If we’re to reduce gun violence in America, which I think is ineluctably connected to the easy availability of guns, it will have to be a bottom-up phenomenon. We can’t count on the Supreme Court, which has construed the Second Amendment as allowing a “right” for private citizens to own guns, nor can we count on initiatives from the federal government, whose legislators are under the thumb of the National Rifle Association. No, we have to develop an anti-gun sentiment among the people, and, given that half of Americans think gun rights are more important than gun control (see recent Pew survey here), and that view is growing, I’m not optimistic:
But at least in some more liberal places, there are ways to control guns through stringent regulation. One of them is San Francisco, where High Bridge Arms, the last gun shop in the city, is closing. Why? Because of stringent regulations, both real and impending, as well as restrictions on the sale of ammunition. As the Associated Press notes,
. . . the breaking point came this summer when a local politician proposed a law that would require High Bridge Arms to video record every gun sale and submit a weekly report of ammunition sales to the police. If passed, the law would join several local gun control ordinances on the books in a city still scarred by the 1993 murder of eight in a downtown high-rise and the 1978 assassination of Mayor George Moscone and gay rights activist Harvey Milk.
. . . In the end, [store manager Steve] Alcairo said, he and the High Bridge Arms owner tired of the continued opposition and mountains of paperwork required by the San Francisco Police Department, state Department of Justice and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
and, from Fox News (whose headline for this item is “Surrender”):
Past regulations have required the shop to bar ads and displays from its windows and install cameras and barriers around its exterior. The shop has 17 cameras as it is, and turns video over to police on request, he said.
“This time, it’s the idea of filming our customers taking delivery of items after they already completed waiting periods,” Alcairo said. “We feel this is a tactic designed to discourage customers from coming to us.
The only reason such regulations exist is because the San Francisco City Council sees a connection between gun control and gun violence. The City Supervisor, Mark Farrell, asked the city’s district attorney to draft the camel’s-back legislation because “easy access to guns and ammunition continue to contribute to senseless violent crime here in San Francisco and across the country.”
Of course San Francisco is hardly representative of the U.S. as a whole, but it does show the way forward. Given strong enough public sentiment against lax gun laws, cities can draft constitutional legislation restricting guns and ammunition stringently enough to reduce the availability of firearms. And it can happen on a national level: the history of gun control in Britain, for instance, shows that more and more laws can take a society once ridden with firearms down to one in which guns are rare. There is, for example, no “right” in the UK that allows guns for self-defense. (One must give a valid reason for wanting to own a gun.) Besides banning all automatic and most semiautomatic weapons, as well nearly all handguns, the following is permitted (with strict licensing):
All other rifles and their ammunition are permitted with no limits as to magazine size, to include: target shooting, hunting, and historic and muzzle-loading weapons, as well as long barrelled breachloading pistols with a specific overall length, but not for self-defence; however if a home-owner is threatened they may be used in self-defence, so long as the force is reasonable.
(There are strict laws against illegal possession of ammunition as well.)
And of course gun violence is far rarer per capita in the UK than in the US.
Meanwhile, Ben Carson continues to utter the Republican mantra; here’s a snippet from his public Facebook page:
The striking phrase is, of course, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” But the “right to arm ourselves” produces a lot of bullet holes, and how can one even compare the mental devastation of seeing a bullet-riddled body (especially if you knew the person) with the “devastation” of contemplation a revoked Second Amendment?
How many tragedies will it take before Americans realize that yes, people do kill people, but they often use guns, and those guns help people kill more people than they could with, say, knives or arrows. Will we have to become a Wild West, with all Americans toting a pistol strapped to their waist, before we try to ratchet down the folly that is gun ownership in the U.S.?
