1. \u00a0Yes, once again, half the country is saying \u201cwe need common-sense gun legislation\u201d and the other half is saying, \u201cstop being so vague; what you want it a large-scale ban on private ownership of guns, and we won\u2019t let you.\u201d<\/p>\n
This time the gun-control side is much more willing, in fact, to speak of places like Australia and the UK, with their gun confiscation programs, as models, as Obama did in his recent speech; at the same time, the National Review<\/a> and others are quick to point out that Australia\u2019s gun laws weren\u2019t necessarily the cause of drops in crime.<\/p>\n At the same time, Nicholas Kristof has an op-ed in the New York Times<\/a> which is now being shared widely by all my liberal facebook friends. \u00a0His prescription? \u00a0Free the CDC to fund research on gun violence under the rubric of \u201cpubic health\u201d. \u00a0Also: \u00a0\u201cuniversal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses\u201d and<\/p>\n We should also be investing in \u201csmart gun\u201d technology, such as weapons that fire only with a PIN or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability insurance for guns, as we do for cars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Are these the right steps? \u00a0(Surprisingly, he doesn\u2019t mention the usual bit about banning guns with magazines of greater than X capacity.) \u00a0Are they \u201ccommon-sense\u201d laws? \u00a0Some of these proposals get pushback such as \u201cit\u2019s a constitutional right so the government has no right to place restrictions on it\u201d but that knee-jerk reaction feels extreme. \u00a0At the same time: \u00a0liability insurance doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense to me. \u00a0How would an insurer price it? \u00a0Would a policy be payable if the gunowner used the gun to commit suicide, or to commit a crime, or if someone else stole the gun? \u00a0How would you enforce this? \u00a0A car driven on public streets can be identified as noncompliant, but would the police keep records of all gunowners and confiscate the guns of noncompliant gunowners? \u00a0About microstamping I don\u2019t know; I would be rather surprised if such a thing were possible and tamper-proof. \u00a0And \u201csmart guns\u201d \u2014 again, it seems improbable.<\/p>\n As to the CDC and the research ban? \u00a0To be honest, what feels wrong to me is the labelling of this as a matter of \u201cpublic health.\u201d \u00a0Gun violence is not a \u201cdisease\u201d and it hardly seems appropriate to classify it as such. \u00a0At the same time: \u00a0are our universities so dependent on government \u00a0grant-making, even in the social sciences, that nothing can happen unless it\u2019s funded by the government, so that it is imperative that some government agency or another fund research on the topic or it won\u2019t happen?<\/p>\n 2. \u00a0Let\u2019s look at Wikipedia\u2019s statistics<\/a>:<\/p>\n According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013, firearms (excluding BB and pellet guns) were used in 84,258 nonfatal injuries (26.65 per 100,000 U.S. citizens) and 11,208 deaths by homicide (3.5 per 100,000), 21,175 by suicide with a firearm, 505 deaths due to accidental discharge of a firearm, and 281 deaths due to firearms-use with \u201cundetermined intent\u201d for a total of 33,169 deaths related to firearms (excluding firearm deaths due to legal intervention).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, suicides exceed homicides by nearly a 2:1 ratio.<\/p>\n And one of the projects of the Brady campaign is to spread a message to \u201csuicide-proof your home<\/a>\u201c\u2013 surprisingly, they\u2019ve going after comparatively low-hanging fruit, not even calling on people to get rid of guns but asking them\u00a0to keep trigger locks on guns so that an at-risk teen (who they may not even know is at risk) doesn\u2019t use the gun to kill themselves, or perhaps store a gun elsewhere \u201ctemporarily.\u201d<\/p>\n Would suicide-planners simply find another means of killing themselves if a gun weren\u2019t available? \u00a0I\u2019ve seen claims that because suicide is impulsive, if it\u2019s harder to act on that impulse, people will abandon the idea; I\u2019ve also seen claims that because there is no correlation between suicide rates and gun ownership in a country, there is no reason to believe that fewer guns will produce fewer suicides \u2014 and I\u2019ve also seen misleading charts such as trends in suicide by gun, rather than overall numbers of suicides. \u00a0I don\u2019t know. \u00a0It doesn\u2019t feel right to say that suicide is impulsive, but I can well believe that, of the means of committing suicide, shooting oneself has a certain appeal because you can be fairly confident that you\u2019ll succeed. \u00a0Overdosing on drugs, by contrast, I would expect would be seen as too \u201crisky\u201d \u2014 that is, where the risk is that you survive but are maimed or at least have the problem of mental health professionals not leaving you alone.<\/p>\n 3. \u00a0How many gunowners could be persuaded to remove guns from the home?<\/p>\n Actually, this is something I\u2019ve wondered: \u00a0can private citizens purchase a taser for self-defense? \u00a0Seems to me it\u2019s not possible. \u00a0But if it were, would that be a satisfactory, and non-lethal alternative for people?<\/p>\n And for people who own guns for purposes of hunting and participating in shooting sports, is there another alternative? \u00a0My memory was that, back as an undergraduate, the student handbook instructed students living on-campus to store their firearms with the on-campus police; I checked the handbook online<\/a> and it\u2019s still there. \u00a0(Why would a student bring a firearm to campus? \u00a0This is Michigan. \u00a0I had always assumed this was for students who went hunting on the weekends, but, turns out, MSU has a shooting sports center open to the general public<\/a>, so there\u2019s that, too.) \u00a0Could Nancy Lanza have stored her firearms at the local police station, and checked them out for hunting or target-shooting? \u00a0 If not, could local communities be encouraged to establish such gun-storage policies?<\/p>\n 4. \u00a0It looks like, again, in the case of the Oregon shooter, we\u2019re looking at a scenario of the Angry Young Man who wants both to commit suicide and to take people along with him to punish, well, someone<\/em>, even if not the people who bore any responsibility for what he perceives of as injustices. \u00a0The particulars of his anger aren\u2019t yet clear \u2014 there were initial claims of white surpremacy, but he\u2019s biracial (or, simply put, black, in the same way as most individuals with one white, one black parent are defined as black, especially if raised by that black parent); there are claims that his MySpace friend is a jihadist. \u00a0But nonetheless: \u00a0was he looking for fame? \u00a0I don\u2019t know; quite possibly he simply didn\u2019t believe in right or wrong or eternal punishment, and figured it would be great to combine suicide and at the same time fulfill a fantasy of killing. \u00a0Which to me suggests that the \u201csolution\u201d is not to keep the names and details about future killers secreted away, so that would-be killers don\u2019t \u00a0see this as a path to fame. \u00a0Rather, the best answer, to the extent that we have any control over these events, is to take such a killer alive, and parade him around so that every misfit, angry-at-the-world young man gets the picture that a suicide-by-massacre has a very real risk of landing him in jail, a place that surely is a fate far worse than death. \u00a0Ideally, he\u2019d have tried to kill himself but end up leaving himself jailed and permanently disabled.<\/p>\n