The progressive position on gun control should be that we should ban all guns now. Can we negotiate on guns for cops, hunters & people in extremely remote areas that cops can’t quickly reach? Sure! Let the NRA ask for those & we can discuss!
Right now, Democrats are proposing limited or complex gun rules. There are three main problems with that strategy:
- Limited rules like assault weapons bans and universal background checks are fine, but send the message that mass murders can only be marginally limited, not eradicated. They’re depressing margin-tinkers, not world-improvers. Who’s going to get fired up to knock on doors for raising the gun age to 21? (The latest mass murder suspect in California apparently had no criminal record and was 28.)
- Complex gun regulations also don’t solve the problem and don’t fire up the Dem base, but DO fire up gun supporters who think only their guns will be regulated while the Minority Criminals get their Obama Guns. Just ban guns! (The parallel is Obamacare – hard to figure out how it benefited you, easy to demagogue as stealing from Hardworking Taxpayers to benefit The Poors. Just do a universal benefit like Medicare For All!)
- The NRA doesn’t compromise. Your incremental reform that won’t save lives? They’ll fight it and demonize you as if you’re trying to ban all guns. Why not actually ban guns and save lives?
Think banning assault weapons alone will solve the problem? The vast majority of homicides are committed with handguns. Homicides using guns are up 31 percent in just the last few years. Guns are also used in more than half of suicides.
The political argument? Gun violence is the #3 most important issue for young voters, according to Pew Research. A Gallup poll shows 61% of Americans want stricter gun safety laws. Banning guns is favored by 28 percent of Americans – and that’s with literally no one in public life making the case for it!
Democrats need stronger answers. I don’t expect Democratic elected officials to start making the case for banning guns tomorrow, but they need more political cover for tougher gun safety laws, and that starts with more of us speaking loudly & clearly.
If you go too far you really do risk running afoul of the 2nd amendment, unless you are proposing repeal thereof which wasn’t clear from the diary.
I think he’s just saying move the Overton Window on guns. Everyone knows Trump can’t end birthright citizenship, but the fact that we even debated it last week makes actual comprehensive reform that much harder and his demands for a giant wall more reasonable in comparison.
The downside to this strategy is the Democrats just won 26 seats in relatively center to center right districts and this kind of bold proposal will alienate the very suburban moderates the party just rode to a majority. I do agree that the right wing fanatics on this issue already think we want to take their guns away, so worrying about them is a waste of time.
It’s the white female Romney/Clinton voter who just voted for Mary McBath’s bold and very personal pitch for background checks we cannot afford to alienate. Maybe after Trump is out of the White House.
On the other hand, this is exactly the reason I voted for Ayanna. To take bold risks and move the window. She and AOC have nothing to lose and everything to gain by pushing the conversation on guns to the left. It will make the more moderate proposals sound moderate again.
So far as I’m concerned, the 2008 decision in District of Columbia vs Heller is dead wrong, undid centuries of precedent, and will ultimately be reversed.
The “originalism” that produced this blunder is as wrong-headed in law as literalist fundamentalism is in theology (and springs from the same idolatry of the written word of the distant past). For all of their strengths, the founders earnestly believed that only wealthy white men should be allowed to vote, and only for their representatives to congress. I remind us that the framers of the constitution provided that the President, Vice President, and Senators were elected by Congress rather than popular vote. The “Originalist” view of suffrage is that it extends ONLY to white male property owners.
The 2008 Heller decision is exhibit A in the argument that originalism is the same literalist fundamentalist fallacy that leads extremist Protestants to superstitious advocacy of “Young Earth” creationism, anti-evolution, and all the misogyny and racism that so permeates that cult. It is a disaster in theology and a disaster in law.
It is not necessary to repeal the 2nd amendment. It is instead necessary to reverse the catastrophic Heller decision — and discard the “originalism” that produced it.
Um, I didn’t comment on Heller and do believe that went too far in the other direction.
Yes, but we didn’t have a problem with the second amendment or gun control until Heller.
That’s my point — we don’t need to repeal the second amendment, we only need to reverse Heller.
America figured out how to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21 and hold liquor providers legally responsible when they supplied liquor to drunkards who went to kill and injure innocents — we did not have to reinstate prohibition to accomplish that.
American can join the rest of the civilized world in controlling our exploding epidemic of gun violence. Background checks are a waste of time that won’t solve the problem.
NOTHING will help so long as we continue to manufacture more than TEN MILLION guns a year.. Small-arms ammunition is a similarly huge industry.
Guns have a lifetime of decades. It is delusional lunacy for anyone to believe that we can flood our society with tens of millions of guns (together with ammunition for them) and not have a corresponding flood of blood.
Many of the victims of yesterday’s shooting (by yet another white male veteran with PTSD issues) were survivors of the Las Vegas massacre of a year ago (the club where yesterday’s shooting occurred was a gathering place for Las Vegas survivors).
Tell THEM about the risks of running afoul of anything.
Are you as mad at me about this issue as you sound?
I’m not mad at you, I’m incredibly frustrated with the paralysis that seems to grip our entire movement.
I think the 2nd amendment makes a much clearer case for a required “well-regulated militia”, more than it does for unlimited gun ownership.
Because of this vagueness, and the obvious bloody cost of gun proliferation, I would gladly repeal the 2nd amendment.
Putting aside little details like the SCOTUS Heller decision, any thoughts on how to ban existing ownership of more than 300 million guns?
This all or nothing approach to public policy is not constructive in this heated polarized atmosphere. I supposed the argument is, gun supporters will lie about anything and will always say we want to ban all guns, so we might as well call for banning them. But that sounds like a poor excuse to match the extermism of others.
I mean, “negotiate” to let cops carry guns???? What political world do you live in? In my world very reasonable people, not just NRA crazies, would think that’s an extreme concept. This kind of suggestion just feeds the narrative of leftist extermism
Hey, come on — it worked for Andy Griffith (Barney Fife was never allowed to keep any bullets in his gun!), why not?
I’m kidding.
Actually, bullets may in fact be the answer to this situation. So many guns are already out there. I doubt we could buy them all back and outright confiscation would raise so many practical and constitutional issues. Bullets, OTOH can only be used once and the supply has to be replenished, so maybe we should focus our efforts on regulating the heck out of the purchase of ammunition, banning certain “cop-killer” bullets, etc.
@ regulating bullets:
I think this is an interesting avenue to pursue. It is very feasible today to mark each bullet so that it can be identified in a national database. Ammunition has a shelf-life of about ten years — the transition to regulated ammunition has a bounded period.
Imagine how forensics could change, across the board, if the chain of custody for each round could be traced from manufacture to wherever it ended up.
This could and should be combined with a law that says that the purchaser of ammunition must be registered and licensed. That purchaser should be held responsible for any misuse of the ammunition. The purchaser could report ammunition as stolen — certainly an individual who had thousands of rounds “stolen” per month could be investigated further.
We have many options for getting this problem under control. Our failure is a failure of will, not means.
More seriously, what came to my mind in response to the “negotiate” of the thread-starter is a serious discussion about what weaponry we need to issue.
I don’t think rural Massachusetts needs quasi-public and therefore essentially unregulated SWAT teams armed to the teeth with military-issue weaponry.
Too many of our police officers are men and women with serious baggage from combat experience who are given similar military-issue weaponry and sent into situations where negotiation and calming skills are far more necessary than combat training.
Australia figured out how to buy back the guns they outlawed. Holding registered owners of guns responsible when the weapons are improperly used will help.
The notion that it is “extreme” to call for a stop to the slaughter when we literally daily mass killings (never mind the gun violence that happens every day and is unreported because it’s no longer even newsworthy) is itself something to pay attention to.
When somebody is drowning, is it “extremist” for them to desperately claw at their rescuer?
We are drowning in the blood of our children. I think that calls for extreme measures.
The irony is Warren Burger-in many ways an anti-Warren Court reactionary-put it best in a 1991 PBS Newshour interview. That the NRA perpetuated a great fraud on the American public with their radical revision of the plain reading of the Constitution.
The Second Amendment is clear as day that firearms are for militias. That’s the textualist and originalist way of reading it. The irony is the right has found imaginary penumbras that allow an individual right to an assault rifle and an ammo dump. There’s a reason we had powerderhouses-the powder was not to be stored at home.
The individual was not John Wayne acting alone but Israel Putnam leading the defense of the community from foreign aggression. It is highly unlikely such a thing is necessary today, but that is why we have the National Guard.
From the penumbra
Looking at the “militia” line in the context of the society of the day can lead to a different interpretation. The “well regulated militia” is needed but back in the day EVERY household had firearms. When someone from a household responded to the call for the militia they gave up individual control of their firearm and agreed to respond to, take orders from, and fight with the well-regulated militia. They may just as well have stayed home and defended their turf on their own.
People store powder and ammunition at their own home and always have, powder houses were used to store large quantities but they weren’t the single storage place. Marking the bullets, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing those who pack their own bullets (and there are many) to add their address.
Society is a contract and those who use guns when they break the laws need to be dealt with much more harshly., armed robbery 5 years with “good” behaviour is a joke. That is the view from my friends who own firearms. Many of my Mass friends own, most of my Fla friends do.
I’ve stopped reading this blog as often as I did. I’ve enjoyed the respectful exchange of ideas from very diverse viewpoints because that is the only way I can learn about other wildly different situations, but often things descend into sanctimonious badgering (not you James)..
Good luck, the Dems are in control of the development of laws now, hope they don’t squander their chance as has happened when we’ve switched control between BOTH parties in the past.
I’m not worried about the self-packed bullets of a collector. People also roll their own cigarettes and slaughter their own meat — so what? Shall we stop regulating RJ Reynolds and meat packers because a handful of people do it themselves?
I cure and smoke my own bacon and ferment my own pickles and sour kraut. Those choices of mine have nothing to do with needed food safety regulations.
The shooters I’m worried about couldn’t possibly pack enough of their ammunition to supply their own weapons. Stephan Paddock did not pack his own ammunition. Adam Lanza did not pack his own ammunition. The drug lords and gang leaders of our inner cities do not pack their own ammunition.
The daily shootings and chaos in Florida reflect the insane Florida gun laws. That’s one reason I choose to live in MA rather than Florida. I invite those who like Florida gun laws to move to Florida.
Appreciate it Scott. There is no way this problem gets solved if we start with the proposition that lawful gun owners cannot be part of the solution. I do worry we are nowhere near that point as both sides retreat to their bubbles. I am all for locking up people that commit crimes with guns and I also think giving cops and the FBI access to a database of gun owners can help them solve and prevent crimes and other acts of terrorism more effectively. I just find it astonishing that 3,000 Americans died because of a hijacking and we changed all of our laws and fought two wars but ten times that many die annually from firearms and we continue to do nothing.
The hysteria and scapegoating about “Muslim terrorists” is much more appealing to ignorant Fox viewers and the GOP thugs that pander to them than the concrete reality of just how many people guns kill and maim every year.
Ignorant Americans and the politicians they elect attack whatever scapegoat is at the top of the current list. “Muslim”, “black”, “illegal”, “Liberal” — it makes no difference whatsoever to those so eager to be led around by the nose.
By all means, let’s make sure we continue to manufacture and ship tens of millions of guns a year — and the ammunition that those killing machines require — because a handful of hobbyists stuff their own bullets.
We are a nation of paranoid delusional lunatics, led by a paranoid delusional lunatic in the White House.
Colonial governments also knew who had which firearms. The militia were trained to use them.