House Democrats Have a Gun Control Proposal That's Painfully in Touch With Reality
The unsettling truth in the aftermath of the latest American horror is that few initiatives that would make a significant impact on this country's gun violence problem are truly under consideration. There's certainly not much talk among elected leaders of getting firearms out of civilian hands, the action that Great Britain and Australia took after similar tragedies with clear results. Granted, that's really not a workable proposal in a country with 400 million civilian-owned guns. It's not clear what you can do about the gun suicide fueling so many of our 45,000 annual gun deaths, either—the silent epidemic of Americans, mostly men, shooting themselves in the head. (Universal access to mental healthcare people can afford? Never.) And it's true you can't eradicate the illegal guns that fuel a lot of homicide, although the relationship between such a large volume of easily accessible legal guns and the number that have made it off the books deserves further investigation. Some guns used in crimes are stolen, though straw purchases are likely more common along with straight buys from crooked dealers.
Still, pretty much anything that cuts into that 45,000 number is worth considering, and Axios and Punchbowl News tell us Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are preparing to do just that. They're looking at a series of eight bills they're calling the "Protecting Our Kids Act" that would include a few major provisions:
raising the purchasing age for semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21
banning the import, sale, manufacture, and possession of large-capacity magazines
putting in place safe-storage requirements within the home
creating criminal penalties for storage violations.
Many will contend the semiauto move isn't enough, and that, say, the feral hog problem is not sufficient justification for people all over this country owning instruments of mass death. They might also say that most gun homicides are committed with handguns, and that kids who legally can't drink a beer shouldn't be able to just waltz into Dick's Sporting Goods and get themselves a gun of any kind. But this is where we're at. Canada is now moving towards just freezing handgun sales across the board. South of the border, that would initiate a national meltdown.
The ban on large-capacity magazines is more promising, in that it gets at that old insight from Chris Rock that we need ammo control. The semiautos are out there and they ain't coming back. (Again, nobody is even much talking about instituting voluntary gun buyback programs, one of the tools Australia used, for people who no longer want to participate in this culture.) But maybe we can stop people getting hold of 30-round magazines so they can't massacre a dozen people without having to reload. You want your AR-15? Alright, but you'll have to make do with 10-round magazines at the range or in the woods. And yes, it would help to ban things. Some people will still be able to get hold of them, but it introduces barriers that prevent many people from doing so. This is why many of the most fervent gun-rights supporters also advocate banning abortion.
The safe-storage requirements might, in a practical sense, make the biggest difference in terms of firearm deaths in this country. It's also pretty much guaranteed to be thrown out by the current Supreme Court. (The most likely argument against it will be that if you have to keep your gun in a safe or some other secured device, it makes it harder to access during a home invasion.) There are a lot of accidental shootings by kids who get hold of guns in this country—the scenario where it's kept in some shoebox in the closet that they get into when a friend is over for a playdate. And at least some of these mass shooters just lived in a home where these weapons were—they didn't buy them themselves—and an age requirement for purchase doesn't address that. Keeping guns locked up might prevent some of these tragedies.
If some of this is DOA at the Supreme Court, it might all be DOA in the United States Senate, where there aren't 10 Republican votes to break the filibuster on much of anything, much less anything that's billed as an assault on the American religion of guns. (Sorry, the Second Amendment, which reads, "the right to bear a high-capacity magazine shall not be infringed.") It's still worth a shot. Maybe pair it with some funding for mental health. We're always hearing about that after one of these tragedies of liberty, and there do seem to be significant connections between domestic violence, misogyny, gun homicides, and mass shootings. (Canada could also move to strip those convicted of domestic violence of their guns.) At the root of it all, however, is the sheer number of guns in the possession of people who are for the most part poorly (or entirely un-)trained in their use, and suffering from the same maladies many others among us are, here and in other countries. In America, they just have the tools of drastic action readily available to them. Confronting this, along with the prospect we are a country drowning in guns and paranoia, can feel an overwhelming challenge. If we're honest with ourselves, it might overwhelm this nation.
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