I have been letting my thoughts crystalize. Profound sadness overtakes any other reaction when children die senselessly. That profound sadness is only compounded by a mass killing in Buffalo earlier this month and another at a Brooklyn subway station last month. We could probably recount each violent episode and others, almost month by month, going back years.
I wish others would also give the thoughts and feelings time to coalesce. Instead, some percentage of the country has an unhelpful and unhealthy reflex to bow up and prepare for rhetorical battle.
One set of people are ready and quick to remind everyone that humans perpetrate violence, not guns, and that the only realistic preventative measure to violence is to arm and prepare more people to respond.
Another set of people are as ready and quick to inform you that your sympathies, thoughts, and prayers are meaningless, that unless you agree with them about policy, you’re a heartless monster, and that the only preventative measure is to, “do something.”
I mostly ignore people who have policy ideas within hours of terrible savagery. Now that I have had some time, I did decide to stare as honestly and as practically as I can at this question: can these acts of violence be prevented, and if so, how? What follows is my stream of consciousness on that question.
It’s too late for gun bans.
Jettison for a moment the immorality and unconstitutionality of banning guns or most guns outright. Just ask: would it prevent even most of the violence we’re seeing today? I don’t think it would.
In the US, we have more guns in circulation than we have people. We have 330 million Americans. No one knows the exact number, but the number of guns in circulation is likely just over 400 million. You could ban the manufacture and purchasing of guns tomorrow, and it would have no impact.
The illegal drug trade that runs almost unchecked in the country would just extend to guns.
Gun confiscation is unrealistic.
Again, forget the morality and the 2nd Amendment for the moment. Is it realistic as a mature policy proposal that the federal government would confiscate, by force, those guns or at least a lot of them? Millions of guns are unregistered. Maybe thousands of Americans would resist by responding with deadly force.
That practical objection comes before absorbing the reality that it is also illegal.
But what about banning “assault weapons”?
I understand the lay person’s instinct toward this, but this is also no solution.
Roughly 2% of deaths where a gun was the weapon used by the killer are deaths where the gun was a rifle.
That goes before understanding how easy it is to turn many handguns into functional rifles. Further, I’m not being pedantic when I wonder: what is an “assault weapon?”. I heard one pundit use the definition, “any gun where one round is fired for each time the trigger is suppressed.” That describes very literally almost every pistol in the country.
Moreover, that same FBI chart I have linked above demonstrates that a majority of deaths caused by a person using a gun come from handguns/pistols. In the end, an “assault weapons” ban — whatever that means — might make its proponents feel good about themselves, but would result in only a marginal change in death, if any at all.
How about expanding background checks?
Okay, I guess, but can someone explain what violent acts we expect this to prevent? Most of the mass killers we could name over the last 15 years either did pass background checks or would have if they had submitted to one. Nothing in most of their records would have precluded them from purchasing a gun.
Moreover, this assumes that people with criminal intent would, for no logical reason, submit themselves to a background check instead of using a criminal method of getting a gun.
I know this is discouraging, but when you dig into those FBI statistics, you will find most gun violence with pistols is perpetrated by people who already circumvented the background check system and bought the gun illegally. These are often previous criminal offenders disqualified from gun ownership but don’t care.
What about making background checks universal?
I’ll admit my skepticism on this because many guns change hands between family members, friends, or locals making free exchanges. This also does not address the reality of hundreds of thousands of guns already in the possession of people who might not have passed a background check.
People already skirt the law in a myriad of ways. I can’t find a good reason to think bypassing a background check while selling a gun would be any different for most people. Again, I’m not calling this a bad idea. I am just dubious as to its effectiveness.
I’m not saying their intentions are bad.
I am confident most of the anti-gun folks are honest, scared, and just want to see the bloodshed lessened. Not all of these people are power hungry authoritarians. I recognize the good intentions.
I just review the ideas and wonder how practical or helpful any of those ideas are. So what might help?
I think I’m becoming in favor of a very precise, careful version of “Red Flag Laws.”
Some killers of late had been obvious risks to public safety. I’m leaning toward needing a way for a citizen to report potential risk to a law enforcement body and then let due process run its course. I have not landed on specifics, but let’s say we have three independent mental health professionals all testify that someone has become a danger to themselves or others, a judge could order any guns already in possession to be removed from the home and apply that information to a background check.
I would want automatic sunsets for those orders. Maybe after a month, and each month after that, the case would need to be heard again so that liberty may be restored to the troubled person.
Whatever process would be created, it needs to value individual liberty and the right to defend one’s self and property while also allowing due process to deprive someone of liberty and property for a short time of determined danger.
Why wouldn’t we have more security?
I’m against almost all government spending and largesse. However, if we are going to require defenseless children, teens, teachers, and administrators to meet in a building daily with no permission to defend themselves, then we have to provide robust security. I understand we’re offering these Resource Officers, but why not more?
Whatever it costs to get hardened, armed security to our schools, let’s pay it.
Even I am a bit scrambled on this.
Even as I work through this, I am realizing that the prevention of mass shootings is an entirely different set of policies than trying to prevent violence committed with guns more broadly. Red Flag laws and hardened schools or institutions try to prevent mass shootings — a relatively small number of deaths caused by someone using a gun.
If we’re going to affect change against violence committed with guns more broadly, that will require fundamental changes in law and in culture.
Here are a few more ideas.
Enforce existing gun laws. We already have a ton of gun laws. Let’s enforce them and make the punishments for breaking those laws severe.
Reintroduce some form of mental health committals. Our “insane asylum” system decades ago was inhumane. However, the idea isn’t outright bad. Many of our violent offenders do not need to be in prisons, but through due process, need to be committed to a mental health facility.
Invest in more mental health resources. The presiding worldview of the past 50 years has been secularism. Secularism has led our people to its logical terminus: hedonism that turns into existential nihilism. It’s no wonder we’re largely mentally ill.
Value Virtue — Correlations does not prove causation. It is nevertheless worth recognizing the correlation between the disintegration of families and the rise of depression, anxiety and other emotional disorders. Broken families create broken people. Broken people are most likely to do violence.
