Before I say anything about guns, or politics, or the NRA, or anything, I have to ask you to take a moment and think about what happened in Newtown, CT, on Friday morning. Whether or not you support the Second Amendment, I think you will agree that it’s time to get serious about these senseless killings. We need to change the gun culture that pervades American society, and we need to do it now—before more innocent children lose their chances to open their Christmas presents, to graduate from college, and to live complete and meaningful lives. I can only imagine what parents are feeling right now.
And before I say anything regarding the Sandy Hook incident specifically, I have to ask you again to take a moment and think about what happened before Newtown, CT. Unfortunately, this should not be asking much of you—2012 was a year unlike any other for those who followed each tragedy unfold. Four mall shootings; an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater massacre; the Oak Creek Sikh temple tragedy; and now the Sandy Hook slaying. I ask you to remember each of these not only to point out just how real these events are but also to show how commonplace they’ve become. I am not trying to exploit this heart-wrenching travesty as a bolster to my argument—as is often done by many a politician—but rather to explain that there is a trend here. It is obvious, it is tangible, and it needs to be addressed; don’t kid yourself.
I find it extremely hard to believe that the Second Amendment will ever be amended, at least in my lifetime. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and the GOP are madly in love with each other, and each helps support the other with big bucks in Washington.
The NRA has even held sway with Democratic interest groups as of late. Detroit’s heavily Democratic auto union, United Auto Workers, added a holiday on the first day of hunting season into its contracts. Former Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (MI), one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress and former Director of the NRA, has long undermined liberals’ aspirations of tougher gun laws.
Even if the NRA somehow loses significant sway in maintaing future Washington gridlock, the fact of the matter is that only 10% of the American population, a relatively insignificant number, thinks concealed weapons should be banned at the civilian level. Australia shocked the world when it announced in 2007 that, after a five-year gun ban, the percent of murders committed with a firearm reached the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3% of violent crimes).
So banning weapons outright for American citizens is extremely unlikely to happen and—beyond that—extremely unpopular and probably ineffective. Nick Kristoff, in yet another fantastic piece for the New York Times, wrote on Saturday that we should instead ” treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes.” We need to recognize the threats that current gun control legislation fail to curtail, and we need to find a way to reduce the number of murders on people like you and me who just want to shop at the mall, watch a movie, and enjoy school.
Our people want answers. Our people want an active, engaging discourse on gun rights to prevent tragedies like the ones that peppered 2012, and rightly so. It’s becoming more and more apparent that the United States has a serious gun problem. Don’t believe me? Take a look a these numbers:
Murders with firearms 2011:
South Africa – 31,918
Colombia – 21,898
Thailand – 20,032
USA – 9,369
Mexico – 2,606
Germany – 269
Australia – 59
Japan – 47
England – 14
New Zealand – 10
The bolded nations are the ones you should focus on here—democratic, industrialized nations, all of which belong to the G-20 (except for New Zealand). Even taking into account population differences, the United States has an amazingly high number of annual murders with firearms. We like to think of our nation as one of the most progressive, free, and safe places in the world. And while that once was an indisputable fact, numbers like these support the notion that America is a much different place now.
So we do have a problem, and it’s extremely obvious and widely acknowledged, even by Congress. It’s not often that Republicans and Democrats agree on anything, but you know the issue is serious when they do. We have a problem, and banning guns outright is pretty much off the table. So where do we step in, and what do we do? How can we get both sides to come together and actually effect a change on our nation’s safety?
The answer, I believe, lies deep below the radar of politicians. It lies where few policy makers and pro-gun lobbyists would go to actually make this country safer—in the loopholes that they themselves created.
What concerns me most about American gun policy is the plethora of loopholes that virtually anyone can exploit to obtain a handgun. The Brady Act of 1994 (named after Reagan press secretary James Brady who was badly injured in the presidential assassination attempt) requires background checks on all arms buyers. (Not that this stopped James Holmes from purchasing his arsenal that he used during the “Dark Knight Rises” premiere.) But this law applies only to licensed dealers – not to private sellers at gun shows, flea markets, and individuals selling firearms online.
How significant are sales from these informal gun markets? Huge.
Forty percent of gun sales were completed without a background check as per a 1997 study, and since then, the NRA has successfully pushed for legislation that prohibits any paper trail or “direct tally” of these types of sales. Essentially, we don’t even have a means to research how big the gun show, flea market, and online gun markets are. What’s sad is that even those who’ve been charged with domestic violence can join in and purchase a gun, including assault weapons in some states. So it should come as little surprise when people like Holmes and Adam Lanza (who both had a history of mental problems) manage to get their hands on assault rifles and wreak havoc.
Many an NRA member has described to me the lengthy process of obtaining a gun, which I’m sure is accurate, but it simply does not mirror reality. It’s hard to argue that the system is “pretty much perfect,” as a family friend and longtime NRA member told me, when 40% of gun sales happen without background checks. I’m not arguing for no guns at all, but we need to address why it’s so easy to get them – especially assault weapons – even for people with a history of mental problems and, yes, those charged with domestic violence.
(As a side note, I think a federal assault weapons ban is absolutely necessary and obvious. I understand having a Glock for self-defense, and I understand owning rifles for hunting, but I fail to see where automatic shotguns and AK-47s come into play for civilians.)
Don’t ask me how we reached this point, but we have to recognize we’re living in a different time and place than we were just a short 30 or 40 years ago. Failure to see that is failure to deal effectively with the problems of modern society. I’m not arguing from an anti-gun perspective, but there are tangible issues that we have to discuss. Banning guns altogether is merely one proposed solution to a problem that is very real and very lethal. Of course guns don’t commit crimes, but they undoubtedly enable owners (sick in the mind or not) with an extremely powerful force. That power requires responsibility, and considering all the loopholes that exist right now, no one is checking for that responsibility in a majority of owners. Why don’t we enact a federal background check for all gun buyers, even for those conducting private sales? Why don’t we limit gun purchases, and why don’t stop the sale of large magazines for assault weapons? And why do you have to wait only two days to get your handgun?
Moving forward, Congress will have no choice but to address gun policy. The Obama administration was not particularly keen on doing this during its first term – presumably to avoid losing the 2012 elections – but now that they’ve locked in another four years, they will probably propose an amendment to gun-control legislation in the foreseeable future. If President Obama’s tears were shed in truth after the Sandy Hook slaying, then he will take a stand and help move our country forward as a safer place, a place similar to the one that he and so many others used to revere as one of the safest on the planet.
And he should take a stand. Addressing gun sale loopholes and an assault weapons ban is an important step in stopping the degradation of American society and morale that we are witnessing today. Everyone is scared. “You’re not safe anywhere” is uttered by mourners more and more these days. The American people deserve a change in gun culture, and the lives of 20 young schoolchildren are counting on something new to help bring this country out from the hole of mass shootings that we’re in today. It’s high time for the NRA to admit that they’re flat out wrong and support the interests of all Americans for once.
K, you can’t possibly be serious. First, the evidence is pretty flimsy; it’s basically rare to nonexistent that armed citizens stop gun rampages. Almost every analysis indicates that the externalities of arming more civilians creates more violence than it prevents on average. But more to the point: You think the solution to this nightmare is to turned our elementary schools into armed camps?
Ben, I agree with you wholly. Matt posted a great retort to the "guns don't kill people" argument in his latest point. And I'm with you, Alexandros, having everyone conceal or open carry, as "k" suggests, is a terrible excuse for a long-term solution to gun control. Here's the truth: "Concealed handguns are not an effective form of self-defense. A Nov. 2009 peer-reviewed study published in the American Journal of Public Health by Charles Branas, PhD, et al. found that someone carrying a gun for self-defense was 4.5 times more likely to be shot during an assault than an assault victim without a gun. Attackers often surprise victims, making it difficult to use a concealed handgun."
No, its time we stop giving up freedoms in the pursuit of safety. If anything they should get rid of gun free zones so that people can cc or, even better, oc. Had someone in the school been armed they could of stopped it. This attack makes a great point of why we cannot just rely on police to protect us, their response time is far to slow. People need to take their safety into their own hands and the government is forbidding us from doing it with their unconstitutional laws.
Even though suggesting that someone in the elementary school was armed (which is not where my mind would first go) might seem immediately rational and the best way of preventing such a scenario from taking place, it will not lead to a reduction of gun violence or a safer society in the long-term. You should try and look at this more as a "tragedy of the commons"; whilst it might be useful for any one person to have a gun at a certain point in time, if we all have guns across the country that would most definitely result in higher murder rates. In fact, recent statistics show that if you have two or more people in a hostile conflict, the absence of a gun significantly reduces the chances of a shooting.
I think your focus is spot-on, and the combination of the rational discussion about effective gun-control policies, intersecting with the details of this unconscionably tragedy, are the perfect cultural retort to the "guns don't kill people, people kill people argument." As you aptly point out, no one is talking about banning guns. We're talking about preventing school shootings.
And in those terms, the arguments are much more favorable to the silent majority, which I confidently believe resides on the left of this issue (one of many areas where the moral cause exists on the left, in my opinion). The result is a rhetorical framework in which the focus isn't on "how much will this regulation restrict my right," but rather, "Which mild annoyance would you be willing to put up with so we could have 5 less dead children?" Restricting bullet-per-second to a cap, expanding background checks, limiting purchases per month—all proven to reduce death counts in mass shootings.
That should be the focus of the left: challenging NRA lunatics to weigh the scales for us. How many dead children are worth getting your gun one day early? It's not unlike airport security; we moan and groan about standing in long lines and taking our shoes off. But in the end, we know that entertaining the pro-con against watching people jump out of burning buildings is an insult, to everyone.