ChairborneRanger
Member
A surprisingly honest and candid opinion piece from an unexpected source. Not to say that it will do anything to stop efforts to make firearm ownership as difficult and as painful as possible...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/opinion/ar15-assault-weapon-ban.html
Opinion
It’s Too Late to Ban Assault Weapons
The half-life of military-style rifles ensures they’ll be with us for many generations. Time to deal with the world as it is.
By Alex Kingsbury
Mr. Kingsbury is a member of the editorial board.
Image
CreditCreditJeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket, via Getty Images
With proper care and maintenance, an AR-15 rifle manufactured today will fire just as effectively in the year 2119 and probably for decades after that.
There are currently around 15 million military-style rifles in civilian hands in the United States. They are very rarely used in suicides or crimes. But when they are, the bloodshed is appalling.
Acknowledging the grim reality that we will live among these guns indefinitely is a necessary first step toward making the nation safer. Frustratingly, calling for military-style rifles bans — as I have done for years — may be making other lifesaving gun laws harder to pass.
President Trump on Wednesday — touring two mass shooting sites in Ohio and Texas — said that “there is no political appetite” for a new ban of assault weapons. Never mind that a majority of Americans support such a ban.
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David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.
Short of forced confiscation or a major cultural shift, our great-great-great-grandchildren will live side-by-side with the guns we have today and make tomorrow. That also means that we’re far closer to the beginning of the plague of mass public shootings with military-style weapons than we are to the end. Little wonder that major companies are now including mass shootings in their risk to shareholder filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Common-sense gun control measures can and do reduce accidental gun deaths and injuries, domestic violence-related deaths, homicides and suicides. Failure to enact nationwide mandatory comprehensive background checks, safe storage rules, red flag laws and robust licensing systems like those passed in Massachusetts is political negligence that will flabbergast future generations. How could they have allowed the sale of those weapons to civilians in the first place? Why didn’t they do anything about it after the mass murders began?
Laws that make it safer for Americans to coexist with weapons won’t remove the contamination of military-style weapons from society, but they will certainly save some lives.
Not only is confiscation politically untenable — the compliance rates of gun owners when bans are passed are laughably low. The distribution of these weapons across society makes even their prohibition nearly impossible. In 1996, Australia launched a mandatory gun buyback of 650,000 military-style weapons. While gun ownership per capita in the country declined by more than 20 percent, today Australians own more guns than they did before the buyback. New Zealand’s leaders, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, launched a compulsory buyback effort for the tens of thousands of military-style weapons estimated to be in the country.
For context: In 2016 alone, more than one million military-style weapons were added to America’s existing civilian arsenal, according to industry estimates.
Not only are the number of total guns in America orders of magnitude larger than other nations, the political imagination is far less ambitious. Consider a federal assault weapons ban that Democrats introduced this year. It is purely a messaging bill since there was no chance it will win support from Republicans and become law. Yet even this thought experiment falls far short: The bill bans military-style weapons, except for the millions of military-style weapons already in circulation.
America’s gun problem is far larger than military-style weapons, the mass killer’s rifle of choice. There are hundreds of millions of handguns in the country that take far, far more lives — both homicides and suicides. Given the quality of modern manufacturing, a great many of those guns will also be operational a century from now.
A protestor at a rally in El Paso on Wednesday.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Thinking about guns as an environmental contaminant is useful in considering the threat they pose to ours and future generations. Like radioactive waste, a gun is most often handled safely. Depending on the type, it poses varying levels of harm to humans.
I put the idea of guns as an environmental contaminant to John Rosenthal, a gun owner and founder of Stop Handgun Violence. Mr. Rosenthal, whose early activism included being jailed for civil disobedience at nuclear power and weapons facilities, noted that, given the potential lethality of their products to humans over time, it is not surprising that both the nuclear industry (in 1957) and the gun industry (in 2005) secured federal legislation to help limit their liability.
Like many actual environmental contaminants, guns are not evenly distributed throughout the country. Nearly one-third of residents of the United States own a gun, two-thirds of gun owners own more than one and nearly half of all firearms in civilian hands are owned by 3 percent of the population. More than 60 percent of households in Alaska contain a firearm, while fewer than 6 percent of homes in Delaware can say the same, according to one study. Alaska has among the highest gun death rates per capita in the nation. More access to guns, more gun injuries and deaths.
The only way to cut the half-life of guns is to convince Americans that they’re safer without them. Yet with violent crime at historic lows and Americans still buying up semiautomatic rifles by the bushel, it’s tough to see what it will take to stop the spending. Meanwhile, fears about gun bans cause even more guns to flow into civilian circulation.
Those of us hoping for a major generational shift on guns are courting disappointment. Younger Americans are far less likely to own guns than in previous generations, but those who do are more zealous about them.
This doesn’t mean that cultural change isn’t possible in the long term. Perhaps children forced to participate in active shooter drills in kindergarten will develop a generational loathing of the weapons. Perhaps people who inherit arsenals from their relatives will dispose of the guns responsibly. Perhaps financial incentives like a tax on guns per household, tax credits for buybacks or mandating that gun owners carry special insurance could move the needle slightly. We already know that even modest efforts to remove environmental contaminants from a community are worth it.
Perhaps if gun control advocates frankly acknowledge that military-style rifles are going to be present in American society for many generations to come, it will help assuage fears of mass confiscation and give gun owners the space they need to support sensible safeguards that will save lives.
The guns — even those that make mass murders more deadly — are here to stay.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/opinion/ar15-assault-weapon-ban.html
Opinion
It’s Too Late to Ban Assault Weapons
The half-life of military-style rifles ensures they’ll be with us for many generations. Time to deal with the world as it is.
By Alex Kingsbury
Mr. Kingsbury is a member of the editorial board.
- Aug. 9, 2019
Image
CreditCreditJeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket, via Getty Images
With proper care and maintenance, an AR-15 rifle manufactured today will fire just as effectively in the year 2119 and probably for decades after that.
There are currently around 15 million military-style rifles in civilian hands in the United States. They are very rarely used in suicides or crimes. But when they are, the bloodshed is appalling.
Acknowledging the grim reality that we will live among these guns indefinitely is a necessary first step toward making the nation safer. Frustratingly, calling for military-style rifles bans — as I have done for years — may be making other lifesaving gun laws harder to pass.
President Trump on Wednesday — touring two mass shooting sites in Ohio and Texas — said that “there is no political appetite” for a new ban of assault weapons. Never mind that a majority of Americans support such a ban.
Sign up for David Leonhardt's newsletter
David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.
Short of forced confiscation or a major cultural shift, our great-great-great-grandchildren will live side-by-side with the guns we have today and make tomorrow. That also means that we’re far closer to the beginning of the plague of mass public shootings with military-style weapons than we are to the end. Little wonder that major companies are now including mass shootings in their risk to shareholder filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Common-sense gun control measures can and do reduce accidental gun deaths and injuries, domestic violence-related deaths, homicides and suicides. Failure to enact nationwide mandatory comprehensive background checks, safe storage rules, red flag laws and robust licensing systems like those passed in Massachusetts is political negligence that will flabbergast future generations. How could they have allowed the sale of those weapons to civilians in the first place? Why didn’t they do anything about it after the mass murders began?
Laws that make it safer for Americans to coexist with weapons won’t remove the contamination of military-style weapons from society, but they will certainly save some lives.
Not only is confiscation politically untenable — the compliance rates of gun owners when bans are passed are laughably low. The distribution of these weapons across society makes even their prohibition nearly impossible. In 1996, Australia launched a mandatory gun buyback of 650,000 military-style weapons. While gun ownership per capita in the country declined by more than 20 percent, today Australians own more guns than they did before the buyback. New Zealand’s leaders, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, launched a compulsory buyback effort for the tens of thousands of military-style weapons estimated to be in the country.
For context: In 2016 alone, more than one million military-style weapons were added to America’s existing civilian arsenal, according to industry estimates.
Not only are the number of total guns in America orders of magnitude larger than other nations, the political imagination is far less ambitious. Consider a federal assault weapons ban that Democrats introduced this year. It is purely a messaging bill since there was no chance it will win support from Republicans and become law. Yet even this thought experiment falls far short: The bill bans military-style weapons, except for the millions of military-style weapons already in circulation.
America’s gun problem is far larger than military-style weapons, the mass killer’s rifle of choice. There are hundreds of millions of handguns in the country that take far, far more lives — both homicides and suicides. Given the quality of modern manufacturing, a great many of those guns will also be operational a century from now.
A protestor at a rally in El Paso on Wednesday.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Thinking about guns as an environmental contaminant is useful in considering the threat they pose to ours and future generations. Like radioactive waste, a gun is most often handled safely. Depending on the type, it poses varying levels of harm to humans.
I put the idea of guns as an environmental contaminant to John Rosenthal, a gun owner and founder of Stop Handgun Violence. Mr. Rosenthal, whose early activism included being jailed for civil disobedience at nuclear power and weapons facilities, noted that, given the potential lethality of their products to humans over time, it is not surprising that both the nuclear industry (in 1957) and the gun industry (in 2005) secured federal legislation to help limit their liability.
Like many actual environmental contaminants, guns are not evenly distributed throughout the country. Nearly one-third of residents of the United States own a gun, two-thirds of gun owners own more than one and nearly half of all firearms in civilian hands are owned by 3 percent of the population. More than 60 percent of households in Alaska contain a firearm, while fewer than 6 percent of homes in Delaware can say the same, according to one study. Alaska has among the highest gun death rates per capita in the nation. More access to guns, more gun injuries and deaths.
The only way to cut the half-life of guns is to convince Americans that they’re safer without them. Yet with violent crime at historic lows and Americans still buying up semiautomatic rifles by the bushel, it’s tough to see what it will take to stop the spending. Meanwhile, fears about gun bans cause even more guns to flow into civilian circulation.
Those of us hoping for a major generational shift on guns are courting disappointment. Younger Americans are far less likely to own guns than in previous generations, but those who do are more zealous about them.
This doesn’t mean that cultural change isn’t possible in the long term. Perhaps children forced to participate in active shooter drills in kindergarten will develop a generational loathing of the weapons. Perhaps people who inherit arsenals from their relatives will dispose of the guns responsibly. Perhaps financial incentives like a tax on guns per household, tax credits for buybacks or mandating that gun owners carry special insurance could move the needle slightly. We already know that even modest efforts to remove environmental contaminants from a community are worth it.
Perhaps if gun control advocates frankly acknowledge that military-style rifles are going to be present in American society for many generations to come, it will help assuage fears of mass confiscation and give gun owners the space they need to support sensible safeguards that will save lives.
The guns — even those that make mass murders more deadly — are here to stay.
