At least Vox is honest
Emboldened by the Student March for Democrat Talking Points, Vox writer Dylan Matthews put fingers to keyboard to publish this.
What no politician wants to admit about gun control
Pray tell, Dylan, what is it?
Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.
I thought you weren’t coming for our guns. That when the NRA says that, it’s paranoia. Well, thanks for confirming what we knew to be true.
Also what European levels are we talking about?
I guess you are not counting the 30 Million civilian casualties of WWII? Seems that these anti-gun people always like to overlook the great wars of Europe. Just like Liberals love to talk about “terrorism since 9/11.”
Fine, so can we talk about violence like the Telford and Rotherham child sex grooming ring?
How about the spike in rape in Sweden?
Or Sweden’s problem with people throwing hand grenades around?
Or maybe the knife and vehicle attacks all over Europe?
The 58 people killed by Stephen Paddock was still 29 fewer people killed in Nice with a rental truck.
I guess that isn’t gun violence so we’ll just ignore that too.
Other countries have done exactly that. Australia, for example, enacted a mandatory gun buyback that achieved that goal, and saw firearm suicides fall as a result. But the reforms those countries enacted are far more dramatic than anything US politicians are calling for — and even they wouldn’t get us to where many other developed countries are.
I agree, a mandatory buyback would never work.
So could it happen in the US? The legal scholars I talked to suggested that an Australia-style program would probably pass muster. If we went further than Australia and also banned handguns, that might cause problems; the Supreme Court struck down Washington, DC’s handgun ban in 2008. But Australia’s actual system is probably constitutional.
I’m not a lawyer, but I doubt that.
“Courts have consistently upheld bans on military-style semiautomatic rifles because other firearms are equally useful for self-defense,” Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, says. “Gun control isn’t stalled because of the Second Amendment. It’s stalled because elected officials won’t pass effective new laws to reduce gun violence.”
Effective like mandatory buybacks? That’s what you’re getting at, a mass confiscation of guns in America. Right?
Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas Austin and author of the landmark article “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,” concurs: “If such an extraordinary law actually got through Congress (meaning with necessary Republican support), then I find it impossible to imagine that there would be five votes on the Court to say no,” he says. “But the real problem, of course, is that there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of Congress actually passing any meaningful legislation re guns, let alone this kind of quite radical legislation.”
Those damn Republicans always putting civil liberties and the Constitution ahead of the lives of kids.
And there’s the rub. Former President Obama occasionally cited Australia in discussions about gun control, but proposals he and congressional Democrats put forward stopped far, far short of what Australia’s done. Obama’s plan to tackle gun violence focused on universal background checks for gun sales, banning assault weapons again, and increasing criminal penalties for illicit gun traffickers. That’s nowhere near as dramatic as taking 20 percent of America’s guns off the street.
You think you can just take 20% of America’s guns off the street. That is somewhere between 60 million and 100 million guns.
Do you realize that is just the number of guns sold in the last three to five years?
For example, researchers have found that:
After Connecticut passed a law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, gun homicides fell by 40 percent and suicides fell by 15.4 percent.
When Missouri repealed a similar law, gun homicides increased by 23 percent and suicides increased by 16.1 percent.
I don’t need a permit to go to Synagogue, operate a blog, or vote. I don’t need a permit to own a gun. I should not have to ask permission to exercise a fundamental right.
Both firearm homicides and overall homicides are lower in states that check for restraining orders (13 percent fewer firearm homicides) and fugitive status (21 percent fewer) before selling guns, and firearm/overall suicides are lower in states that check for fugitive status (5 percent fewer), misdemeanors (5 percent fewer), and mental illness (4 percent fewer).
Fix NICS.
The national assault weapons ban did not decrease gun deaths in the US, though if it had existed longer it might have made certain shootings less lethal. The end of the assault weapon ban did meaningfully increase homicides in Mexico.
Yep, the AWB was useless. Also, I’m going to accept an AWB because Mexico is a failed, corrupt, narco state currently engaged in a apolitical civil war.
A Maryland law banning cheap, crummy handguns might have reduced gun homicides, but this effect was offset in part by customers rushing to purchase the guns before the ban took effect.
Or that “Saturday night specials” were not the guns used by criminals. Criminals generally bought guns on the black market that were stolen. The “cheap, crummy” guns they used were because they robbed their neighbors in poor communities.
“I suspect it would take a while (decades) for the US to get down to gun violence levels of other developed countries because a) we have so many guns which are durable, and b) we have a gun culture — we tend to use guns more often in more situations than citizens of other developed countries.”
It might be easier if there are positive feedback loops, he says — “if the rival gang doesn’t have guns, our gang has less need of guns” — but it’ll be an uphill battle.
The Harvard Prof that said that is fucking stupid. In the real world it goes like this, “if the rival gang doesn’t have guns, our gang wipes them out with our guns.”
But we have accumulated some general knowledge all the same. Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths. The US doesn’t just have a gun violence problem because of its lax gun regulation. It has a problem because it has a culture that encourages large-scale gun possession, and other countries do not. That, combined with Australia’s experience, makes large-scale confiscation look like easily the most promising approach for bringing US gun homicides down to European rates.
Maybe the problem is America is a nation of 325 Million people that are ethically, culturally, religiously, and economically diverse, and that causes friction and problems. Comparing us to a mostly homogeneous nation is pointless. Especially since what we see in Europe is that the majority of violence comes from where diverse groups rub up against each other.
Large-scale confiscation is not going to happen. That’s no reason to stop advocating it. (I also want to repeal all immigration laws and give everyone a monthly check from the government with no strings attached, and will argue for those ideas even though they’re not politically viable.) But it does mean that we should be realistic about what gun control with an actual shot of passage can achieve. It can make us safer. It cannot make us Europe.
So you are an open boarders, anti civilian gun ownership, Socialist. So every idea you have is bad. I wonder what it is like to get up in the morning and ask yourself “what would Stalin do?” as a guide to live a virtuous life.
Unless something dramatic changes, gun violence will remain a distinctly American problem for the rest of our lives — background checks or no.
It’s far from being a distinctly American problem. You should visit Africa or Anywhere south of the Rio Grande for a while. We’re pretty damn peaceful for just how many guns and people we have. Sure, we’ll never be like Europe, then again, there are also no museums that were once gas chambers and crematoriums in the US so that’s a plus.
It’s clear that it’s not really about wanting to reduce gun deaths with this guy, it’s about using gun deaths as a justification to impose his Utopia.
That is the reason I own guns. Because Utopians like this asshole eventually find out that the solution to their problems is not to get rid of 20% of guns but to get rid of 20% of the people, with guns.
Try that in America and we will definitely achieve “European levels of gun violence” with the pushback.
