I’ve written at least a dozen essays on the politics behind guns. And with a new cluster of mass shootings making gun control a politically salient issue like it hasn’t really been since before the pandemic, it’s worth a post.
If we have a goal of less gun violence in America, there’s no easy solution if we think about the problem holistically. That includes politics, logistics and the simple reality of the existence of guns. The obvious things are only obvious if you exclude the hard parts. So we need some honest thoughts on the issue if we want to make a dent. Here are mine. Do with them what you will.
-The single largest contributor to gun violence is the prevalence of guns in America. This is not a particularly deep insight. But we forget it immediately when we start talking about solutions. It’s too hard to deny access to guns for anyone. And that’s because there’s so many more here than anywhere else. There’s not an exact linear relationship to the number of guns and the amount of violence. There are groups with lots of guns that pose little danger. But it’s really hard to think that the estimated 390 million guns in America isn’t why we have more gun violence. And it’s hard to think that any solution doesn’t include thinning that out. Keeping gun prevalence constant and reducing gun violence beyond just the margins probably isn’t possible without deep innovations in other domains like physical security or policing.
-Guns are really dangerous. This is another no brainer that we quickly cast aside when we get political. We can actually make them at least a little less dangerous with some rules that don’t impact ownership.
I traveled around the world with an arsenal that could take out a small city in the right hands. We stored them in an armory (or a mobile armory), cleaned them, counted them and did a serialized inventory on every part of them every time we moved. If I didn’t know where one was, I had to report it immediately. And if I didn’t find the lost weapon there’s a very good chance I would have been fired. There’s a large gap between the rules and regulations that dictate how professionals treat weapons and the standard that the average American gun owner has to follow. This increases the “guns lying around” aspect of the issue. And that’s not a small part of the problem.
-We could barely count votes last year without trying to burn down the Capitol. We’re not taking people’s guns in America with political action right now. And we’re not taking them by force without violence. And so if we’re trying to stop violence, using violence is not a great sell for most Americans. I’m not sure 2021, after we’re all quite close to zombie apocalypse mentality from the last year is the best time to start talking about taking people’s guns. This is my least favorite thought right now. Because it means we’re in rough shape to do hard things as a people. But that’s where the ball lies. So that’s the one we have to play.
-Saying things like “we shouldn’t play politics with guns” misses an important point. The United States decided, at the beginning, to be an armed population. Deciding that we won’t be an armed population is a political decision. And unfortunately for gun control advocates, your median American voters isn’t in favor of disarming Americans. And since the status quo is guns everywhere, anything else is some form of disarming.
-African American teenagers are 14 times1 (one thousand four hundred percent!) more likely to die by gun violence than white children. The overwhelming majority of gun violence happens in high crime, mostly inner city areas. The high profile mass shootings (4 or more deaths not including the shooter) account for 1% of the U.S. gun deaths. Flaming outrage in the wake of mass shootings while staying silent on the inner city gun violence is a way of caring because you can see yourself as a victim of the former while not caring because you’ll never see yourself as a victim of the latter.
-I grew up on the outskirt suburbs of a high crime rate urban area. The only people I knew that even talked about guns came from the inner city or my cousins that lived out in the rural areas. The American law enforcement apparatus is set up to protect the highly populated suburbs or gentrified metropolitan areas; the places our media and politics cater to. It does not police rural areas well. It does not police our inner cities well. And so it’s not strange that’s where we find the guns. Good luck disarming either groups.
-The person anyone is most likely to kill with a gun is themselves.2 60% of all gun deaths are suicides. But..three out of four homicides happen with a gun. Of the 40 thousand Americans who die by gun each year, many would be alive if there were not gun involved. Maybe most. Refuting this is intellectually dishonest. It’s really hard to kill another human without a gun.
Related: We lost that many Americans in our worst 2 weeks of the Covid pandemic.
-I’ve fired just about every sort of gun on the planet and been trained to use them by the best gun fighters in the world. It’s pretty clear to me or anyone that uses guns for a living that one can kill many many many people with far less than an AR-15. In fact, we spend most of our time in places where the concealed nature of a small hand gun is inherently more dangerous than any sort of rifle. The inner city killers aren’t ARs. They’re Glocks or other 9mm semi-automatic handguns. All this is to say, focusing on the sort of gun is a bit like keeping people from only falling off the tallest buildings.
-Physical security in public places seems like one of the places to invest. Saying things like “we shouldn’t have to do this” is a strange reason for not doing something.
-The Second Amendment was originally part of the sales package for the Federalists to get the Constitution across the finish line. A union kept states from European type wars. No standing armies would be required. An armed population was sufficient for defense against “tyranny”. None of those realities exist anymore. But what does exist is a culture of being armed that is hundreds of years old. It’s not going to be easy to change. It might be impossible. We should be thinking of solutions that work if we’re never going to experience mass disarmament of Americans.
So what do we do?
Honestly, I don’t know. It’s a hard problem. If you’re gut instinct is to yell back at me that it’s not…than you’re ignoring the hard parts of the discussion.
Within the realms of things we have the political will to do:
Things that create friction to gun acquisition help. Things that make it harder to bring guns into crowded areas help. More effective law enforcement in the inner cities will help. And we could certainly benefit from the sorts of things that lower the sorts of suffering and address mental health issues that lead to suicide.
Things like red flag laws don’t make the holes in the net small enough to keep much from happening. They feel like “we have to do something” ism.
We can probably keep schools, concerts and sporting events safe. Probably malls. The inner cities are a problems 400 years in the making. But it doesn’t seem like we’re anywhere near the outer limits of law enforcement innovation there. We should be. Caring about gun violence means caring a lot about the effectiveness of inner city policing…beyond the incidents of excessive use of force.
There’s no silver bullet though.
https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-gun-violence-prevention-and-policy/research/community-gun-violence/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/