David Michael Miller
Here’s the problem: There are too many guns in America.
Here’s the answer: Have fewer of them.
That may seem like common sense, and the facts overwhelmingly back that conclusion, but these days nothing is obvious in America.
In fact, the answer to gun violence that is pushed by the National Rifle Association and Republican presidential candidates is still more guns. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” the president of the NRA famously declared after the Newtown murders that left 20 young kids and six of their teachers dead.
It’s a silly, Wild West view of the world. We’ll somehow be safer if a bunch of paranoids packing deadly force — the “good guys” — will start blasting away in the general direction of what they perceive to be the bad guys. God help us.
And all the evidence shows that it almost never works that way. There are about 30,000 gun deaths every year in America. About two-thirds of these are suicides and the rest are homicides, with a small fraction of these deaths resulting from accidents. The incidence of the use of guns for self-protection is so small that it doesn’t show up in the percentages.
There are an estimated 112 guns for every 100 people in America. The next developed country on the list is Switzerland with 45 guns per 100 people, and that county has mandatory military service.
Not surprisingly then, America also leads the developed world in gun deaths, with 31 per million residents. In Canada it’s closer to six. In France it’s two.
Speaking of France, there are those who point to its strict gun laws and note that the mass killings on Nov. 13 took place anyway. One hundred and thirty people were gunned down in Paris that day — the same number that are killed routinely by guns in America every 36 hours.
So it was significant that The New York Times chose to call for the reduction in the number of guns loose in America in a front-page editorial last weekend. It was the first time the paper had chosen to use that valuable real estate for an opinion piece since it warned about the scourge of Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election. A sensible person might ask if the scourge of Adolf Hitler, nuclear annihilation or global climate change might have outranked the dangers of Harding, but nonetheless I’m glad the Times gave gun control the visibility it deserves.
It’s not that the editorial will have any effect on Republicans or the NRA or even, in the short-run, public opinion. But it will have an impact on how Democrats and liberals view the gun issue.
For too long those who advocate for more gun safety have been way too timid. Gun safety proponents should take a page from the NRA’s playbook and go for the gusto. Being reasonable has gotten gun control advocates nowhere. Being crazy has been wildly successful for the NRA.
The NRA has opposed even the mildest of gun safety measures — denying guns to those on the terrorist watch list and universal background checks even in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre. Their strategy is to fight the smallest measure so hard that more effective measures never even get considered.
So, when the Times calls for an actual reduction in the number of firearms, that’s significant because it may embolden the gun safety side to start proposing meaningful reforms.
And to those who say that there is no chance that Americans will ever support the actual confiscation of guns, consider this. Over 90% of Americans support universal background checks. About 85% of gun owners support that. And yet the NRA fights it and still wins. The NRA doesn’t take the attitude that polling is against them and so they should concede the argument. They fight with wild-eyed passion, and they just win and win and win.
And public support for better gun laws is only likely to increase. While gun sales are on the rise, the number of American households that own even a single gun has been on a steady decline. Today, only one in three U.S. households contains a gun, which means that some households are collecting arsenals. In other words, the best-armed people in America are also those who tend toward a paranoid view of the world. Great. All the more reason to reduce their arsenals over time.
Another reason for the likely increase in public support for gun control is the cost of doing nothing. A recent study found that the cost of gun violence in Wisconsin alone is almost $3 billion a year. When we make this an issue of public health and the public pocketbook rather than an unfounded, absolutist view of a constitutional right, the real good guys will start to win.
But I don’t think we have to go to actual confiscation anyway. We can cut off the supply and start to reduce the number of guns in circulation through attrition.
As a gun owner myself, here’s what I think I owe to society.
I should have to have a license to operate a gun, just as I need a license to operate a car. I should have to demonstrate some basic level of proficiency with a firearm and an understanding of the principles of safe gun handling. My license should have to be renewed every so often, and I should pay a fee to cover the cost of the program. We already have a template for this not only in licensure for drivers but in the licenses necessary to carry a concealed weapon.
My guns should be registered annually just as my cars are. I should pay a registration fee that covers the cost of the program and then some. The additional amount might go to the purchase of public hunting lands in the case of fees covering legitimate hunting rifles and shotguns. The additional amount could go for a voluntary buy-back program for semi-automatic weapons like the AK-47 and all handguns.
Semi-automatics and handguns should be banned from production. It should be illegal to manufacture or import them. They have no place in society at all because they are simply designed to kill people. They have no legitimate sporting use that outweighs their danger to human beings.
Under this scenario, all consistent with the Second Amendment, the government wouldn’t go out and confiscate guns. But over time, with the spigot of the worst weapons cut off and with guns being turned in for the money, the number of guns on the street would steadily decline.
There are over 300 million guns in America. We’ll never get to a time when there are none, but we’ll be a safer country when there are 200 million guns and safer still when there are half that many.
