Simple. My criteria is lethality. A person can easily kill a few people with a handgun or two. He could also do it with a car, a pipe bomb, or any number of ways. With a semi or auto rifle at stand off range that same person could kill many more people than he likely could with a handgun. Legitimate uses of semi auto and auto rifles and shotguns beyond killing large numbers of people are very limited. The trade off isn’t worth it.
-
Gun ownership should be predicated on taking and passing a gun safety course. The NRA provides such courses, interestingly enough.
-
I’m fine with “shall issue” – that anyone who has passed the beforementioned gun safety course is legally entitled to purchase, own, and register a firearm – but it should indeed be registered. Registration should accompany purchase.
-
Guns and bullets alike should have some kind of serial numbers or codes that make it possible to trace purchases.
-
There should be harsh penalties for selling or otherwise conveying firearms outside of a registered and tracked procedure. There should be (and already is, I believe) an array of pretty harsh penalties for misuse of a firearm (to threaten or intimidate as well as to use it in the commission of a theft or other crime).
Make an American solution.
Firearm owners need to have insurance *akin *to automobile owners (and thank you in advance for not feeling the need to point out that guns are not automobiles).
Responsible firearm owners are legally responsible for their firearms. Government does NOT mandate how owners secure a firearm at home, but requires them to have insurance in the event there is an accident or otherwise.
Firearm owners are responsible for their firearm. No ifs ands or buts, until the firearm is legally transferred to someone else. That means, firearm owner cannot loan, give, leave out or otherwise provide a 3rd party access to the firearm without legal and civil responsibility. Legally sell your firearm to someone else with a legal transfer, then it’s not your responsibility. If it’s lost or stolen, once it’s reported to the police then it’s not your responsibility. Good ol’ “cousin” Johnny down the street wants to borrow it for a while, well then you are criminally and civilly responsible until their is a legal transfer of ownership.
Won’t fix all problems. But should reduce private sales and irresponsible gun owners over time.
The trouble with this is that it doesn’t leave room for all the legitimate ( civilian ) needs of spraying out 100 rounds per minute.
Yes, but the issue with a lot of the higher-profile mass shooters is the ease with which they assemble large arsenals. I’d like to see these attacks made into less of a crime of opportunity.
It has been clarified. The line isn’t blurry at all, at least in the eyes of the law, and the ATF disagrees with your opinion.
Yes. No argument. But if I am proposing new laws, I am also changing definitions. That’s a small rifle, by the laws I propose.
If I might make a suggestion, instead of semi-auto pistols but not rifles, how about no semi-auto weapons chambered in a cartridge with more than x joules of energy. Semi-auto .22 rimfire, but no semi-auto .30-06. Not sure exactly where the line would go but somewhere below .223.
Good post, but I’m mostly focuses on the insurance angle right now. What happens to a person without health insurance who is shot by a criminal? Who pays for their healthcare, or are they just left with the bill?
Even if they have insurance, why should their insurance pool have to pay out due to the actions of a criminal with a gun?
IF they are killed, and they don’t have life insurance, who takes care of their families, or at least pays for their funeral?
So, yeah, mandatory insurance on guns that pays for the healthcare and rehabilitation of anyone injured in gun violence, as well as death benefits to family of dead victims. If you own a gun, you pay into the fund that pays for these medical bills, rehab bills, and disability payments to those too injured to work anymore. Get caught without insurance, lose you gun privileges for a bit, just like driving and insurance. Get caught again, privileges are suspended longer, and a third time, you have proven that you don’t have the proper level of responsibility to own and carry a gun.
Responsible gun owners would be encouraging other responsible gun owners to pay their insurance, as no one likes a free rider. Gun owners would also be looking for ways to reduce gun deaths and injuries, as those increase the insurance premiums.
It’s a good thought. a heavy caliber is potentially a lot more damaging than a lighter one. No debate there.
The reason I went the other direction is that getting shot, period is potentially lethal. My family has a lot of ex military types and police in it, and I was taught to shoot and handle firearms at an early age. One thing that came through was a disdain for heavy calibers. Typically you want to use the lightest caliber for whatever application you have, that you can. Why? A heavier caliber weapon is a lot harder to shoot well. These things kick. My concealed carry gun is a Walther p22. With it, I can put a lot of bullets downrange accurately in a short period of time. I will routinely see people at the range who insist on using hand cannons. They have a lot tougher time getting bullets into the target accurately at range and speed. People get caught up on stopping power, but I think it’s overrated Rambo tripe.
A lot of people have these assault rifles that are chambered in .22 because they are really easy and accurate to shoot. I think their lethality at short to medium ranges is very high, probably higher than a heavier caliber which is harder to shoot and where a magazine will fit fewer rounds.
For me, I am more concerned about the ability to put massive amounts of rounds downrange quickly than I am about the size of the holes they make. I am most concerned with auto and semi auto rifles with huge magazines, less concerned with handguns with smaller magazines and less accuracy. I think lethality is going to first be a function of number of rounds fired, and secondly of their stopping power. The thing that really needs to be stopped are these “fire hose” weapons that can kill and injure massive numbers of people.
Fair enough. I was figuring that a standard based on muzzle energy would be a nice clear, objective test. Classifying certain firearms as pistols vs rifles is going to get messy, especially if you want your rifle category to capture things like the AR pistol.
Ok. But let me give you an example of why this doesn’t work. My favorite gun isn’t even a gun. I have a Condor SS. This a precharged pneumatic pellet gun. It shoots .25 caliber pellets, powered by basically a mini scuba tank of air at around 3,000 psi. Google it. It’s really cool. I use it for target practice and for vermin. For the latter I shoot these barracuda pellets with sharp little plastic tips. They penetrate and the lead spreads out. This thing is good for shooting golf balls at 100 yards. I think I get like 30 fpe from the gun which is laughable by firearm standards. But I use it for groundhogs comfortable in a humane kill. People use these to take down feral hogs in the southern suburbs because they are quiet and you can adjust the power so that they are not deadly for miles. I’ve heard people using them for deer.
You can have a very serious and dangerous weapon shooting light rounds with little energy.
On the other side of the coin some of these stupid hand cannons have phenomenal energy, but they fire a big slug from a small barrel and they start tumbling immediately. They have terrible accuracy and they are bleeding all that phenomenal energy instantly.
All things being equal more energy is more lethality, but in my opinion things are far from equal.
Manufacturers will simply adopt a cartridge that is a smidge below that line, and it’ll be just about as lethal as a .223. This suggestion won’t accomplish much of anything useful, imho. Would you try to do anything about the many millions of semi-auto rifles already in private hands that are above that line?
Actually, going door-to-door and confiscating alcoholic beverages is exactly what the government did during Prohibition.
You are misunderstanding my suggestion. I was proposing that Scylla’s plan to allow semi-auto pistols but ban semi-auto rifles might be better using an objective standard rather than the potentially subjective line between pistols and rifles. I also didn’t propose any specific muzzle energy, merely noting that it would be somewhere below .223.
I am personally not in favour of banning semi-autos in the first place, though I suppose I might be convinced. I have no idea what Scylla plans to do about existing semi-auto rifles.
Sorry, my bad. Thanks for the clarification.
How does this work practically? I’m imagining something like auto insurance (which is the analogy that’s been used). But, if I’m hit by a stolen car, I generally can’t make a claim against the car owner’s insurance. And if I’m hit by someone who cannot legally drive, they likely don’t have insurance anyway.
So, they question becomes, how many deaths/injuries are caused by people who lawfully own firearms and would be likely to obtain insurance? I’m imagining “crimes of passion” (perhaps domestic violence). Certainly a policy that would include accidental injuries from negligently stored weapons (i.e., a child gets the firearm). I would imagine that the policy would exclude suicides for the same reason life insurance often does.
The insurance idea sounds fine, but I’m not sure it creates a situation where a significant number of those gun violence victims have a claim. It probably does incentivize reducing accidental injuries.
About 33,000 Americans are killed by guns every year.
Approximately 22,000 of them are suicides. 90% of gun suicide attempts “succeed”, so there are maybe 2000 survivors a year who would need to be supported. Most suicidal people are fairly isolated, but if we’re giving benefits to surviving family members, the vast majority of insurance payouts would be in that category. I don’t know, but I’m guessing most suicides are committed with legally owned guns.
Almost all of the rest are homicides. About 1700 of them are women, mostly victims of domestic violence, but the vast majority are men, with young and black men being greatly overrepresented. I don’t know how many of those were impulsive acts by previously law-abiding citizens; my guess is that a lot are but most aren’t. Of course, a lot of the domestic violence is probably being committed by non-law abiding people as well.
Considered as an independent category, the next largest group of victims are civilians killed by law enforcement, about 1000 per year. I’m sure the discussion of whether to cover them will go well.
Less than a thousand deaths a year are reported as accidental, though there are some doubts about the reliability of the data, so maybe more than a thousand. Again, I’m guessing most of these are legal guns, but I’m sure a lot aren’t.
Next on the list are victims of terrorism and mass shootings, and the smallest group is law enforcement killed in the line of duty.
So, if benefits are confined to those who have paid into the fund, the vast majority will go to the survivors of suicides. If they are excluded, the benefits will probably apply to only 4 or 5 thousand people a year, so, yeah, a relatively insignificant number. If benefits are not so confined, and suicide is excluded, several thousand more people will benefit, but a large proportion of them will be people with significant criminal records.
But having written that, I realize it accounts only for deaths, and not to survivors. I don’t have data for the number of people who survive attempted homicide or accidents and require care, but clearly there must be many thousand of them a year.
So, in light of the above and relevant to the OP:
Gun control laws aren’t going to do much for the largest category, the suicides. All you need is a cheap handgun and one bullet. That needs to be addressed by a general suicide prevention program, part of which should be a public service campaign informing people that owning a gun for home or personal protection is much more dangerous than not doing so (almost entirely due to increased risk of suicide, secondarily to increased risk of accident; the actual incidence of law-abiding citizens using guns to protect themselves from criminals is much smaller). Just as with alcohol and tobacco, severe limits should also be put on the gun industry’s ability to advertise.
Likewise, most of the homicides need to be addressed by measures aimed at reducing the crime rate in general, in particular economic development in black communities. Serious measures to keep guns out of the hands of people with criminal records are also indicated. We should have a comprehensive national database and tracking program for guns to ensure that nobody with a disqualifying conviction can get one, and all transfers without exception need to be reported. Also, there need to be limits on the number of guns that can be purchased at one time. Here in Chicago, gangs get their guns largely by having members without criminal records drive half an hour to Indiana and buy them by the dozen. Thanks, Federalism!
But short of banning handguns, it will be hard to stop anyone who’s really determined to shoot a particular person or group thereof. Gun control laws obviously won’t stop police from shooting people, so that’s a separate issue.
So let’s concentrate on the mass shootings. This is a relatively small category, but it does seem to be an area where laws could be helpful. Also, let’s be honest, it’s the one that scares most of us the most. If we don’t have a gun in our house and don’t associate with criminals, our chance of getting shot is pretty low, particularly if we’re white. But this is a risk factor we can’t do anything about. Outlaw the type of guns people use to do shit like that. I’m not going to get drawn into debates about exactly how to define those guns, but I like Scylla’s idea that it should be defined by an overall measure of lethality rather than by features of the guns themselves. Say that law-abiding citizens who can pass a basic safety test can own guns that would let them kill, say, twelve people by firing randomly into a crowd. If people think that’s not enough freedom, I could negotiate up to maybe twenty.
I understand that criminals already have a lot of guns, and there are a lot of weapons already in circulation that run afoul of the paragraph above, and not even generous buyback programs will convince many of their owners to turn them in. So we need to be realistic that we won’t see instant results from these laws, but that is what I would propose.
But the people you are trying to convince do not believe that owning a gun for home or personal protection is more dangerous than not doing so. They believe they are safer by owning a gun for home or personal protection then they would be without one.