Update: Grim illustrates in the comments that I am at least partly wrong, in thorough fashion. Wonderful list.
I find myself saying this in my head often. Ideas for gun control. They Don't Work. People are just sure that something - some "common-sense" gun control should work. And if by chance it does occur to them that their idea won't work, then they are sure someone else's similar idea will do it. Educational ideas, a new crop every September. Sometimes they even look like they work, until we try to scale them up. But let the subject come up, and the same ideas get floated repeatedly, just dressed in different clothes. Mental health. Poverty. Say those words over at Maggie's, or at Althouse, and you will sometimes get some better, or at least more original answers - but even there, usually not. Kids succeed if you have high expectations. If we didn't give tax breaks to billionaires, we could afford this. Other first world countries don't have this problem. Did you look under the seat cushions?
Nothing more to say. Mostly just whining, but also grateful for the people here. You're a smart group.
I have probably written this down before, but in fact there are things that could work to reduce gun violence; they don't require new laws, however, and they would require doing things that the gun-control crowd has written off for other reasons.
ReplyDelete1) Of the gun deaths in America, 2/3rds or so are suicides.
2) Of the remaining 1/3 that are murders, most of them are conducted with handguns. Therefore, handguns and not long arms are the place to focus.
3) Of these, illegally possessed handguns are the crucial problem, so additional gun control laws won't help: they're already illegal. You have a policing problem, not a legislative problem.
4) This policing problem is not a universal or global problem in America, however, but one that can be geographically fenced. Thus, resources can be intelligently assigned to attack it where they will be most effective.
5) To whit: Most American counties have zero murders in a year. Most of the rest have no more than a handful. It is not even 'a few cities' that are the locus of the gun homicide issue, but a few neighborhoods within a few cities.
6) Police already know exactly which neighborhoods those are, so there is no question nor a need to study the issue further. We can simply identify the neighborhoods in question and assign additional resources.
7) Though these will prove to be neighborhoods that are disproportionately minority, this is not 'racial profiling' but 'neighborhood profiling.' Thus it should not be offensive racially; and will likely be regarded with relief by those living there in peace anyway.
8) The tactics that will work are aggressive stop-and-frisk searches, pressing via interrogations and prosecution for details on other known illegal guns or people in their possession, followed by search warrants and aggressive raids.
9) Federal prosecution would enable every felon found in possession to be sent up for five years without parole (the NRA itself backed this approach very successfully in Project EXILE).
If you did those things aggressively and with resources, you could take a big bite out of the gun violence problem in America. But you wouldn't get any new gun control laws, and you would have to do all those forbidden things that the Democratic party is dead-set against. It would work, though.
Great list. See update
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