Just last week, I wrote a blog post about gun control. I was struck by the immediate response to Obama's election from my Republicans acquaintances on Facebook. They weren't concerned about social issues or his approach to the economy. They were most concerned about their guns. "They're going to take my guns!" Their right to hunt was their primary worry. They posted pictures about guns, including the one that I used in that blog post.
I remember reading an article about the 1994 election where a huge freshman class of Republicans entered Congress. Polling showed that these Republicans were elected not because Clinton's approach to the economy or social issues, but because he had proposed a gun control law.
Guns, the real third rail in American politics.
As I've said before, I don't understand guns. I try to understand them, but I don't. I've never shot a pistol or even touched one. I don't know people who have them. Sorry, but I hang out with a bunch of urban, brie-eaters.
However, I do understand that other people really like them. I also understand that there are 300 million guns in this country. Even if it were politically possible to pass gun control legislation, those 300 million guns aren't going anywhere. They would just be sold on the black market.
I can't think of how one could possibly pass meaningful gun control laws, even though I would 100% support a plan.
Apt. 11d 
I shot, as a teenager. My dad and his friends hunt. And I still don’t understand how anyone who shoots for sport needs a repeating weapon or how anyone thinks any gun is important enough to justify twenty tiny children as collateral damage.
I’d like to see owning a repeating weapon made a felony, full stop. I don’t care as much about shotguns or even handguns.
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Many shotguns and nearly every handgun is a repeating weapon.
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I live in a community with a lot of hunters and I learned to shoot at an early age. But gun control isn’t quite the knee-jerk issue here in Canada that is in the U.S. although the closing of the long-gun registry shows there are some similar emotions at play.
The Australian law in the 90s banning assault weapons included a buy-back provision. Apparently that netted 650,000 weapons. I wonder what number that would be in the U.S.?
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I see a depressing amount of now-more-than-ever-ism on Facebook — the gun control supporters want to revive the AWB, the gun rights supporters want more CCL holders in schools, and the @#$^&s want prayer in school. Despite that, I think that targeted gun control is possible, but very, very difficult.
The first political problem we face is that there’s very little socializing between sides due to the urban/rural divide, the pew gap, and all the things that we conflate into the red/blue segregation. One group is flabbergasted that a large number of reasonable people would sincerely think arming teachers would cut down on school shootings. Hence the shadowy “gun lobby” which be behind such outlandish stuff. Members of the other group has never met someone who sincerely feared a college classroom discussion could turn violent if a CCL holder were in the room, so it must be “the government” who wants the absurd gun-free school zones. I’m a little hopeful that Facebook will help here — certainly I’d have never encountered the school prayer loons otherwise.
The second challenge is that historically we’ve painted all gun deaths with the same brush. A friend on facebook responded to Friday with a post about ending the drug war as a way to reduce gun homicides. That won’t have any effect at all on mass shootings, but maybe that’s okay. I think we should tackle each major category separately to look at the motivations, the firearms, the perpetrators and their context. I remember reading that if you divide homicide rates by zip code, the US looks like Sweden with pockets of Somalia scattered through it.
I’d like to see more statements like Doug’s comment on the earlier thread: Yes, you have a right to self defence and to own a gun. Here is the cost of that right. Is it worth it? (I think the Supreme Court’s decision on Heller makes that easier.) I’d also like more direct engagement with/criticism of the extent to which the tyrrany-resisting/home-defending arguments are a schoolboy fantasy — perhaps a fantasy with interesting connections to military-appearing guns like assault weapons.
I don’t know what the results might be. Perhaps we restrict handgun possession to CCL holders? Perhaps the background check ask questions about the mental health of other people in the buyer’s household? But I do think it’s possible.
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the gun rights supporters want more CCL holders in schools
That one is getting a little freaky. The “If you can’t trust them with guns, you can’t trust them with your children” just ignores so many practical problems with securing and using guns around little kids that I assume it will backfire as a political message.
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How is arming teachers supposed to solve anything? Teachers spend their classroom time engaged with children not standing at the ready waiting to shoot anyone who comes through the door. If someone is intent on shooting a teacher, even an armed one, they will almost always be able to get off the first shot.
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I have been trying hard to understand the “right” to guns and was able to understand better (though not agree with) some of the emotions when I compared the way that some people feel about guns with how I feel about the 1st amendment. Mind you, I still think they are wrong — I do not see how a weapon, and one particular one at that (no right to knives, for example, or mace, or pepper spray, or bows and arrows) can be thought of as a right.
But, the analogy helps me understand some of the arguments. The first is that I do believe there can sometimes be a cost to the 1st amendment and it is one I am willing to pay. I also believe that grey lines between, say, fraud, and advertisement, and obscenity and speech that should be permitted make me wary of any restrictions. Finally, I am viscerally attached to the first amendment. I would not feel free without feeling that I can post, for example, a comment here or anywhere without fear of government censorship (of course, Laura, as editor has the right to edit her comments, but the government, doesn’t).
I disagree, of course, but I can understand a little bit better. I do think targeted gun control is possible and that it would be effective at reducing gun deaths in the US. It would require long term changes in laws and attitudes, but I see it as being comparable to seat belts and booster seats and tobacco. Regulations have brought about societal change on those issues, without perfect compliance. And, on some of them, we are seeing practical benefits (gun deaths exceeded traffic deaths in Washington state — an 10 others in the most recent statistics; seat belts, car safety regulations, road improvements have made a difference in people’s likelihood of dying in car accidents). Lung cancer rates are down.
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Also, some arguments are just dead wrong, empirically. Teachers armed in classrooms would not be able to effectively defend their students. It’s conceivable that the threat that teachers armed in classrooms might dissuade some from attacking the classroom, but rather unlikely, given that these attacks frequently are suicides.
The idea that even well trained operatives would be able to operate weapons effectively in a crowded classroom with non-compliant children to save the children is beyond ludicrous. People who believe that should participate in simulations.
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Thanks for the thought experiment, bj. I work on the same thing in the other direction, and find that I’m ready to ban all sorts of things I do not participate in and only suffer from the negative consequences of.
To turn your ‘dead wrong’ argument around, do you think that banning CCL holders from possessing firearms on campus would deter school shootings?
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“To turn your ‘dead wrong’ argument around, do you think that banning CCL holders from possessing firearms on campus would deter school shootings?”
I think it would reduce accidental shootings and suicides. School shootings can’t be the sole judge of the effectiveness of the policy — they are too rare. I think fewer guns in the environment will reduce in fewer gun deaths, and that limiting the places where they can be carried reduces the accessibility of guns. And, since I don’t think the absence of casual gun carriers in schools, bars, and churches would decrease the likelihood of deaths in any of those places (or even other bad acts, like robberies), I see the ban as being useful. I also think the absence of guns has a good chance of decreasing the number of casual deaths in those places (for example, the 16 year old girl whose gun went off in her handbag in a Starbucks in the PNW — nobody was killed in that one, but they could have been).
Of course, there will be non-compliance. But, we’re talking about a change in culture that respects my desire to be in gun-free places. For example, if there’s a gun-free Starbucks and one where gun are allowed, I’d chose the gun-free Starbucks. I wouldn’t feel less safe — I’d feel more safe, even while recognizing that someone might ignore the rule, since I have no respect whatsoever for the use of a casual gun carrier to protect *me* in that circumstance.
In your comment, you said that the two populations don’t mix — that’s actually, I think, not true in the west (where the gun deaths exceed car deaths)
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do you think that banning CCL holders from possessing firearms on campus would deter school shootings?
i do, although it would only be a small amount of deterrence. basically it would do two things that we don’t have without a CCL holders ban: (1) a reduction in the number of “heat of the moment” shootings on campus. high-profile massacres aside, a lot of shootings are by people who don’t set out to commit murder. but then they encounter something that pisses them off and rather than storming out or punching a wall, they have a gun handy and so they shoot before red leaves their face, and (2) it would be grounds to arrest a shooter if caught with a weapon on campus. if CCL apply to campuses and cops happen to spot a heavily armed person walking around, they can’t do anything about it. i personally think the ability to stop someone under those circumstances would at least decrease the likelihood of gun violence a little bit.
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Alan Jacobs summed up my thoughts on the arming teachers idea:
But what troubles me most about this suggestion — and the general More Guns approach to social ills — is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian “war of every man against every man” in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now — but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly.
Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can!
It’s not just that arming teachers would result in more deaths, although I do believe that. For me, what’s almost as bad is what such a society would feel like. It’s just aesthetically repulsive to imagine teachers walking around armed to the hilt because a insane student may walk in and shoot people. Who wants to live like that?
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“Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! ”
This is one of the biggest problems with all of the pro-gun arguments, the idea that we can identify the person who will use the gun unwisely, or with evil intent from the person who won’t, and further more, that the person won’t be the same person, at different times. We have to balance that against all those feelings of desire for guns. Gun enthusiasts might think of their desire like mine for the 1st amendment, on occasion, but maybe they need to think about like their enthusiasm for tobacco.
The NY times article indicates that Newtown was a city awash in guns, guns for fun and that there was recently discussion and controversy over their use was recently a public discussion:
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I’ve been hunting and shooting recreationally for over 20 years. We were taught gun safety and responsible behavior with guns by our father and in the Boy Scouts. I was actually in the duck blind with some friends on Saturday morning. We were all holding guns and had enough ammo with us for a small platoon. We spent most of the morning talking about James Bond movies.
My point is that I know a lot of guys who LOVE guns but they are just a tool. There’s plenty of gun control on the books already. Permit requirements for fully-automatic guns, background checks, concealed-carry laws, all sorts of hunting-related restrictions designed for safety. I don’t think calling for new laws is the answer. Tragedies like these defy rational thought.
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“the gun rights supporters want more CCL holders in schools”
Nancy Lanza was a survivalist and a ‘prepper’, so probably had a CCL. Didn’t seem to help much. The CCL usually doesn’t – I can’t find a single case of a CCL stopping a crime, and the statistics show CCL has no measurable effect on violent crime. The gunman in the Aurora shooting was wearing body armour, so nothing short of a hunting rifle could have stopped him. Body armour is cheap and readily available, so future shooters can be expected to protect themselves. You can’t conceal a hunting rifle..
More guns mean more suicides, more homicides, and more unintentional deaths and injuries. Many households in S. Africa had guns for ‘safety’. After the shooting stopped, it usually turned out that either the head of household had gone ‘bossies’ (bush-war-crazy, roughly PTSD) and slaughtered his family with said gun: or the bad guys had broken in to steal the guns, and slaughtered similarly. It didn’t seem to be helpful.
As a conscript Army officer I was trained in all kinds of weapons, from handguns through Uzis and AK-47s (needed to know how to use the enemy’s weapons as well as our own), up to LMGs. This taught me fear.. I own several shotguns and hunting rifles, but they are locked in a safe. The ammunition is locked in a separate safe with a combination that is not written down anywhere.
bj, “if there’s a gun-free Starbucks and one where gun are allowed, I’d chose the gun-free Starbucks. ”
So do the CU students, not being idiots..
“Since the University of Colorado’s Boulder and Colorado Springs campuses began segregating dorms for students with valid concealed-carry permits this year, not a single student has asked to live where guns are allowed.”
There’s a small but extremely noisy set of gun nuts who have successfully blocked gun control. Most of the hunters I know are quite happy to accept gun control as the price of civil society. Perhaps we need a national referendum..
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“the gun rights supporters want more CCL holders in schools”
Nancy Lanza was a survivalist and a ‘prepper’, so probably had a CCL. Didn’t seem to help much. The CCL usually doesn’t – I can’t find a single case of a CCL stopping a crime, and the statistics show CCL has no measurable effect on violent crime. The gunman in the Aurora shooting was wearing body armour, so nothing short of a hunting rifle could have stopped him. Body armour is cheap and readily available, so future shooters can be expected to protect themselves. You can’t conceal a hunting rifle..
More guns mean more suicides, more homicides, and more unintentional deaths and injuries. Many households in S. Africa had guns for ‘safety’. After the shooting stopped, it usually turned out that either the head of household had gone ‘bossies’ (bush-war-crazy, roughly PTSD) and slaughtered his family with said gun: or the bad guys had broken in to steal the guns, and slaughtered similarly. It didn’t seem to be helpful.
As a conscript Army officer I was trained in all kinds of weapons, from handguns through Uzis and AK-47s (needed to know how to use the enemy’s weapons as well as our own), up to LMGs. This taught me fear.. I own several shotguns and hunting rifles, but they are locked in a safe. The ammunition is locked in a separate safe with a combination that is not written down anywhere.
bj, “if there’s a gun-free Starbucks and one where gun are allowed, I’d chose the gun-free Starbucks. ”
So do the CU students, not being idiots..
“Since the University of Colorado’s Boulder and Colorado Springs campuses began segregating dorms for students with valid concealed-carry permits this year, not a single student has asked to live where guns are allowed.”
There’s a small but extremely noisy set of gun nuts who have successfully blocked gun control. Most of the hunters I know are quite happy to accept gun control as the price of civil society. Perhaps we need a national referendum..
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I think it is pretty clear that it won’t be long before private guns sales will be banned or required to go through a background check somehow. It’s nearly impossible to argue “it’s not guns, it’s mental illness” while having no real check on keeping anybody from buying a gun.
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The NY Times article on Newtown gun ranges actually explains what people do with their repeat firing weapons. They fire at targets to make loud noises and hear and watch things blow up. The article describes a commercially available target that explodes in some way when successfully shot at. I remember hearing about this kind of game years ago, probably during a public discussion of the old assault weapons ban, in which a gun enthusiast group said they liked to go out in the desert with an old car and shoot assault rifles at it.
The activity struck me as strange at the time, but having spent time watching Mythbusters, I can see the attraction. I don’t really believe that shooting at targets for fun would make someone more likely to kill children. So, the question is, how to make that activity more safe, if it is permitted. One of the issues seemed to be the availability of official licensed gun ranges. I’d be willing to trade more gun ranges for more licensing requirements and greater restrictions on gun use in other places, including for example, bans on using repeat fire weapons in other places (including large private properties near other residences), control over ammunition (that they be checked out at the gun range), storage of the repeat fire weapons at the gun ranges, safely, rather than at home.
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I remain confused about what the status of gun laws actually are — the two previous posts actually seem contradictory to me (that there are plenty of gun control laws on the books v anybody can buy a gun).
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There are restrictions about who can buy guns, but private intra-state sales of guns are an easy, legal way around the restriction. And full-auto weapons are indeed very hard to get, but the weapon used in CT and the weapons that the assault weapons bans cover are semi-auto.
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That is, private sales are a legal way for the seller to do the transaction without a background check, not that they make it legal for somebody to own a gun if they have a disqualification.
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We have a 2nd Amendment that says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Gun control advocates would need to repeal the 2nd Amendment to make any headway. We all know that’s a loser of a political issue. In fact, all infringements of the right to keep and bear arms are unpopular.
Personally I think the 1st Amendment is also contributing to these shootings. Massive media coverage of the shooter’s name and photo makes people want to commit suicide in a dramatic way, and aim for a higher body count than the last infamous mass murderer. Not sure what you can do there, except petition news organizations not to publicize the names and photos of the shooters.
I think the fastest and most realistic approach to preventing more Sandy Hooks would be to put severe limits on ammunition. No high capacity magazines. No large-scale ammo purchases. No online ammo sales. Don’t make bullets like Lanza used available to civilians (hollow-tipped bullets designed to inflict maximum tissue damage.) No constitutional issues there.
Also, given the existence of 300 million guns in the U.S., I think it makes sense to eliminate “gun-free” zones. With one exception — the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011 — every public shooting since 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns. Monsters like Lanza target “gun-free zones” like schools on purpose. So let’s get rid of them.
Many celebrities and businessman and politicians, even those calling for gun control, have armed security. Their lives are not more precious than those of school children. Israeli schools are fenced, with an armed security guard at the only entrance. Teachers in some districts in Texas and PA are armed.
Allow trained school staff with concealed carry permits to carry in schools, and you’ll deter violence. I think more policemen are a good idea, too. My high school got a full-time police officer after Columbine, and there is at least one police car at all times parked right in front of our local high school here. Did Sandy Hook’s high school have a police presence, and that’s why Lanza targeted the small elementary school?
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“It would require long term changes in laws and attitudes, but I see it as being comparable to seat belts and booster seats and tobacco.”
Haven’t we discussed at some point that the booster seat laws do not actually save lives?
As to Laura’s question, Megan McArdle is on the job.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/17/there-s-little-we-can-do-to-prevent-another-massacre.html
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MM makes an interesting point here:
“Short of a gun ban, there is very, very little that would stop spree killers, who are hard to deter precisely because they aren’t much worried about the future; as far as I can tell, most of these things end when the killer docilely sits down and waits to be arrested, or turns the gun on himself.”
That is worth remembering, that mass killers are much more determined and committed than usual murderers.
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AmyP, Freakonomics covered some (flawed, IMO) research claiming booster seats don’t save lives. But they were talking specifically about forward-facing, belt-positioning and probably backless boosters used for bigger kids, not the kind of carseat with a 5-point harness and LATCH and tethers that most newborns through preschoolers are in today. The research on those is undeniable. They save lives, especially when used in a rear-facing position.
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every public shooting since 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.
That statistic is absurd, even if true. (I couldn’t find a cite that wasn’t an editorial). First, public murders and murders where three or more people have been killed at once are a very small portion of the murders. Most murders are singular and, for obvious reasons, as private as the murderer can arrange. Those who go public want to make statement and as such pick places where crowds have gathered. Those areas are set as gun free for the same reason as the spree killers picked them, because there are crowds.
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the reason why gun access restriction (and yes, if ammunition restrictions would be more politically palatable, those would be fine,too), is that a fair number of spree killings are likely to be impulvie. It’s quite possible that the impulse would pass, or intervention would occur. The wilingness to die does not exactly mean the person is also persistent in the face of frustration and resistance.
Ammunition restrictions wouldn’t be effective in the biggest cause of gun deaths, though, suicides. Suicides are also impuslive and very solid evidence suggests that there is a strong causal correlation between casual access to guns and successful suicide (5% of suicide attempts, but 50% of suicide deaths).
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“Suicides are also impuslive and very solid evidence suggests that there is a strong causal correlation between casual access to guns and successful suicide (5% of suicide attempts, but 50% of suicide deaths).”
Aren’t a lot of suicide attempts just theater? It may be that when people really want to get the job done, they use a gun, but if it’s a “cry for help,” they’ll use something less effective.
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MM makes an interesting point here:
And then she goes on to make a suggestion that sounds a lot like she studied the tactics of Soviet penal battalions and wants to teach them in schools.
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“And then she goes on to make a suggestion that sounds a lot like she studied the tactics of Soviet penal battalions and wants to teach them in schools.”
Yep. There are also apparently some technical bloopers in her piece (I wouldn’t know), but that’s inevitable when a non-gun person writes on guns.
I saw somebody on a blog pointing this MM quote out as a technical mistake:
“The handguns were also semi-automatic, as most handguns are, because revolvers have much stronger recoil.”
I have no idea what the problem is with that statement, but give MM credit–it’s really hard to write accurately about guns when that’s not your thing.
She has a very good point about gun control advocates being mistaken in thinking that hunting rifles are somehow less scary than other firearms. I hadn’t thought of that before, but it certainly makes sense that the amount of power needed to bring down a 1000 pound elk humanely is far greater than the amount needed to kill or seriously harm a human.
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The Cafe Racer incident in Seattle (http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/05/30/another-shooting-police-warn-seattleites-to-stay-out-of-active-scene-on-roosevelt-way), with 4 dead at the cafe, occurred at a location that has no ban against guns.
Ian Stawicki, the killer, with a history of mental problems and violence, wasn’t barred from acquiring a concealed weapon license under Washington’s “shall issue” laws.
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“Aren’t a lot of suicide attempts just theater? It may be that when people really want to get the job done, they use a gun, but if it’s a “cry for help,” they’ll use something less effective. ”
The studies consistently argue against that argument, which effectively, is that only those who really want to kill themselves use the more effective means of suicide (guns & leaping from tall structures like bridges). The studies can be done before/after intervention with bridges — because you can measure suicide rates before and after erecting structures that make it harder to jump from the bridge. It is a common myth completely unsupported by data that people who use guns to kill themselves will find a way to kill themselves no matter what.
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Given that the U.S. suicide rate isn’t very high by international standards and our homicide rate is, I don’t think you can say it is completely unsupported that suicide is less susceptible to interventions which deny weapons than homicide.
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“Given that the U.S. suicide rate isn’t very high by international standards and our homicide rate is, I don’t think you can say it is completely unsupported that suicide is less susceptible to interventions which deny weapons than homicide.”
That is interesting.
I’d read somewhere that there is a huge difference between attempted and successful suicides (gender, method, etc.). So few people manage to commit suicide with drug overdoses that it is natural to wonder how hard they’re trying. There’s a Wikipedia piece on the characteristics of failed suicide attempts (bj probably wouldn’t like the sourcing, though).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_suicide_attempt
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For you, Doug.
Ezra Klein writes, “I’ll tell you what scares me: I don’t think we know how to prevent a tragedy like the Newtown massacre. The more information that emerges on the killings, the less effective any of the potential policy remedies appear to be.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/18/a-better-target-for-gun-control/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein
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