Enough Votes to Block

Except for the most cursory, easily evaded law, there is no way to pass any meaningful gun-control legislation through the US Senate today, and for sure no way to expect the President to sign it into law. Should any measure of gun control pass anywhere, it will be mired in the courts for years. And as long as guns are easily obtained in any one state, effectively guns are therefore available everywhere. Where there are gun restrictions, a short drive to a nearby red state will produce a legal path to buy most any sort of gun or high-capacity magazine. 

Military-grade semi-automatic assault rifles are meant to lots of people in a very short time span. Their bullets tumble, end-to-end to tear out as much human bone and tissue as possible even with off-center hits. As someone said, if you need more than six bullets as a hunter, you need shooting lessons. Those ain’t huntin’ rifles, unless you are huntin’ people, especially in groups.

Let’s make one thing clear. Even under the recently distorted Supreme Court radical interpretation that the Second Amendment is not about militias, even though that word is expressly stated, but a general right to own guns, the arch conservative champion of gun owners, the late Antonin Scalia, said in his majority opinion in the 2008 District of Columbia vs Heller Supreme Court ruling, stated: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited...” It is “...not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

When assault weapons bans, the law in most every other nation in the world outside of civil war-torn regions, or extensive background check are mentions, the squeaky wheels, reinforced by a struggling and financially mismanaged National Rifle Association, kick into action. Children and crowds of innocents die in ways and in numbers that only a semi-automatic rifle could inflict. And you get the absolute most inane standard response: “Guns don’t kill, people kill.” Even though statistics dramatically show that the more capable the weapon, the more devastating are the mass killings that are now routine. 

Kids in school practice “active shooter” drills and watch “how to protect yourself” videos in class. You can buy “bullet proof” backpacks these days (most will not stop a bullet from and AR-15). Oh, and that self-defense claim? For every thirty gun homicides, only one can be labeled “justifiable.” It’s not subtle. The Second Amendment does not guarantee a right to own military-grade weapons under any serious interpretation. Enough with giving our “prayers and condolences” to the bereaved burying their family members. Stop!

Call for gun control and the radical right will call you a socialist (huh? Someone who wants the means of production to be owned by the government?) and unpatriotic. Unamerican. A move to force the elimination of the over 15 million US semi-automatic rifles invites statement like, “Come and try and take my gun away,” from the crazies who need to possess such devastating firearms. That those with desperation in their hearts, some amplified by mental illness, can always “find or borrow” such an assault weapon should be enough. They cannot be controlled.

How do Americans really feel about gun control? Melissa Healy, writing for the September 19^th Los Angeles Times, summarized recent surveys and poll results:  

In a national survey conducted in January, researchers from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Policy and Research found that 84% of all respondents believe that first-time gun buyers should be required to pass a safety course on the safe handling and storage of a firearm. Close to three-quarters of gun owners surveyed shared this view.

Some 83% of those surveyed — again including roughly three-quarters of gun owners — told pollsters they believed that carriers of concealed weapons should to be required to demonstrate they can safely and lawfully handle their weapon in the types of situations they might encounter.

More than 60% of gun owners, and 73% of American adults overall, supported setting a minimum age of 21 for Americans to be able to own a semiautomatic rifle.

And by roughly the same majority, gun owners declined to support “stand your ground” laws, which allow a person who feels a threat of serious injury to shoot or kill his or her perceived assailant, even in instances in which the gun owner could safely retreat. Overall, fewer than one-third of Americans endorsed stand-your-ground measures.

The findings were published recently in the journal Health Affairs. They drew from nationally representative surveys conducted in 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019. At least 7,833 Americans participated in each poll, and in a bid to understand how gun owners’ views differed from those of Americans who don’t own firearms, researchers deliberately oversampled those who acknowledged keeping a weapon in or around their home.

The study captures potential political support for firearm safety measures that go well beyond those in place now. And it suggests that gun owners may be less opposed to a range of strictures than politicians widely believe.

Currently, for instance, all U.S. states have provisions allowing lawful gun owners to carry a concealed weapon. But only 29 states require applicants for concealed-carry permits to undergo safety training, and just 16 of those require an applicant to fire a gun as part of that training. Fifteen states have no application or screening process, and no training requirement at all.

Meanwhile, some variant of stand-your-ground laws are in force in 28 states. And fewer than half of the states — 23 — have set a minimum age of 21 for purchasing a rifle. Even in some of those states, there are broad exceptions to those limits.

In the wake of recent mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, President Trump entertained the idea of instituting universal background checks for would-be gun owners. He later abandoned the idea, but the new study suggests that opposition to that policy might be much weaker than politicians had assumed.

The study also reveals some notable shifts in the American public’s attitudes toward a slate of gun safety measures following dozens of mass shootings in recent years.

Between January 2015 and January 2019, Americans’ support for gun safety measures increased, the study authors reported. Among the measures that saw the most robust hikes in public support were those requiring all firearm purchases to be subject to background checks (rising from 84% in 2015 to 88% in 2019) and all buyers to obtain a license to own a gun (rising from 75% to more than 80% in 2019).

Support for laws requiring the safe storage of guns jumped from 69% to 74% over that four-year period. And support for laws that would allow family members and/or police officers to seek a court’s permission to temporarily remove a person’s guns — so-called red flag laws — rose from just over 70% in 2015 to close to 80% in 2019. The study authors noted that 17 states have adopted provisions allowing for such “extreme risk protection” orders.

The political affiliation of the survey taker was often a predictor of his or her opinions, but that wasn’t always the case.

For 14 of the 18 gun control measures the survey asked about, support was significantly higher among self-declared Democrats than among those who identified as independents or Republicans. But in nearly all cases, majorities of both Republicans and independents supported tighter strictures on all the firearms policies.

The one exception was an assault weapons ban, which was favored by just over 60% of all survey-takers in 2019. While that was an increase over 2015, the difference was so small it may have been a statistical fluke.

The time for change is now. Clearly, those kids in school, as they grow to voting age, will always remember those active shooter drills. Sooner or later, they will vote for what they know is right. Older, radical right-wing gun zealots will die off. They are on the wrong side of history. But how many more people, children and other innocents, must die to protect the right to own “weapons of mass carnage”? Sooner or later? How about now? As of this writing, in 2019 alone, over 300 people have been killed via mass shootings in the United States.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and how long should we remain a nation that values the ownership of military weapons more than the lives of our own children?