidates—for instance, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris—have proposed similar ideas to some of those in the peace plan. Most of those ideas have in one form or another been ferociously attacked over the years by the National Rifle Association and even more extremist organizations like Gun Owners of America. Whether now or after a 2020 Democratic win in the Senate and White House, every item in the March for Our Lives plan is going to be dodging heavy flak, with the activists being attacked and smeared even more than they have been since they began speaking out a year and a half ago.
The bloody 2013 massacre of 1st graders and educators at Sandy Hook elementary in Newton, Connecticut, gave frustrated activists and lawmakers hope that maybe, finally, the United States would adopt some sensible if mild reform to keep all guns out of some people’s hands and some guns out of all people’s hands. But the effort failed as the NRA and its marionettes and enablers in the Senate shot down two pieces of legislation, one to mandate universal background checks for all gun buys and one to ban a list of civilian semi-automatic rifles sporting numerous features originally designed to make these firearms better weapons of war. It was a bitter defeat. If the slaughter of youngsters just learning to read couldn’t turn the tide, disappointed reformers wondered, could anything?
Today, here we are again, several deadly mass shootings after Sandy Hook, with two pieces of legislation very similar to those introduced in Congress six years ago—universal background checks already passed in the Democrat-controlled House, and an assault weapons ban in the Senate, Both await Senate action. And they will continue doing so unless Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can be pushed out of his stubborn obstructionism. That would require pressure from other Senate Republicans and Trump. Neither proposal is likely to even get out of committee.
If there is one thing we know for certain about gun law reform, it’s that there is a slice of the American population absolutely adamant that no stricter rules be legislated at any level of government. For more than three decades, the NRA and its puppets have sought to make that slice appear greater than it is. Having spread this false perception, they have spurred enough members of Congress and legislators in the vast majority of the states to loosen gun laws. In some cases, stricter laws had been on the books for a century or more.
Not even the Sandy Hook slaughter of children still learning how to read could persuade enough members of the Senate to pass the most sensible and obvious reform: mandating that the millions of people who buy guns from private parties get a background check beforehand just as people who buy them from licensed dealers must already do. Not enough senators could be persuaded even though poll after poll over the past 20 years have shown the overwhelming majorities of all Americans, of gun-owners, and of NRA members favoring universal background checks. A recent poll puts the opposition to that at 11%. It’s not been above 15% since the question started being asked.
The failure in 2013 to upgrade the background check law—along with the failure to reinstitute the assault weapon ban that had been passed in 1994 and expired in 2004—was a major disappointment for gun law reformers and for several years suppressed any serious efforts in that direction by congressional Democrats. At the state level, matters were even worse as the NRA continued its three decade effort to make it easier for people to buy, use, and carry firearms, either openly or concealed.
In the years since that horrible day in Connecticut, 444 people have lost their lives in mass shootings in public places in which at least four people died and at least 898 were maimed in 53 cities, including Dayton; Virginia Beach; Las Vegas; Pittsburgh; Washington, D.C.; Santa Fe and Sutherland Springs and El Paso in Texas; Orlando and Parkland in Florida; San Bernardino and Thousand Oaks in California; Roseburg in Oregon, and 41 other places. Since Sandy Hook, firearms have been used in 74,000 homicides, 150,000 suicides, and several thousand unintentional killings. There are also 1,000 or so fatal shootings each year by on-duty law enforcement officers.
Whether any Democrat will present the March for Our Lives’ plan as a resolution in Congress is anybody’s guess. It might get a few sponsors in the House at least, but it’s no slam dunk to get out of committee for a floor vote this year, and probably even less so next. Which means most of the items in the plan, probably all of them, won’t see the light of day in Congress until January 2020 at the earliest.
Even if Democrats keep the House, defeat Trump for a second term, and gain the Senate majority next November, getting anything enacted that’s close to what the “peace plan” proposes will mean a very tough fight, the first part of which must be bringing some reluctant Democrats around.
In 2013, four Senate Democrats opposed universal background checks and 15 opposed an assault weapons ban. All four of the the first group have since been replaced by right-wing Republicans. Six of the Democrats who voted against the assault weapons ban are still in the Senate. While the national atmosphere around gun-law reform has improved since then, getting licensing, a gun registry, and a mandatory buyback program in place will encounter rather more adamant opposition than the 2013 bills. Gun-reform activists and their allies have our work cut out for us. Persuading hesitant Democratic senators and representatives to make even part of the leap that March for Our Lives proposes will be a titanic task. And a crucial one for the nation’s well-being.