Fla. school shooting is not the tipping point
Here’s how to bridge the divide on new gun laws
In a rational world, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, with its 17 dead and its heroic students marching on Tallahassee and calling out legislators on national television, would be the tipping point for America to finally pass new gun laws. But we have to jettison the idea that the next gun horror will tip the scales toward action and instead bridge the divide at the heart of America’s split on guns — the divide between those who see guns primarily as a threat to their safety and those who see guns as a form of self-protection.
There is no official count of gun ownership in the United States, but experts estimate at least 300 million guns in private hands. Pew Research found that 42% of Americans had a gun in their home. In rural areas, gun ownership approaches 60% of households, while in urban areas it’s half that. The No. 1 reason owners possess firearms is self-protection.
Then there is gun crime. About
400,000 gun crimes are committed every year, with 130,000 people being shot and 11,000 becoming victims of gun homicides. Every 12 hours, roughly the same number of people die in near anonymity in gun crimes as were killed this week in Parkland, Fla.
If you push these facts together, there are two ways to interpret them. The first is, “My God, that’s a lot of gun carnage.” The second is, “Hmmm,
299,600,000 guns didn’t cause anyone any harm.” Which view you hold depends upon where you live. Baltimore, encompassing 92 square miles, suffered through 318 homicides in 2016. The combined murder total of eight rural Western states spread out over
1,302,361 square miles was 320. This matters because we are a sparse, rural country, so gun safety advocates are outnumbered in Congress. These Western rural states, combined with the South (which has the highest gun ownership rate of any region), have enough Senate votes to scuttle any gun law. That is why the path to stricter gun laws is to find the balance point between what rural and suburban gun owners seek from guns for protection and what mostly urban dwellers fear from guns to protect theirs.
In most of the country, gun laws are already minimally strict, so owners desire less in the form of looser laws and more in terms of respect for the individual right to own firearms, for the responsible manner in which most stores handle them, and for the view held by most of them that firearms make them feel safe. Urban areas need stiffer laws to interdict the 400,000 guns that find their way into crime each year, but should be content to leave alone the bulk of the other 300 million in lawabiding private hands.
We could start with stricter laws to deal with gun trafficking between states, improving the criminal background check system to thwart illegal would-be buyers and the mentally ill from obtaining guns, requiring the same criminal background checks for all firearms sales from gun shows and the Internet as already required at gun stores, and reducing the lethality of certain firearms such as semiautomatic rifles, bump stocks and the large-capacity magazines they use.
These laws, drafted by weighing the equities held by gun owners and nongun owners in rural, urban and suburban areas, could be broadly popular. If that seems like a pipe dream, that’s how the Brady Law ultimately passed in 1993 — giving gun control advocates the background check they needed but making it instant, which is what gun buyers wanted.
Together, we have spent 50 years fighting for better gun laws working for politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and starting up our own gun safety organization. What becomes apparent on guns is that we are a big country with a constitutional right to own guns, massive gun ownership and a crime problem unlike any other in the world.
Instead of praying the next massacre will shake America to its senses, we must engage the millions who believe possession of firearms is not only their right but also their duty to protect the safety of their families.