How about some bullet control?
Columbine. Sandy Hook. Parkland. Mourn, rage, repeat. But even if, if, if — if Congress would pass a bill and if the President would sign it and if the Supreme Court would let it stand — we’d still be up against an engineering problem with no obvious political answer, and one that gets harder to solve with each passing year without a real effort to do so.
There are more guns in America than people, most likely, and the guns definitely live longer.
I say “most likely” because the gun lobby, at once fearful of tougher laws and happy to use the threat of them to spur sales, has ensured there’s little federal recordkeeping, let alone a gun registry, while the so-called Dickey Amendment means the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t been allowed to spend money studying gun violence for more than two decades.
That’s the backstory to the “thoughts and prayers” offered after each new tragedy by Republican lawmakers, in thrall to the NRA, who offer empty words about evil people and human nature as a way to avoid making any effort to protect human lives.
Forget about straightening their crooked timber. It’s time to start biting bullets.
“You don’t need no gun control. You know what you need? We need some bullet control,” Chris Rock joked in 1999, nearly 20 years and a million acts of American carnage — murders and suicides and accidents — ago.
“I think all bullets should cost $5,000. $5,000 for a bullet. You know why? ‘Cause if a bullet costs $5000, there’d be no more innocent bystanders.”
It’s a great riff, one Rock may have borrowed from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was dead serious about it.
After passing a bill — supported by many police unions and Republicans — banning so-called cop-killer bullets, it hit the U.S. senator from New York that there was no constitutional obstacle to regulating, taxing or banning ammunition.
Moynihan started talking about how guns don’t kill kill people; bullets do.
About how guns, like nuclear waste, remain potent, while bullets expire after a single use and and can only be stored for a few years.
Since America has a practically unlimited supply of guns but less than a five-year supply of bullets, Moynihan stopped talking about “gun control” and started talking about “bullet control.”
It’s an idea Democrats need to seriously revisit, to stop playing defense with our lives. The Republican hypocrites in the House who’ve lost their interest in states’ rights now that they control Washington just passed a nightmarish bill that would compel every state to honor every other one’s concealed-carry gun licenses.
In Utah, anyone can apply for a license in a few hours, and expect it in the mail 60 days later, which is why it's issued 300,000 licenses to residents of other states. In Arizona, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety described the process for getting a permit as “pretty much nothing.” Florida, too, is a “shall issue” state, meaning anyone from any state is entitled to a permit if they can clear a basic checklist.
The NRA calls the reciprocity bill its “highest legislative priority” and NYPD Commissioner Jimmy O'Neill calls it “insanity.” They’re both right.
Moynihan pushed bullet-control laws for years without ever quite passing them, though he did get some provisions inserted into other big crime bills. Still, pressing ammo makers won results. Days after he proposed a tax that would raise the price of one sort of bullet from $20 a box to $2,000, the manufacturer announced that it would stop selling them to the public.
It turns out that the munitions maker folded more easily than the cigarette titans, or car companies back in the day.
Right now, most bullets are cheaper than cigarettes — especially in the states that now tax the hell out of cigarettes. Anyone with a credit card can order 1,000 .223 rounds for their AR-15 killing machines for less than $50 — or less than $10 for the 150 shots that ended 17 lives in Florida — and have them shipped most anywhere in America with no questions asked. (California this year joined Massachusetts, Chicago and New York City in banning home ammo shipments.)
Twenty five wasted years ago, Moynihan laid out the way to start resolving our gundeath problem and escape this spiral of needless death and legislated ignorance, if we begin to summon the political will:
“We need to ban some rounds, tax others, keep records, scrutinize licenses to manufacture. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms needs to come alive. The alternative is more death.”