Fewer guns and harder to get — let’s aim for stronger laws
When a gunman fired shots at congressmen practicing for a charity a baseball game June 14, our nation went through a ritual that is now familiar to the Orlando community. Online, in person and on the floor of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, at least temporarily, joined together and called for a spirit of unity.
Congressman Steve Scalise remains hospitalized, and has a long and slow recovery ahead of him. Just as tragic: Nothing has happened in the days since this shooting to break the cycle of gun violence that is killing more than 32,000 Americans every year.
Words from politicians mean zero if they’re not followed by action. Steve Scalise is now a statistic.
The United States is awash in guns — and, as a result, gun violence. Someone is shot in America every five minutes. The nation has already experienced 27,856 gun incidents in the first six months of 2017, including six at sporting events.
Amid this epidemic of gun violence, however, there are growing signs that the public mood is shifting. Americans understand that guns are the problem. A new poll conducted by PSB Research for Guns Down — conducted one year after the mass murder at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub — found that a majority (55 percent) of Americans would feel less safe with allowing more people to carry guns in public. Even 32 percent of gun owners said more guns on the streets would make them feel less safe.
While Guns Down was the first in a series of polls released about gun violence after the Scalise shooting, all evidence points in the same direction: The public believes that guns are the problem and that guns should be harder to get. Pew Research found that huge majorities of Americans think that easy access to guns — whether legally obtained or not — is leading to gun violence. (They’re right.) In the year since Pulse, Republican support for stronger gun violence prevention measures has jumped 7 points, according to another poll.
The surveys reveal strong public support not just to act, but to do so boldly and decisively. Our representatives must propose and debate the same policy solutions that have already decreased gun deaths in other developed nations. It’s time to stop nibbling at the edges of this epidemic.
Background checks are a natural place to start — and enjoy overwhelming public support. But background checks alone aren’t the answer. The man who shot Rep. Steve Scalise, congressional staffers and two Capitol Police officers may have been able to clear a background check and obtain his firearms legally. The Pulse shooter was also a legal gun owner.
To truly tackle the gun violence epidemic, lawmakers must go further — after the guns themselves. Our polling also found that a majority of Americans, 54 percent, want to see fewer guns in circulation, and 61 percent believe that guns should be harder to get. A majority, including Americans who live in gun households, also favor bold proposals that would dramatically reduce the number of guns on our streets.
Seventy-eight percent — including 65 percent who live in gun households — support creating a government buy-back program for assault weapons. Seventy-six percent would support a ban on military-style weapons. Eighty-eight percent would like to require gun licenses for all gun owners.
These aren’t solutions you hear much about from politicians in Washington, D.C., but they’re on the minds of voters all across this country who are ready to support policies that would actually keep them safe.
Not everyone is lucky enough to be protected by a trained and armed security detail, like the members of Congress who came under fire in Virginia. The gun lobby asks you to believe the answer is to go out and buy your own weapon. But, as the Violence Policy Center and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence have found, and as police have always known, a gun in the home is more likely to be used to kill or injure an innocent person than an intruder.
Put another way: There are already more guns in this country than ever before — we now have more guns than people. They haven’t stopped the violence.
It’s time to radically rethink how we tackle gun violence.