At some point we will be judged for our inaction.

In the U.S. we quite frankly have a shit ton of guns, excuse my French.  In fact we have 265 million guns for 242 million adults, more than one per person [1].  We have so many guns and they are so easy to get that terrorists come here to buy guns and send them back to the Middle East [2].  We have just as many guns as cars, and they kill similar numbers of people every year [3-4].  Almost 1300 children under the age of 17 die every year in gun related deaths in the U.S. and in 2010 91% of the children who died in gun related deaths worldwide were American [5].  We have so many guns that toddlers frequently find loaded weapons laying around and shoot either themselves or another person.  In fact in 2015 toddlers killed more people on American soil than terrorists did [6].  And while the frequency and death toll of mass shootings continues to climb [7], the number of gun sales roughly doubled between 2010 and 2013 [8]. All of this is not an argument against the 2^nd Amendment, but it is an argument for common sense reforms to our gun laws.  Here are a few suggestions:

1. We should implement universal background checks. Law abiding gun owners have nothing to fear from an FBI background check, and a slight delay in getting your new toy won’t really hurt you.  I mean it’s not as if you’ve got a bank to rob or something is it?
2. We should ban or at least severely restrict the sales of semi-automatic assault rifles like AK-47’s or AR-15’s. Machine guns are already difficult to purchase and require extra licensing, but semi-automatic assault rifles which are generally weapons designed to be fired in automatic mode as well can be purchased relatively easily, and can easily be converted by any dedicated hobbyist or terrorist to enable automatic firing.  This is exactly the kind of weapon that was used to spray bullets on the crowd in Las Vegas [9-10].  And even without converting them to be automatic, these guns are really only designed for killing people, they are not hunting guns.  They are the weapons of choice for mass shooters, from Sandy Hook and Orlando to San Bernadino and Las Vegas [11].

• We should implement nationwide safe storage laws. Leaving a loaded gun lying around for a toddler to find and shoot themselves should be treated as an equivalent crime to vehicular manslaughter- or killing someone while D.U.I.  These deaths are entirely preventable, and it should be the responsibility of the gun owner to secure their weapons in a safe manner.  The risks of having a gun in your house far outweigh the benefits [12], but if you really need to have a 9mm locked and loaded at any time in your home then you can at least agree to store it safely.  Fingerprint and key code gun safes are readily available and sold almost anywhere that guns are sold legally.  If taxpayer funded fingerprint gun safes are the price we need to pay to get you to store your gun safely then I would happily pay that price to save 20 toddlers per year.  One per home, and you are on your own for gun safes and trigger locks for all your other guns- just like you pay for the seat belts, Nader bolts, and air bags in your car- as well as car insurance.  You should not be storing your guns in such a way that they can be easily found and used or stolen- that’s just plain common sense and benefits everyone.

That being said, I don’t expect anything to happen any time soon.  Sandy Hook proved that the gun lobby was strong enough to resist gun law reform even in the face of innocent children being slaughtered.  The argument that any one reform will not prevent the current incident in the news is a cherry picked straw man.  The point is to make future incidents less likely, we cannot expect to prevent them entirely as we are already awash in guns.  But reducing the availability of guns, and especially the deadliest kinds of guns, can reduce the incidence of mass shootings [13].  And there are common sense ways to make gun storage in the home safer for yourself and your family- I’m even willing to pay for it with tax dollars because it makes my family safer as well.  Congress will once again do nothing, but they should also realize that voting against common sense gun reform will only add more blood on their hands when future historians judge their legacy.  If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past decade, the solution to gun violence is not more guns.

 

 

1. http://fortune.com/2016/09/19/us-gun-ownership/
2. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/louisville/press-releases/2013/former-iraqi-terrorists-living-in-kentucky-sentenced-for-terrorist-activities
3. According to CDC data in 2015 there were 36,252 Firearm related deaths and 38,022 Motor Vehicle related deaths. https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States
5. http://www.snopes.com/toddlers-killed-americans-terrorists/
6. http://www.snopes.com/toddlers-killed-americans-terrorists/
7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/02/americas-deadliest-shooting-incidents-are-getting-much-more-deadly/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.13404126a4ea
8. http://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-the-numbers
9. http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/machine-gun-las-vegas-harvest-festival-massacre-easy-to-make-9743612
10. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/how-make-your-gun-shoot-fully-automatic-one-easy-step/
11. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/12/the-gun-used-in-the-orlando-shooting-is-becoming-mass-shooters-weapon-of-choice/?utm_term=.1aed70375d2c
12. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1559827610396294

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/australia-gun-control/541710/