Perhaps, if possible, but even that's the long game. First how do we get there? I think Democrats are taking a sucker's position on trying to solve the problem foremost with bans and restrictions. Because that's EXACTLY where the Republicans and gun lobby want us, as the "bad guys” trying to “infringe on Second Amendment rights”.
We need a cultural wedge that instead shifts the blame onto all gun owners in general. Especially in the eyes of everyone else who is not one. Because owners want generally free and unfettered access to weapons they can now purchase.
I think the genius of the modern day fascist-leaning Republican party and their refusal to give an inch on guns has suckered Democrats into the extreme (but somewhat reasonable) position of banning weapons. And against more restrictive regulations which are truly needed in any case. Whereas instead, we should be putting the blame on gun owners in general. A blame which can be placed there because of their desire for unregulated & unrestricted demand which drives the issue.
Instead we should be making the argument that Democrats would not need to ban guns if gun owners take responsibility towards getting annual gun deaths in America down into the low hundreds annually across the country. Right? If we look at nations, in which allow similar free ownership and lenient regulations regarding mass shootings we are still far and away the worst of all. We still have far more gun deaths, and accidental discharges and threats with guns.
When we look at other nations which have had plenty of guns but now heavy regulations similar those numbers are much, much lower. Those should still be numbers we aim for. In part because we have more money available to fight poverty and beef up our justice system than any other nation, sources of the crime problem. By those standards though we should be able to achieve even lower gun violence numbers over a generation than other nations with free access to guns. I will note that we should not particularly be comparing ourselves to nations that never had anything like one gun per person. I think they need to be excluded from the data as they never had the means and are in a different category than our reality.
Continue to focus on that our goal remains to get the numbers into the high thousands or even low hundreds nationwide per capita which would be a reasonable goal in a nation of 350 million people. The 3rd largest population in the world. Which would be a significant drop in all that in itself. If gun owners want access, they must earn those achievable standards or we will continue to slowly grow numbers against them until greater restrictions occur. Although the pace remains slow. I think this different way could be much quicker. Republicans showed us that discretely suggesting cultural changes in the 1970’s and ‘80’s can quickly change huge numbers of minds in a few short years.
The point here is that the threats of banning become less and less needed if so many mass shootings become a thing of the past again. The more you ban guns the cheaper they get on the black market. If gun deaths, injuries and threats becomes rare and remains so, then the numbers of weapons available become somewhat irrelevant if over 99% are responsibly stored but usage is rare. We have ALWAYS had proportional numbers of firearms to the population. It has always been so. What has changed since the 1980’s and Columbine and the rise of the modern conservative movement is the sudden exponential rise in mass shooting gun deaths even with lower crime rates in general. It is more of a cultural issue. That is the thing that has changed, how people view firearms, how people fear crime despite decades of fewer deaths due to crime. An unrational and breathless expectation that “The government is coming to take your guns!!!” This is the group that is driving the problem.
Maybe under a fascistic authoritarian Republican government we might see actual gun roundups but that’s a story for another day…
I think more than anything we are dealing with a cultural problem. I feel that one progressive liberal YouTuber, Beau Of The Fifth Column makes the argument well while holding his realistic toy gun in this video (which is the third part of a 3 part video commentary. If you know little about firearms, or perhaps even if you think you know a lot, as a reality check you should verify, and watch the first two videos where he explains technical particularities here, and here. Particularities that have made bans not as successful as they might have been in addressing the problem. There are things about rifles which every one of us should be familiar with as knowledge is power, and he dispels various myths and misunderstandings which you should not have if you want to engage gun owners in debate and not be getting basic premises wrong). By the way, I think at this time I believe I have heard Beau has decided to abandon his real firearms.
If gun deaths, and assaults and accidental shootings were to basically begin vanishing by the numbers as an issue, the problem is solved by making gun violence fleetingly rare. This is the argument we need to make to the gun owners; that in the end it’s up to them if they don’t want bans. If bans will even be possible as Meteor Blades is warning us, they may not be soon. If bans do become illegal however, we still can use this approach as a way forward. If as a nation we advance and every year were to start making gun deaths 30%, 50%, 99% fewer by communities working together, bans become irrelevant. But gun owners need to be held accountable by every one else for not making the violence going away as a communities are generally not working with law enforcement nor in cultural circles. Gun owners often hold up that process by voting for Republicans and not feeling any heat over being the source of solutions to the problem. By our changing attitudes among the general public and making it their problem to help the country and law enforcement to solve the shoe starts fitting on a different foot. I know some guys who would vote Democratic except that, because of strict gun laws in my state of California, they feel are treated unfairly as law abiding citizens.
Admittedly, at first, this will include casting some shade law abiding Democratic gun owners. Or any truly responsible gun owner. But I would think they should also be the ones to to lead the way in accusing other irresponsible gun owners of being the problem if they don't develop a similar sense of integrity. Much of what gun owners can do is by making sure they, as a group work with law enforcement, getting guns out of the hands of gangs and criminals. Widely casting shade themselves on yahoos with guns. Or anyone not safely handling a weapon at all times. To make that fear of“confiscation” go away if gun owners as a group work with law enforcement and figure out how to turn in those people putting guns in the hands of criminals. Which honestly is a major source of the problem. Get them angry at the illegal sellers of such weapons. Make them the legitimate gun owner’s sworn enemy. Helping local and federal agencies to become trusted allies to them and not perceived threats to ownership.
Another ready made and predictable source of gun violence has been shown again and again are people who commit domestic violence. People who, if rightfully are charged with domestic violence, become subject to existing laws that prohibit them from ownership already. Owners need to have no tolerance for domestic violence even before it gets to the point of a gun. We need part of the gun culture in America to as equally readily supporting red flag laws which identify people who are likely to abuse and commit violence to others even before reaching for a gun. Including and especially cops. Owners also need to teach from a young age to turn in anyone they wouldn't trust by the way they mishandle a gun or don't secure them properly. Making such people to be a person in their eyes lower than dirt and stigmatize those who aren't extremely safe with guns. That should be something that causes other gun owners to shun them, and that one would avoid wanting to be seen as such a cretin.
Furthermore we hear that the problem isn’t guns but people with mental health issue. There is some truth to that. Again though, all of us and especially liberal gun owners, should be pushing for expansion of health care to the point that it will include for everyone, as part of annual health prevention, to be able and encouraged to sit down with a therapist or for psychological or life counseling a couple times a year as regularly as dental checks should be. And no more stigmatic. We need government funding for this and continued counseling. Even if you are happy and well adjusted having a chat a couple times a year where can turn to issues, large and small, for advice about dealing with family, friends, co-workers could be beneficial for anyone. As first a liberal and eventually any gun owner you should demonstrate that you are a responsible owner and willingly submit to such mental health checks. Helping people deal with depression, opiates, frustrations that seem to go unresolved can prevent people from becoming more unstable as years go on which if prevented will help stem the tide. “I ain’t gonna be a crazy person having my guns around” should be a gun owner’s badge of honor.
Moreover I think it’s important to separate out suicide by gun as its own problem which needs different solutions. Proper support and mental health without stigmatization reducing depression and despair across America could greatly reduce the use of firearms for that purpose. Other people deal with terminal physical anguish from disease and unless we have other ways to alleviate the suffering guns will remain the number one solution. That’s its own thread and problem in general. Although it does apply here tangentially as well let’s take that off the table as a distraction against gun violence and threats towards others.
Again I firmly believe the issue is more cultural than anything. It is part of the conservative-authoritarian cultural stealth project to keep most Americans distracted from the fact that maybe 750 American billionaires and a few hundred thousand other people that enable them are potentially hoarding many times the money and assets than the 99% possess. This is not a non-sequitur. I believe this is the root cause for keeping people off guard and distracted from such obvious true failure of government by keeping us all at each other’s throats by manufactured cultural means. Such as with our current gun culture.
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The Good News Is that notion leads me to the point to where there is a another thing we can do, are starting to do, to help make all this possible. A thing which, because of legislative successes in 2022, the ACA, the legalization of gay marriage, and perhaps also with Donald Trump and his cohorts possibly facing real justice, we are already are underway to begin undermining perhaps the most noxious part of conservative gun culture. Distrust in all government. Any time we get majorities in government we need to to make lives of the bottom 60% of Americans improve rapidly. Become much much better. Which will also raise living standards eventually for the entire bottom 90% citizens unfairly kept from our fair share of economic resources. Immediately focus on the bottom third of earners and quickly escalating to the bottom 60% of Americans. To offer reasons for the doubters to regain trust again in government and possess demonstrable benefits from government.
We need Democrats whenever we get control of the federal and state governments to rapidly roll out New Deal, Great Society, post-Keynesian economics in two year spurts as much as possible. With high wages labor policies, minimum wages. Aggressive taxation and regulation of mega corporations and high wealth regulating policies to put government in a good light again to a majority of Americans. To start to win the trust of more people who can afford to own weapons.
To make government a source a very good return on your tax dollar which winds up in your paychecks, or benefits or economic environment. And redistribute legally stolen wealth and have the trillions hoarded by the wealthiest and most profitable put back into the hands of most Americans giving us the benefits of those asset values instead which don’t exist without our labor and purchases.
We need to do these things to turbo boost an undoing of the unreasonableness of the fear-based gun culture of government. And acknowledge that trying to eliminate 400 million firearms, if it ever happens, will take generations. Instead we need to make the need for gun ownership less and less essential for safety.
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Honestly We Need Liberal and any other responsible safety conscious gun owners and our representatives to lead the way. Another point of good news regarding the gun culture however is that, in fact, much of this line of thinking came to me from hearing time and again concerns of even some illiberal gun owners who hate the mass shootings. Even small ones of 3 or 4 people. And will rail to you against all and any irresponsibility with handling and owning firearms. Not having a gun safety training or proper handling or cleaning regimens. The good news is that for many owners these attitudes are already in place. We need to accelerate them. This is why they see Democrats as the “bad guys” when many of these people will quote you chapter and verse about responsible gun ownership when they are trying to do the right things. They actually gave me the idea for this model of owners needing to self-organize a drive to bring gun deaths and threats and injuries and in America as close to zero as possible. For their own benefit.
If you say you are a responsible gun owner help us to combat unreasonable fears of (mostly) non-existent government seizure of legal firearms. We need a culture that is willing to make it a standard of responsibility to register make training mandatory and ponying up for some liability insurance. Leading other owners to want to show they are not part of the problem.
Until then the drive to ban will continue and if they want it to go away it’s their responsibility to do so. THEN I think we are able to start making it a reality to do things about firearms such as:
prohibit their manufacture or sale in the US, require the safe storage of all such weapons, prohibit their being carried in public except if unloaded and rendered unoperational. For any violation, confiscate them for public safety. No case sanctifies these weapons as protected by the Second Amendment.
But again, as the Forbes article points out even if that happened tomorrow it’s only solving a small slice of the problem. We need to ultimately focus less in the impossible banning of 400 million guns and instead of changing radical gun and social culture in reasonable ways to where safety and sporting and a secure culture to where a person can assume they will go through life without needing to use their firearms in defense. We need the average gun owner to realize that they are being railroaded by the gun lobby and most of the gun crowd they belong to. Because they’re getting a free ride. When they should be the edge of the blade against gratuitous gun violence and as a community should be expected to stand up against it. And against the gun lobby which is driving the Democratic party into a corner where it seems like bans are the only thing we have left to push back against the cultural cancer that has become escalating gun violence and threat.
We need the rest of the public to hold them to account instead for gun restrictions, not the Democratic party.
