1. We should reinstate the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (which expired in 2004.)
Now, studies have shown that this ban didn’t have much impact on overall gun deaths (since gun deaths that only impact 1 or 2 people are so so common.) However, there is evidence that it helped prevent mass shooting events.
A 2019 DiMaggio et al. study looked at mass shooting data for 1981 to 2017 and found that mass-shooting fatalities were 70% less likely to occur during the 1994 to 2004 federal ban period. This didn’t stop all mass shooting events, obviously (the spike you see in 1999 is Columbine.) But it is an improvement. You don’t get to own a grenade launcher or a tank. Maybe its time we took AR 15s and the like off the table. (For cops too, for the record.)
2. Universal background checks.
In 2015, a national Public Policy Polling survey of gun owners found overwhelming support (83%) for background checks, a 2018 Gallup poll found that 95% of people supported “requiring background checks for all gun sales,” and in 2019, a Quinnipiac University poll from 2019 found that 94% of American voters supported universal background checks.
These are popular and obvious steps forward.
3. No more permitless carry.
Texas has a permitless carry law. This legislation allows individuals 21 and older to carry open or concealed handguns without a permit. This means that most Texans no longer have to undergo a background check or complete training in order to carry a handgun in public.
This is, obviously, fucking lunacy. You have to pass a test to get a driver’s license. You even have to pass different tests to drive different kinds of vehicles.
The same should *obviously* apply to firearms. Just. Obviously. A test for rifles, a test for hand guns, a background check for either, you only get to buy what you have a license for.
4. Inspections
Ok, so this is the most logistically and legally complicated, so it would be the one that we would need to work up to. Yeah? But I know Japan has a similar system, and yes. We are much bigger and own a lot more guns than Japan, so I know I know. But let’s talk about it.
I have to get my car inspected every year. Make sure the brakes work and the engine won’t explode. Yeah? For public safety.
So, let’s say every year (3 years? 5 years? I don’t know the logistics here) someone from the county comes out, checks that your guns are in good working order, that your gun safe is in good repair (that you aren’t stockpiling a bunch of illegal ground to air missiles and land mines)- that everything is on the up and up and safe.
5. Gun buybacks.
Gun buybacks are straight forward systems to help get excess guns out of a community in a safe and legal way. A robust and generous federal buyback, like what Australia did in 1996 and 2003 would be a simple and easy step.
I’m not saying that we ban all guns. I’m not saying that no one never has any legitimate reason to own a gun. But this wild west mutually assured destruction arms race that America is currently in against itself is eating us alive. Eating our children. And there are simple, tested, popular steps forward.
American history is largely one of armed white men using organized, state-sanctioned, domestic terrorism that targeted Native Americans, Black people, and other non-white Americans. Calling any non-white race inherently violent is a gross act of projection, erasure, and an attempt to whitewash history.
Listen I’m a responsible gun owner and I hunt for food, like the deer we take in November feeds us for most of the year, and I will get really strong learning how to draw a bow or submit to any amount of fees or fines or testing, or just figure out how to raise chickens or something, if it means kids are safe, ok
Hunting weapons are not whats being used to wholesale slaughter civilians here, and we all know it!
Let americans have all the surrogate penis guns they want: just rigidly control, tax, monitor, and license access to ammunition.
No one’s shooting up crowds with a bolt-action .30-06. There’s a very specific subset of weapons these losers use to enact their batshit cowboy fantasies and we all know it. We desperately need to curb them. Our politicians just won’t fucking DO anything about it, and until they do, we’re forced to live under threat of terrorism.
Do some people hunt with ARs? Yeah, sure, and I think they’re losers too if they’re not mowing down feral pigs (in which case use a fucking chain gun for all I care, but those too should be HEAVILY FUCKIN’ REGULATED). But time and again and again and again and again it’s the end fucking guns used by white terrorists in the US.
Japan has a pretty savvy setup: guns are easy to come by, but ammo isn’t; IIRC, you have to account for every single shell, and you don’t get more until you’ve used—and documented the use of—what you’ve got. If we did things that way, the insecure gunfucker 2A fetishists could stop squealing like stuck pigs about MUH FREEDUMB and the rest of us could do normal people things without worrying about white terrorism so damn much.
