I really just don’t see it happening any time in the near future here. Guns are one of those sorts of issues where all but the most hardcore opponents of guns just aren’t that fanatical about it, but there’s a lot of people who are passionate about them, and that passion wins out in both money and votes. This is further complicated by the fact that even most opponents will say that the Second Amendment guarantees us the right to own guns, and the Supreme Court and the DoJ have both come out strongly in agreement with that. And, beyond that, guns are a significant part of our culture from the American Revolution and the Forefathers writing the Second Amendment, to the Wild West, to American fascination with wars, and that guns very much just represent to Americans freedom.
But here’s the thing, where a lot of other countries might have a tragedy like the Aurora shooting and react with stronger gun laws, Americans will react very much the opposite. Our culture tends to distrust government and, agree or not, when this sort of thing happens rather than crying out to the government to do something, Americans will tend to do it themselves. That’s why gun sales increased after the shooting rather than decreased.
Ultimately, guns and gun control have just become one of those issues, like abortion, that politicians have largely learned to back away from because it’s not going to change and it will only lose votes. People will more or less assume that you are pro-gun or anti-gun based on where you’re from and/or what party you’re a member of, so if they really care strongly one way or the other, they’re already voting for the party that traditionally supports it, so all you do is run the risk of alienating more moderate people.
So, really, short of like someone running into the Capital and shooting up Congress I just don’t see gun control really being taken seriously.
I don’t think it will ever change. We have just come to accept these incidents pretty much the same way that we accept floods or hurricanes; they happen from time to time, we feel bad about them and then we forget about them. While the numbers were high this past week, it is not at all uncommon to hear about a workplace shooting of a few people every month or so. Culturally, we have accepted these incidents as the cost for our gun laws. Personally, I think it is an absurd cost, but I’m in the minority.
High profile incidents like the Batman shooting or Virginia Tech get a lot of media attention, but it’s always important to remember that the murder rate in the United States has dropped drastically in the past 20 years, even though the amount of firearms possessed by civilians has not declined. So firearm violence is actually less of a problem in the United States now than it was in the past.
In addition, the American Constitution guarantees private citizens the right to be armed. Reversing this is far more complicated and difficult than changing a regular law. Most Americans don’t support an all out ban on guns, so amending the Constitution on this matter is essentially a political impossibility.
Something I’ve noticed: several of the Americans appear to be equating “gun control” with “gun ban”. At the very least, all those who are pointing at their Constitution.
It is perfectly possible to have the right to own and bear arms in a more-limited way than the one currently existing in the US, but this middle ground isn’t what they think of when they hear “gun control”: it’s what we say, but not what they hear.
There’s already tons of “middle ground” in American gun laws. It varies by jurisdiction and there are certain loopholes, but requirements like gun registration, licenses to carry, back ground checks before purchase, laws banning convicted felons from possessing firearms, etc are common in the United States.
As a non-American something that always sticks out to me as an outsider is American’s seem to have a preoccupation with the idea of being violently attacked. Home invasion seeming to be the most prevalent expression of this. It just seems like there is an obsession with being over prepared for something that I can only imagine the vast majority of people will never experience.
When I say over prepared I am not so much talking about just having a gun for home defence but thinking a little too much about home defence scenarios e.g. backup guns, backup backup guns, tactics for a fire fight in your home etc. Maybe as my view of this is mainly from on-line its skewed somewhat by the guys who think you need an MG42, a backup magnum and a few tactically placed claymores at a minimum for home defence.
There just seems to be an obsession with being violently attacked I just don’t see on my country (UK)
If your back of an envelope calculation suggests that the Australian rate of gun ownership is actually double the USA’s then you badly need another envelope. There’s also the rather incongruous consequence were that true; how come Australia has about 30 firearm homicides annually and the US rather a lot more.
Let’s accept that gun stats are intractably rubbery but the current estimates are that there are 2.7 - 4.6 mil guns (ABC News Nov-2011) say about 1 per 6 persons. The US has, what something like 300mil firearms for a population a bit north of 300 mill? Making it say 9 guns per 10 persons.
These back of the envelope calculations give a number somewhat closer to the Wiki value:
Nothing short of God descending on a cloud and declaring, “No more guns” will get gun control to pass in the USA. The religious right has a large overlap with the NRA pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands types.
I don’t think it’s really about the reality of the situation but the fear of such things. I am not saying the UK is better in any of its crime figures but from my perception worry about violent attacks is not as prominent. Of course no-one want’s to be subject to a violent attack of any sort but I never hear people I know detailing the measures they have in place for home defence for instance. It’s just not something I would ever expect to hear from someone and to be honest you would be looked on as a little paranoid if you started to list the weapons you have at your disposal for defence from burglars.
As I said though maybe it’s just posting on the internet that gives this perception as people who are not worried about things probably don’t post much about how they are not worried
The NRA caught their luckiest break ever when the Batshit shooter’s assault rifle jammed. If it hadn’t and the death count quadrupled, maybe there’d be enough outrage to do something. As for right now, the sane Americans don’t have the votes, it’s as simple as that.
“Sane”? The anti-gun folk are a cargo cult. They’re the ones that wrote into law that certain guns should be banned because you can attach a knife to them.
In the context of world societies we are adolescents.
Other countries, especially European ones, have a history long enough that they have become tired of war and violence and try to avoid it.
We revel in it.
If you want to better understand some things about America’s behavior as a country, compare it with a teenager.
We are strong and immature. We’re like a young, muscular person you spot on the street at night that causes you to cross to the other side to avoid an encounter.
We have the freedom to own guns, among other freedoms.
But we don’t have the maturity to deserve some of these freedoms.
Kind of like how you restrict use of the car when your teenager gets their first drivers license.
They think they’re ready for the full responsibility. You know they’re not.
We’ve also got the cowboy mythos to outgrow. People think that if they were packing heat they could just get the drop on the bad guy at twenty paces and save the day and get the girl (yes, I’m assuming gun-nuttery is mostly a guy thing, but I know there are exceptions, like Sarah Palin).
Michael Moore explores gun crime statistics in Bowling for Columbine.
His original theory was that the sheer number of guns accounted for the high gun murder number in the US.
That theory held until he got to Canada. They had a similar number of guns per person, but far less gun crime.
When he asked Canadians about this, they simply said that they didn’t immediately resort to guns as a solution to personal conflict.
The notion that more gun ownership will reduce gun violence is not thought out very well. As gun ownership penetrates further into the general population, it will be taken up by those who are less responsible, less thoughtful and less sane than the current population of gun owners. It is just simple math; once you make guns a commodity that everybody feels they need, the likelihood they are going to take gun safety classes goes down, because the new owners don’t come from a responsible gun culture that learned gun safety from family and friends. New owners from outside a gun ownership culture bring their bad habits with them.
Once guns become the main way arguments were settled, and we saw daily carnage in the street in middle class communities, there will be a backlash and the second amendment will be changed, if not repealed.
We cannot survive as a nation of vigilantes with a chip on our shoulders and pistols on our hips.
I’ve seen the movie before. Gun advocates mock legislation on hyper-technical grounds- “Ha! you can’t ban guns with specification X! Because there are guns with specification Y that would be perfectly legal!” The fact that we have had laws with some nonsensical provisions doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have laws. The plain truth is that there is no defensible reason why a person should have a gun capable of getting off X rounds in Y seconds. I’m sure reasonable people could set reasonable numbers for X and Y. Instead we have the gun nuts acting as though any reasonable restrictions on citizen firepower are exactly equivalent to banning all guns. If that’s the attitude they want to take, I say accomodate them. Ban all guns.
I can understand both points of view. What I can’t understand is the resistance to making assault rifles like the kind Holmes used much harder to obtain.
Yep, I’d have to say this pretty much sums it up. I was working for a pro-gun-control Senator in 1968 when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated. That stirred a certain amount of outcry but not nearly enough. There was even less interest when Hinckley shot Reagan even though Brady certainly changed HIS position on the issue. And now you rarely even hear faint stirrings in the wake of horrendous events like Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Aurora. I don’t understand the attachment to guns and probably never will but I’ve given up the hope that anything will change.
