Obviously, among the main challenges with gun control is that unless it is done just right, we may end up denying or diminishing law abiding citizens’/good guys’ ownership and (legal) usage benefits: hunting, target shooting for fun or for competition, collecting, and self-defense. Those uses, I think, are just fine, and what probably the vast majority of gun owners have in mind when they purchase a firearm.
I think the main areas we should be working on are:
A way to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those who suffer from the types of serious mental health issues that present the most potential for violence, whether intended (EG, sociopathy) or not (EG, psychosis). The mental health portion of that is tricky and requires balancing personal liberty and privacy with concerns about some mental health diagnoses and their propensity for leading to violence. That might be the hardest part to solve -- finding a fair, but effective, balance -- out of all of this.
To impress upon all gun owners to keep their weapons secure. Gun safety courses, and the firearm owner's personal commitment to following/practicing those safety procedures, would help here. Lanza could not have legally purchased a firearm, correct? So, had his mom secured her weapons properly, he would have been pretty hard-pressed to pull off his crime with firearms. We can't know if he would have tried other means, but the firearm option would have been much more difficult for him to use..
Better background checks.
An emphasis placed upon greater vigilance and action on the part of law enforcement. For crying out loud, when multiple people call in and tell you they think someone is dangerous, maybe that person should be investigated and, if claims are founded, placed on a sort of "no gun sales" list. That would have helped to prevent the Orlando shooter from purchasing firearms. He might have tried other means, but it would likely not have been with a firearm, unless he got one illicitly...
So what’s the objection to having mandatory training / licensing (akin to how we require training / licensing before one drives a car)?
So what’s the objection to having mandatory insurance (akin to how we require car insurance)?
So what’s the objection to having mandatory safe-storage equipment (akin to how we require our cars to meet certain safety standards - seat belts, emissions, etc.)?
So what’s the objection to having universal background checks, and not allowing the work-arounds of private purchases, gun shows, online, etc.?
One put forth by the republicans (Grassley) would have centralized information about mental health but it would also have made it easier for someone who had been ** involuntarily committed ** to get off the no buy list. That is a poison pill for me. Honestly, it’s just idiotic.
One put forth by the democrats would have put people on the Federal Terror Watch list on a no buy list. For republicans, that was a poison pill because of the chance, however tiny, of someone innocent being on that list.
A republican alternative (Cornyn) would have simply notified law enforcement if someone on the Federal Terror Watch list bought a gun. Wimpy, but I would have voted yes just to get some small step forward.
Another bill put forth by the democrats would have closed the gun show/internet loophole. ** Most ** guns are bought at gun shows, and while it might be difficult to get a background check before you go to a gun show, it certainly wouldn’t be impossible (just see the thread about TSA preCheck!).
So, none of these bills passed and the voting went largely on party/NRA lines which is just sad. This has been going on for years and years and I’m not surprised that people in Congress are turning to civil disobedience. I hope it works.
And the truly sad thing is that guns are implicated in about 2x more suicides than homicides. Do all the people who buy guns know this? Shouldn’t they be told?
Buying a gun should involve some mandatory safety information at the least. Suicide, accidents, and theft of the weapon all become tragically possible when one buys a gun.
@greenwitch It’s unfortunately true we ended the week with no legislation but I still think something is changing. In the Senate, it was only this week that the pro-control forces finally found the spine to demand action (bolstered by public opinion which is nearly unanimous on some of these measures). Then during the filibuster, I’m sure that pro-gun senators’ phones were blowing up. McConnell would not have allowed the vote unless he felt extreme pressure from his members. That’s new.
In the House, Ryan knew he had to avoid a vote at all costs. The BEST option was to be seen refusing to vote on something which 90% of the country wants, but the NRA doesn’t, and then leaving town literally in the middle of the night. The reps are not proud enough of their pro-gun stance to go on record with it, and the whole world saw that. We didn’t get the win there either, but we got the moral high ground and the momentum.
The pro-gun forces are now afraid of both the NRA and the voters, and they’re on notice that they will no longer be allowed to hide. That’s what we did this week.
》》 Please provide another explanation for why Joe-Everyday needs to carry a gun to Safeway and Starbucks. 《《
For personal protection in the off chance someone else decides to use a gun illegally. But then again, “Joe Everyday” is likely just Bubba’s cousin to you, so dunno what his opinion matters to you. To insinuate that every person who carries a gun legally is trigger happy and is looking to shoot anyone who looks at them cross eyed is ludicrous.
We have had a mass shooters who were military servicemen (Fort Hood and the Navy one), another that was a licensed security guard (Orlando), police officers that have gotten charged with gun violence, along with ordinary citizens. I don’t know that any group is immune, especially when mental illness and/or radical religion is involved.
I just watched the latest John Oliver “This week tonight” from June 19. He talks about gun control and later, about the stupidity of the UK trying to leave the EU (I wonder what he’ll say about that in his next show…)
Anyway, he mentioned a bill named after Senator Manchin, from 2013, that would have required universal background checks even for gun shows and internet sales. Senator Manchin is a proponent of gun rights, and even showed himself shooting in a campaign ad, well before his bill. It failed and the NRA turned on him.
Then he mentioned the Dickey amendment from 1996 which prevents the CDC from spending any money researching gun violence and how to end it. People in Congress regularly propose revisiting the Dickey amendment - most recently just 4 days before the Orlando shootings! Someone will propose revisiting it, there will be a voice vote, the ayes will clearly have it but the committee chair will say, “the nays take it” and that will be that. Oliver showed two video examples of that - it was rather shocking. Representative Dickey is one of the people who wants to get rid of his old amendment too!
So what is the problem? The NRA members, though not numerous, are extremely well informed about when votes are coming up and they are also very dedicated and tenacious about calling their reps, repeatedly, to get their POV across. Most other people will assume that politician will see a poll that says, “90% of Americans believe in this” and actually look at it. I guess they don’t.
Owning a gun became a “fundamental right” when citizens were being denied that right and others, as part of larger political suppressions. No one today is trying to remove the right of
“law abiding” citizens to own a gun or guns. As long as thats the sound bite, conversation is stunted.
“The third new law requires gun owners to surrender their firearms and ammunition to the police if they’ve been disqualified to possess the weapons “due to a diagnosis of having a significant behavioral, emotional, or mental disorder, or due to emergency or involuntary admission to a psychiatric facility.”
If the person does not voluntarily give up their arms, the police chief has permission to seize the weapons.”
The above quote is from the article on the gun bills that became law in Hawaii.
Here the details matter. What is a ‘significant’ behavioral, emotional or mental disorder? What disorders are covered? Who determines whether a person has one of these disorders? What happens if a person is cured?
No one wants a person with mental illness to have a firearm. But what are the definitions of a ‘mental’ disorder? Any psychiatric problem? And what of HIPAA and doctor-patient confidentiality?
Will this law deter people from seeing psychiatric help? OTOH, it might have prevented the Virginia Tech shooter and the Sandy Hook shooter from keeping their firearms.
Golly gosh. Isn’t it amazing that England and Canada and Australia and so forth don’t seem to have all this angst over this? They have common sense solutions and consequently their rates of death-by-gun-violence are so much lower than this?
@greenwitch I think they do look at the polling. But then they look at the NRA’s success rate of getting pols voted out of office who defy them, and the fact that they pay no price for defying the public’s wishes. That has been a winning strategy for getting reelected. So far. We’ll see if this year the public punishes them for refusing to get out of the NRA’s bed. Our best bet is to help them understand in November that a pro-NRA vote is no longer free. That will begin to peel some of them off, which is all we need.
H and I were having one of those hypothetical if-you-won-the-lottery discussions (even though we never buy lottery tickets). So concept was - you win the lottery (which at the point we had the discussion, was ~ $300 million. You have to donate it to a charitable cause. What do you do? H’s concept was - he would have a press conference and publicly challenge the 25 wealthiest people in America to match him, in donating it towards gun control – which would most likely mean towards re-electing politicians who believe in gun control.
H used to be a member of the NRA (though never owned a gun), back in the days when he was outdoorsy and camped a lot. But that was in the days where the NRA was normal and reasonable and stood for responsible gun ownership, not clingy paranoid gun ownership.
I’m not a political scholar, or an expert in foreign laws, but do the countries she mentioned have a constitution that specifically gives its people an unfringed right to bear arms?
So much of this debate is called common sense, or good ideas, but enacting many of restriction ideas currently proposed are contrary to our Constitution as it stands now. Even Joe Manchin talked about that darned ol’ due process getting in the way of further restrictions. He hints it would be so much easier to make restrictions if we could only pretend some of the rights in the Constitution didn’t exist. Isn’t that the way with all laws? Some we like, and some we don’t?
Why don’t those in favor of additional restrictions simply press to amend the constitution to add the word “unreasonably” before the word infringed in second amendment? The law that binds the Feds to permit gun ownership unfringed permits very few restrictions; but changing it to “unreasonably unfringed” would permit common sense restrictions.
Some see the debate on gun restrictions not just as - are they good ideas, but as - are they good ideas in keeping with the Constitution. To open up more avenues for restrictions and still be in keeping with the Constitution simply amend it to permit restrictions. To say- its a good idea, even though it is contrary to the Constitution- isn’t persuasive enough to some.
People pick and choose what they want from the Constitution. What happened to “as part of a well regulated militia”? If you couldn’t buy guns unless you joined an official militia that would be very restricting. And I don’t mean those anti-government militias - they are not “well regulated”.
Anyway, why can’t I have nuclear weapons or a military tank in my backyard? Isn’t that “un-constitutional”? Who is the government to tell me I can’t own these things?