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Dec. 20th, 2012 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerThanks to my friend David for linking to this piece by a former GW Bush advisor, which equates the NRA (and other groups) to racketeers. Hopefully the GOP will heed his call to "refuse to endorse anyone who runs in a primary with N.R.A. money against a sitting Republican".
And thanks to Nicholas Kristof for putting the lie to some hoary canards of the gun control debate and for linking to this study (PDF) that (so to speak) shoots holes in the faulty Lott research that sought to suggest that the answer to guns was more guns (it's not; in fact the researchers found that "there is stronger evidence for the conclusion that these [shall-issue] laws increase crime than there is for the conclusion that they decrease it.")
And thanks to Charles Blow for this graphic that shows how deplorably dangerous our country is in comparison to our social and economic peers.
On the other hand, a few factoids for those on the gun control side of the house.
"Assault weapons" is a meaningless term; it's a Humpty-Dumpty word, that means whatever its current speaker intends it to mean, but nothing by itself. What I gather, from watching the debate over most of my lifetime, the majority of people react adversely to are semiautomatic rifles.
"Semi-automatic" (or, as the British military used to call them "self-loading") rifles are ones that have a magazine (a container holding bullets attached to the gun) and which automatically (through the action of the expanding gasses of a fired round and a strong spring) load a new round from the magazine into the weapon when the weapon is fired. This is not a feature of restricted to military weapons, though most military weapons feature it. Almost all rifles and almost all pistols do this. Restricting weapons just because they are semi-automatic is not practical. Such a regulation would affect most weapons owned for perfectly legitimate hunting uses and would never get enough support to pass Congress.
Restricting weapons because they "look" like military weapons is also not practical because the look does nothing, because "style" is in the eye of the beholder and therefore hard to define, and because it can be easily changed to circumvent a law designed to limit "military style" weapons. The last assault weapons ban restricted weapons based on irrelevant features like the style of the grip or whether a rifle had military mounts--things that had nothing to do with the mass killings we have seen these weapons used in.
As scary as people seem to find the *look* of such rifles, the only relevant feature is the magazine. Most modern weapons (pistols or rifles) have detachable magazines, to allow quick reloading. The most productive restrictions on rifles would be to limit the size of the magazine that can be carried (the old assault weapons ban limited magazines to ten rounds) or, to take it one step further, to ban detachable magazines, which would force a shooter to reload a gun's magazine by hand, one shell at a time, after emptying it.
All of this doesn't get to the most significant fact, however: although rifles *look* scary (to some) and are often used in shooting massacres, these shootings constitute only a tiny fraction of the gun homicides in the US every year. Far and away the largest number of people are injured or killed, intentionally, accidentally, or through suicide, by handguns. If people want to affect the rate at which people are killed by guns, rifles are far less relevant--handguns are the place to look. And since the SCOTUS decision in Heller, which designated handguns as "an entire class of 'arms' that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense", banning handguns is a non-starter. Creative and thoughtful efforts to control who can purchase such weapons may help.
But, in the end, nothing will stop just what happened in Connecticut: an adult, non-felon citizen of (as far as anyone knows) sound mind purchased, over time, several weapons that were kept in the home and used for legitimate reasons (self-protection and target practice). And then someone stole those weapons, killed the owner, and went on to kill many other people. The only things, even under a strong and reasonable gun-control regime, that would have prevented some or all of this killing would have been the institutionalization of the shooter before he gained access to guns or an armed security officer at the school.
We can look to gun control to try ans stem the tide of killing, but we will never find a 100% solution to murder. And if we stop at guns, we will be missing some of the major elements of the tragedy that also need to be addressed.
And thanks to Nicholas Kristof for putting the lie to some hoary canards of the gun control debate and for linking to this study (PDF) that (so to speak) shoots holes in the faulty Lott research that sought to suggest that the answer to guns was more guns (it's not; in fact the researchers found that "there is stronger evidence for the conclusion that these [shall-issue] laws increase crime than there is for the conclusion that they decrease it.")
And thanks to Charles Blow for this graphic that shows how deplorably dangerous our country is in comparison to our social and economic peers.
On the other hand, a few factoids for those on the gun control side of the house.
"Assault weapons" is a meaningless term; it's a Humpty-Dumpty word, that means whatever its current speaker intends it to mean, but nothing by itself. What I gather, from watching the debate over most of my lifetime, the majority of people react adversely to are semiautomatic rifles.
"Semi-automatic" (or, as the British military used to call them "self-loading") rifles are ones that have a magazine (a container holding bullets attached to the gun) and which automatically (through the action of the expanding gasses of a fired round and a strong spring) load a new round from the magazine into the weapon when the weapon is fired. This is not a feature of restricted to military weapons, though most military weapons feature it. Almost all rifles and almost all pistols do this. Restricting weapons just because they are semi-automatic is not practical. Such a regulation would affect most weapons owned for perfectly legitimate hunting uses and would never get enough support to pass Congress.
Restricting weapons because they "look" like military weapons is also not practical because the look does nothing, because "style" is in the eye of the beholder and therefore hard to define, and because it can be easily changed to circumvent a law designed to limit "military style" weapons. The last assault weapons ban restricted weapons based on irrelevant features like the style of the grip or whether a rifle had military mounts--things that had nothing to do with the mass killings we have seen these weapons used in.
As scary as people seem to find the *look* of such rifles, the only relevant feature is the magazine. Most modern weapons (pistols or rifles) have detachable magazines, to allow quick reloading. The most productive restrictions on rifles would be to limit the size of the magazine that can be carried (the old assault weapons ban limited magazines to ten rounds) or, to take it one step further, to ban detachable magazines, which would force a shooter to reload a gun's magazine by hand, one shell at a time, after emptying it.
All of this doesn't get to the most significant fact, however: although rifles *look* scary (to some) and are often used in shooting massacres, these shootings constitute only a tiny fraction of the gun homicides in the US every year. Far and away the largest number of people are injured or killed, intentionally, accidentally, or through suicide, by handguns. If people want to affect the rate at which people are killed by guns, rifles are far less relevant--handguns are the place to look. And since the SCOTUS decision in Heller, which designated handguns as "an entire class of 'arms' that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense", banning handguns is a non-starter. Creative and thoughtful efforts to control who can purchase such weapons may help.
But, in the end, nothing will stop just what happened in Connecticut: an adult, non-felon citizen of (as far as anyone knows) sound mind purchased, over time, several weapons that were kept in the home and used for legitimate reasons (self-protection and target practice). And then someone stole those weapons, killed the owner, and went on to kill many other people. The only things, even under a strong and reasonable gun-control regime, that would have prevented some or all of this killing would have been the institutionalization of the shooter before he gained access to guns or an armed security officer at the school.
We can look to gun control to try ans stem the tide of killing, but we will never find a 100% solution to murder. And if we stop at guns, we will be missing some of the major elements of the tragedy that also need to be addressed.
