25 November 2017
Gun Control
There have been two mass shootings in the news recently. The rhetoric about reducing gun ownership has ratcheted up.
Some things to remember:
The total death toll from all mass shootings in the entire country over the last three decades is only about as bad as 2012’s murder count in Chicago alone. (Steve Sailer).
Which crimes are we really talking about when we demand gun control?
99 percent of the homicides in this country are… ordinary crimes, many of them involving no firearms at all. The ones that do involve firearms overwhelmingly involve ordinary, common handguns, not exotic long guns.
If you want to restrict firearms access in a way that has a real impact on American violence, then you need to be honest about what that means: a general prohibition on common firearms and the seizure of millions of such arms already in private hands.
The reality is that guns will not be banned in the United States.
A cracked malcontent and conspiracy nut killed three times as many people in Oklahoma City as were killed in Las Vegas, without using any firearms at all.
Nineteen fanatics with box cutters killed thousands on September 11, 2001. In the United Kingdom and Europe, the jihadists have taken to driving trucks into crowds of people.
Restricting the magazine capacity on a .223 rifle isn’t going to change any of that, and it won’t do anything to change the overwhelming majority of ordinary homicides, either.
Possible solutions:
- The government should start prosecuting straw-buyer cases. Right now, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago has a policy of refusing to prosecute straw-buyer cases unless they are part of a bigger arms-trafficking case.
- More aggressively prosecute gun-related violent crimes short of homicide, including jail time for illegal possession convictions.
- The overwhelming majority of the murders in our big cities are committed by men with prior criminal histories, which could be addressed by better probation and parole systems and better mental health care.