Chapter 12 - Guns
The emotions over guns runs high, but what does the data tell us?
So today we bring you another of the “culture war” issues that divides us from my book “Fixing America”. This time it is guns. The Constitution’s 2nd Amendment clearly states the right to “bear arms”, but in these divided times is it smart to have heavily armed people walking up to political protests?
12. Guns
With the right to bear arms comes a great responsibility to use caution and common sense on handgun purchases.
—Ronald Reagan
Ten years after he had been shot by a would-be assassin, Ronald Reagan issued the quote above in support of the Brady Bill, which proposed background checks and restrictions on gun sales. He was still a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), still owned guns, but apparently getting shot had made Reagan a little more open to gun control.
This is the fourth hot-button issue: guns and the right to own arms as defined in the Second Amendment. It reads, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” So, let’s understand the 1789 meaning based on the military hardware available at the time. Private citizens could own and keep shotguns, rifles, and pistols. Some say it meant that the Founding Fathers thought that people should not be allowed to own cannons or mortars. There is nothing in the Constitution or anything written by the Founding Fathers that prevents people from owning cannons or mortars. The Constitution even allows Congress to issue “letters of marque and reprisal” that would have allowed private citizens to use armed ships against countries the United States was at war with. The Supreme Court later decided in a ruling in 2016 that “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding, and that this Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States.” This opens the door to private citizens owning any weapon that can be carried by a single person. There are even provisions for people to own cannons, mortars, and machine guns, but only with special approvals from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and their state.
And how many guns are in America? The Small Arms Survey of 2017 estimated that almost 400 million firearms were in civilian possession in the United States; that is more guns than people. Other studies have put the number higher, but for this discussion we will use 400 million. At 120 guns per hundred people, even the “small” number of 400 million guns places the United States far ahead of any other nation for guns in civilian hands. At just over forty-one guns per hundred people, Switzerland is the next closest, and there are a number of countries with just above thirty per hundred, but none of them come close to the United States. The figure of 400 million may seem outrageous but consider that the ATF tracks gun manufacturing in America, and in 2016 alone, US gun manufacturers produced 11.5 million guns. They exported fewer than 400,000 and imported almost 4.5 million for an addition to America’s gun total of 15.6 million. That was just in 2016, which was a banner year, but from 2009 to 2018, the US gun total increased by an average of 12 million guns each year. These totals don’t account for the weapons that federal law requires to be registered with the ATF, such as the almost 640,000 machineguns, 150,000 sawed off shotguns and almost 1.5 million silencers. Those are not included in the 400 million guns total either.
But what are the consequences of all those guns in America? The Center for Disease Control and Prevention records the number of gun deaths in America. For 2020, it was 43,595, of which 24,245 (56%) were suicides. Gun control advocates have pointed to suicide as one reason for gun control, but then, if a gun wasn’t available, would they try something else? The point from the advocates is that guns are very effective at suicide. Using a gun for suicide is fatal in 82.5% of attempts; the next closest is drowning/submersion, which is successful 65.9% of the time.[i] But that misses the point. Removing guns may not stop the attempt, and while it may make the attempt less likely to succeed, is that something that justifies gun control? How much gun control would be required to impact the numbers?
The United States has 7.3 gun suicides per 100,000 citizens. While that number is the highest in the world, there are a number of countries with levels of gun suicides above two per 100,000 citizens, which have gun ownership levels of thirteen to forty-one guns per hundred citizens. A number of these are in Europe. Switzerland has 41.2 guns per hundred citizens and a gun suicide rate of 2.32 per 100,000 citizens. An effort to remove over 66% of America’s guns just to reduce the number of gun suicides doesn’t make sense when you consider that in 2016, Europe’s overall suicide rate was 15.4 per 100,000 citizens versus the United States at 13.7 per 100,000 citizens. This has changed for 2019 with the United States at 14.4 suicides per 100,000, and Europe’s average dropped to 10.5. But the point is that taking away the option of guns doesn’t prevent people from using other means. Europe has a very low gun suicide rate compared to the United States, but overall has a comparable suicide rate. In 2019, Belgium had 13.9 overall suicides per 100,000, very close to the United States at 14.4 suicides that year, but Belgium only had 1.09 gun suicides per 100,000 citizens and has low gun ownership at 6.9 guns per hundred citizens (a mere fraction of US ownership). The conclusion is that the decision to attempt suicide is independent of whether guns are present. Access to guns provides the potential means that will be used. The focus should be addressing poverty and mental illness, which are the causes of suicide rather than the means that people opt for to attempt suicide.
The reason gun control advocates want to include gun suicides among gun deaths is that if you remove them, you are only dealing with 19,350 gun deaths for 2020, still a large number, but much fewer than 45,000 which includes gun suicides. Gun homicides are not one of the major causes of death in the United States at about 0.5% of all US deaths, including medical, accidental, and felonious. Now there has been a lot of discussion about how this compares with Europe and elsewhere. Japan has almost no gun homicides, and the United Kingdom has 0.02 gun homicides per 100,000 citizens, although the British Murder Mystery genre would make you think otherwise. Most European countries are between 0.06 (Germany) and 0.29 (Italy) gun homicides per 100,000 citizens, while the United States in 2019 was 4.6 per 100,000 citizens. That number of 4.6 puts the United States at a far higher rate of gun homicides than any other country that is part of the modern economy. You must look at the Philippines (7.62), Mexico (16.5), Jamaica (38.2), Honduras (28.65), South Africa (12.92), Venezuela (26.48), and a number of others for higher numbers of gun homicides per person. That doesn’t put the United States in good company, so would disarming make a difference?
Looking at the countries with higher gun homicide rates, the United States has 120 guns per hundred citizens, and the countries with the higher homicide rates ranged between four to thirty-two guns per hundred citizens. It does not correlate to the number of guns or the number of gun homicides, but it does correlate to poverty. All the countries except one have levels of poverty in excess of the United States. The tables of countries and the analysis in the Appendix show the patterns between gun homicides, suicides, and poverty. The summary of the Appendix is that unless you massively reduce levels of gun ownership, you can’t impact the gun homicides because the more important factor with gun homicides is poverty. European countries with high levels of gun ownership (35–42 guns per hundred citizens) don’t have the same levels of gun homicides when their poverty levels are less than America’s. Even within the United States, among the twenty-five states with the worst gun death rates, only three have a gross domestic product per citizen above the national average, and all three have low homicide rates, but high suicide rates. Thirteen of them have the worst GDP per citizen for the whole country. People will point to California and make the case that their low gun homicides are a result of California’s strict gun laws. I would point to California’s high GDP per citizen as the criterion that sets it apart.
This point is strengthened by a report released by the Center for Disease Control in May 2022 that looked at the increase in gun homicides between 2019 and 2020.[ii] In 2020, with COVID raging in the background, gun homicides increased from 4.6 per 100,000 citizens to 6.1 deaths per 100,000 citizens, a 35% increase. The CDC looked at why this occurred and found that “rates of firearm homicide were lowest and increased least at the lowest poverty level and were higher and showed larger increases at higher poverty levels.” The reality is that the volume of guns is not the driving factor in gun homicides; it is poverty that drives the crime rate.
No amount of partial disarmament is likely to affect it. Removing 66% of America’s guns to lower us to a level with Switzerland means taking a minimum of 264 million guns out of private hands. Remember we are working with the “small” number of 400 million guns in America. Any idea of the government taking that many or more guns from people is going to be next to impossible. Not only because the Second Amendment bars the government from doing it, but also most Americans oppose disarmament and logistically confiscating 264 million or more guns is simply not feasible. This has not stopped politicians and the NRA from claiming that “the liberals are coming for your guns,” which is a way of driving donations to the NRA and votes to the NRA’s candidates. So, let’s stop and agree that disarming America is not constitutional nor possible, and likely disastrous for a liberal government to attempt. No matter how often liberals may point to other countries and compare how much less gun violence they have compared to America, this is just not feasible. First, disarmament won’t produce lower overall suicide rates, and poverty is the driving factor for gun homicides. Second, because most people legally own and use the guns. If 45,000 guns are used in suicides and homicides per year, that is 0.01% of all the guns in America. So, when we discuss disarming, we are really discussing punishing 99.99% of Americans for the actions of an incredibly small few. This is why the idea of disarming America is not only impossible and ridiculous, but it also blocks discussion of real gun control issues that need to be addressed.
The issue of mass shootings is the other point brought up by gun control advocates as a reason for more extensive gun control. On May 26, 2022, a list of the thirty worst mass shooting in the United States was published.[iii] Half of them (fifteen) had been in the ten years preceding this book. At the time, the tenth worst and oldest on the list occurred in 1966 and involved a shooter who killed his wife and mother and then went to the observation deck of the University of Texas’s clock tower. He killed three people on the observation deck and then used a bolt action rifle and killed another eleven and wounded thirty-one others. For almost two hours, he terrorized the University of Texas campus before two Austin police officers were able to reach the observation deck and, in a shoot-out, killed him. A friend once made the brazen remark that it takes some skill to kill that many with a bolt action rifle, but any damn fool can beat that number by walking into a crowded area with an automatic weapon—a crass comment but unfortunately very true.
The worst mass shooting in US history was in 2017 when a man opened fire from the top of a Las Vegas hotel into the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest music festival 450 yards from the hotel, killing fifty-eight and wounding 413 over the span of ten minutes. He fired over a thousand rounds of ammunition from fourteen AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, all equipped with bump-stocks that turned them into fully automatic military equivalent weapons. Some were equipped with hundred-round drum magazines. He committed suicide as police were closing in. Semiautomatic rifles with multiple large-capacity magazines were used in seven of the ten worst mass shootings as well as all five of the ones that were in the last five years. These weapons have become the weapon of choice for mass murder. Thinking about banning them? It may be too late; gun manufacturers track the production of “modern sporting rifles,” which in gun speak is the civilian version of military rifles, and they estimate the number already sold in the United States is over 18 million. That is likely an underestimation of the actual number in circulation.
Thinking about trying to do a buy-back or some other plan to get those weapons off the streets? In the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, bump stocks were outlawed, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives issued a final rule that indicated “current possessors of bump-stock-type devices must divest themselves of possession as of the effective date of the final rule (March 26, 2019).” The ATF has collected less than 1,000 of the bump stocks sold. How many were sold? That answer is unclear, but it is greater than 200,000. There were several lawsuits filed by multiple organizations challenging the ban. In January 2023, the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law failed to define bump stocks as machine guns and as such the ATF did not have jurisdiction over them, which would kick the law back to Congress or the Supreme Court. Even though in another case, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that bump stocks converted semiautomatic weapons to fully automatic making them machine guns and able to be regulated by the ATF. Other lawsuits are pending. One lawsuit filed in federal court seeks compensation for individuals deprived of their bump stocks. And while some may be waiting to see how the lawsuits resolve, even if all the lawsuits opposing the ban were rejected, confiscation would likely prove ineffective.
One other thing: you don’t need a bump stock to convert a civilian version of a military rifle into a fully automatic military version. There are multiple YouTube videos and information sources on the internet that show you how to convert them if you have the tools and enough metal-working skills to give it a try. While this is not the same as Prohibition when America tried to outlaw alcohol, it has to be seen as an example of not being able to put the genie back in the bottle. Realistically disarming America is not an option, but it has to be asked: why do American citizens need semiautomatic high-velocity weapons with large magazines? These weapons are a “force multiplier” allowing a single person to inflict massive casualties in crowded locations. There are several factors that need to be discussed.
First is the National Rifle Association, which was founded in 1871 with the intent of teaching gun safety and marksmanship. It wasn’t until 1934 that it began to defend gun ownership rights. In 1976, the NRA established the NRA Political Victory Fund, a political action committee for lobbying and supporting pro-gun candidates. The NRA today identifies itself as “one of the largest and best-funded lobbying organizations.” It receives large donations from gun manufacturers and is opposed to any form of gun control or limitation, helping to effectively kill the Brady Bill when it came up for renewal in 2004. So, the NRA has worked tirelessly with monetary support from gun manufacturers to make semiautomatic versions of military guns available to the public. They have also worked to block background checks and have prevented gun sales from being regulated.
The second issue is those calls by politicians and the NRA that “the liberals are coming for your guns.” In an official 1995 NRA Institute of Legislative Action fundraising letter signed by then executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, they referred to federal ATF agents as “jack-booted government thugs.” The NRA later apologized for the letter’s language. This and government standoffs and fatalities at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993) gave some groups the idea that they needed to be armed with military-grade weapons to confront government overreach. Though these anti-government groups declined from 800 groups in 1996 to only 150 in 2000, they have been increasing recently as evidenced by the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Protestors from these groups have been openly carrying semiautomatic weapons around state capitols, which they are legally allowed to do. Some of the killings during the racial protests in 2020 and 2021 involved people openly carrying semiautomatic weapons as permitted by the state laws where the incidents occurred.
There is a third issue: America’s gun culture and the glorification of these weapons, which makes law-abiding citizens want to own them. Even I have entertained the idea of buying these weapons. And those law-abiding citizens make this issue much more complicated and less about a simple idea that assault rifles are bad, a perspective taken by many liberals. Of those 18 million “modern sporting rifles” in society, the vast majority are in the hands of law-abiding citizens. That is why efforts at gun control legislation fail when it includes bans or discussion of buybacks of semiautomatic rifles.
Remember the question about data from the first chapter? How often do legal gun owners use guns to defend themselves? The numbers of confirmed reported cases vary from 50,000 to 70,000 a year with about 1,500 to 2,000 ending with someone dying. No one tracks these events with the precision that the FBI tracks the national crime statistics, so the numbers are a little vague and they differ depending on which source you are using. There are even claims that the number is much higher due to the number of times in which “the victim pulled a gun, and the assailant ran away and no police report was filed.” This is a gray area of opinion surveys and some researchers have even put the number of defensive gun uses in the millions per year. The problem is that it happens often enough where gun owners firmly believe that it is a valid position and there are multiple verified instances where gun owners do defend themselves. But there are also multiple instances where the criminal uses the victim’s own gun against them. Again, you can find anecdotes to support almost every side of a policy question, and without hard accurate data, both sides feel they are correct.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment doesn’t prevent a local jurisdiction or the federal government from establishing laws limiting the type of guns or requiring that citizens shall secure them or register them. There are existing laws that require sellers of guns to be registered, and registration for machine guns doesn’t fall into the category of personal weapons. You can own a machine gun or even a cannon; you just have to go through a federal registration and background check that is supposed to be very thorough. The fact is that we regulate and track automobiles better than we do guns. Every car on the road must be licensed, registered, and insured. Any private sales between individuals must be reported to transfer the title. The number of unregistered cars is less than 5%, and some of these are race cars, since they don’t need to be registered for racing on private racetracks (hence the term “street legal” for a race car that is registered). The number of unregistered cars on the highway varies but is thought to be less than 3%. That would be about 7.5 million of America’s 250 million vehicles. Having been driven around in an unregistered “ranch truck” on a friend’s property in Texas, I believe that number and most likely they don’t ever touch paved roads. But compare that with the little over 6.6 million registered guns of the 400 million that have been sold in America over the years—that’s 98.3% unregistered. And when we say registered, we mean they were voluntarily registered; very few states require guns to be registered.
Mass shootings are a very emotional issue, especially when they take place at a school. One of the problems is that the definition of mass shooting changes depending on who you talk to. The Congressional Research Service (CRS, Policy Research for Congress) defines it as four or more victims shot and killed in one incident, excluding the perpetrators at a public place. CRS excludes gang-related killings, acts carried out that were inspired by criminal profit, and terrorism. Using that definition, much of what most people consider mass killings gets excluded.
At the other end of the spectrum is the Mass Shooting Tracker (MST), which defines a mass shooting as any event in which four or more people are shot, including the perpetrator. When you hear very high numbers for mass shootings, you are likely getting it from MST.
In 2019, CRS said there had been eight mass shootings with sixty-nine deaths and ninety-three injured. Contrast that with MST indicating 503 shootings, 629 deaths, and 1,901 injuries. The problem is both sets of numbers are too far to the extreme. CRS excludes killings in home, and there have been a lot of the those, while MST lumps in events where people were only wounded or were really tied to criminal activity. We are going to use three people killed excluding the perpetrator and include domestic, terrorism, events over multiple days, multiple shooters, and unsolved cases. Based on that, 2019 had fourteen events, ninety killings, and 126 injuries. And we are going to look all the way back to 1966 to include the University of Texas shooting.
Figure 1. Mass Shootings
After every event, people will howl that it is the guns, and we must do something about the guns. But this chart shows us two interesting points, a drastic drop in events in 2002 and 2020. We will look at 2002 first, specifically after September 11, 2001. Because after 9/11, there were no mass shootings for the rest of the year and only two the following year. The volume of guns didn’t change, so what did? Was it all the security? Well, security was beefed up at airports, but it wasn’t in schools, churches, or places of employment. My guess at what changed is the level of hate. The country came together, partisan attitudes were set aside, and the country worked as one.
A mass shooter needs three things: the weapon, a target with the potential for lots of casualties, and the hate in his heart to do the deed. There is no doubt that lax gun laws in many areas have increased the volume of weapons available. There are multiple examples of people buying guns and using them in a mass shooting event within days, sometimes hours. All too often those are high-velocity semiautomatic weapons with large-capacity magazines, so we do need to tighten the controls on guns, but that alone won’t do it. We also need to consider the hate. The growth of social media and online forums where hate can fester has tracked with the increase in mass shootings. There is no getting around that the hate being pumped into our social space by politicians, pundits, and media groups is then being amplified by social media and has had an impact. Think that’s wrong?
Well, what about 2020? The hate levels were the same, the guns were still around, so what happened? With COVID hitting the country and a vicious partisan presidential election on the horizon, we saw a drop in mass shootings. But why? The guns were still present, but for most of the year, public places were closed. Workplaces and residences were four of the five settings for the mass shooting events that did happen, but why weren’t there more? There were, though they didn’t fall under our definition of mass shooting, but they did meet MST’s definition. MST reported 696 events, with 661 fatalities, and 2,750 injuries for 2020, which was higher than the 2019 numbers and lower than the 2021 numbers. The hate was motivating people to pull the trigger; it was just that the groups of people were much smaller.
You can already see some people moving to harden or reduce the targets that could generate multiple fatalities. The idea of increasing security against mass shootings is coming from the conservatives to avoid implementing gun control. Little wonder, the NRA’s meetings and conventions do not allow guns inside. The same is true of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) when they hold their major gatherings. More security on schools, churches, and public events are being pushed as a solution, but they may have an unintended consequence. A big push is to make schools have a single entrance with security. While that would avoid the few mass shootings, it would make schools much more limited for fire evacuations. And let’s be real. Between 2014 and 2018 the National Fire Protection Association reported an average of over 3,200 school fires per year with on average one casualty per year and almost forty injuries.[iv] Making schools more difficult to evacuate will increase the risk of fires to solve the super-rare school shooting. This would be the height of folly.
Other chapters will look at social media and discuss what can be done to lower the hate in public spaces. As far as guns, as badly as people want to confiscate “assault weapons,” that isn’t going to happen. As we said earlier, you are punishing the country for the actions of the few. It would be the embodiment of the fear that the conservatives and libertarians have been warning about and would not only violate the Second Amendment, but it would also split the country. But we do have some suggestions at the end of this chapter.
The last issue to consider is children’s access to guns. There has been a push to require gun owners to secure their weapons using trigger locks or lock them in a secure cabinet. There are numerous examples of children accessing unsecured guns and shooting themselves, others, or taking the guns to school. In some countries, strict laws require that guns be secured, and that ammunition be secured separately from them. Most gun courses stress this as a safety measure. The reality is that too many people carry loaded guns or store them in their cars or bedrooms with an idea of defending themselves, and they believe that the idea of locking the gun and ammo separately defeats the purpose.
So, what is to be done? It comes down to managing risks and consequences. It also comes down to a set of laws that would not apply equally to everyone. If a law was passed requiring guns to be secured, based on children, then it really wouldn’t apply to childless adults or those with grown children. The fact is that about 600 children die each year due to suicide or accidental shootings, and these are horrific events. But are they sufficient to pass a law requiring all gun owners to secure their guns or suffer legal action if they don’t?
For the family of a child who has just committed suicide or been accidentally shot, it may seem insane to charge the owner of the gun with a crime, but that is the answer. Especially when you consider that in many cases, the gun owner is not the parent of the victim but was responsible for the shooter getting the gun. The solution is a simple law saying if your gun was used in a shooting, then you are responsible for failing to secure it or neglecting to report it as sold or stolen. It would function in the same way as vehicular responsibility. Let someone borrow your car, you and your insurance are on the hook for any accidents caused by that car, especially when it is your underaged son driving.
If we want to get accidental shootings and suicides by children under control, this is the answer, not a law that requires securing guns and could only be truly enforced by searching everyone’s houses.
Gun control is like so many other issues where the false claims aren’t limited to one side. Second Amendment advocates for reducing gun laws point out that Chicago and Washington DC’s strict gun laws haven’t prevented gun homicides, but that doesn’t recognize that the nearby regions tend to have very loose gun laws. And as we discussed earlier, criminal gun homicides are more about poverty than anything else and mass shootings are more about a single disgruntled or disturbed individual’s ability to cause large numbers of casualties.
This brings up the question of what to do about automatic weapons and weapons in the hands of unstable individuals. There has been a push for “red flag” laws where individuals can have their guns taken away if they are identified to be a threat to themselves or the public. The problem has been that these laws have been enacted in some states and to varying degrees and usually aren’t clear on when the decision to remove the guns is made and how a person applies to have their guns returned.
The Justice Department should draft guidelines, have them reviewed by the Supreme Court, and then send them to the states. It would then be each state’s responsibility to either adopt, modify, or reject the guidelines. That may seem like a weak answer but realize that this is a jurisdiction of the states. We cannot look to the federal government when the real solution is to resolve it at the state level. That does have the possibility of fifty different variations, but it respects the actual division of powers that lies at the heart of our Constitution.
Here is the summary of the data and logic so far:
The United States has over 400 million guns in private hands.
The number of guns owned doesn’t relate to gun homicides.
The number of guns owned does relate to gun suicides, but not to the overall number of suicides.
There are more than 18 million semiautomatic legal versions of fully automatic military rifles in private hands.
Mass murders constitute a very small (615 in 2020) part of gun homicides, but those that occur at schools and involve innocents have a large social impact.
Most guns in America are unregistered.
It is time for liberals to give up the idea of forcing the registration or confiscation of America’s guns. It is simply not feasible. First, there is the cost of taking millions of guns off the street. Guns can range in cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Plan to repay the owners for the cost of their weapons? You could be looking at over a trillion dollars. Then add the expense of all the manpower to remove those 400 million guns from, say, 150 million owners. Second, the legal costs: the Second Amendment is part of the Constitution, and the Supreme Court has upheld it repeatedly. It is impossible to think that a constitutional amendment could be approved and even more unlikely that any court would allow a massive gun confiscation. Now add the political and emotional costs: this would deeply divide this country. That is why liberals need to stop demanding bans on gun sales and any form of confiscation.
But it is also time for conservatives to stop blocking every gun control effort and framing it as if it was some type of liberal witch hunt. As Ronald Reagan said, “With the right to bear arms comes a great responsibility to use caution and common sense on handgun purchases.”
The first necessity would be to stop the supply of high-capacity magazines for both pistols and rifles. Like bump stocks, they make the potential for mass murder too easy. How are a hundred rounds necessary for hunting, target-shooting, or anything legal? If you feel the need for a hundred-round drum magazine to go hunting, it might be time for a marksmanship course. Large magazines for semiautomatic pistols or rifles have been at the heart of too many of the most horrific mass shootings, and stopping new sales is the least that the gun community can do. Liberals may feel the need to ban new semiautomatic weapons, but there are already 18 million in civilian hands, most belonging to law-abiding citizens. Banning semiautomatic weapons won’t change anything, and it goes back to the very basis of the Second Amendment. Instead, leaders should address poverty, hatred, and the mental health crisis—the root causes of gun violence.
The second requirement would be background checks and cooling off periods. Someone can come in and ask to buy a gun and register, but then allow time for both the background check and the purchaser to consider whether they need that gun. The NRA, gun manufacturers, and gun sellers will object to this, but it is needed. There are just too many cases in which someone purchased a weapon and then immediately used it to shoot someone. A two-to-four-day period gives the background check time to be done properly and confirmed, and it gives the purchaser time to determine whether they can really afford the gun and if they really need it. Impulse buying and firearms is not the best combination. This requirement would extend to background checks for gun sales between individuals and at gun shows, even using a system where people can pre-register or with shorter wait times.
The third thing to consider would be that all states ban the open carry of semiautomatic rifles. With the rise of private militias and radicals supporting conspiracy theories, how is it a good idea that these people could walk up to a state capitol or crowded location with an openly displayed semiautomatic rifle? That is something that is going to give state troopers sleepless nights after the political rallies and the incident at the Capitol. If a state allows the open carry of pistols, shotguns, or bolt-action rifles, they should remain legal to carry openly. But it should not be allowed to openly carry semiautomatic rifles that could be converted to full auto. There have been too many incidents where police said they were outgunned by criminals. The potential for a group of radicals to legally bring that level of firepower to a political demonstration or any mass gathering is too much of a risk, and it disadvantages law enforcement.
The fourth thing is for liberals to stop establishing “gun-free” zones around schools, churches, or other gathering places. In 1990, Congress passed the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1995. The law was revised and repassed in 1996. It prevents unlicensed individuals from having guns with 1,000 feet of kindergarten through twelfth-grade schools. It allows authorized people (law enforcement officers) and people who have been licensed (concealed carry permits) and it only applies to unlicensed possession. The issue has not prevented the school shootings that have occurred since 1996 and will not prevent extremists from attempting an attack again. As written, the law impacts law-abiding citizens not only on school grounds, but within 1,000 feet on public sidewalks, roads, or highways. Most states allow some form of open carry, concealed within a vehicle or without a permit, this creates a legal problem. A “gun-free” zone is almost unenforceable for police officers; they can’t stop and frisk everyone, they can’t check every vehicle as parents pull up to pick up their children. So, the reality is it makes people driving by on nearby streets violators of a law when they may not even be aware of the school on the next street. It is an unenforceable and unnecessary law which provides a false sense of security and fails to address any real problems. Instead of spending money to put up signs and calling areas “gun-free,” we need to address the underlying problems of poverty and mental health.
The fifth necessity would be to establish a national concealed carry permit, not to override jurisdictions that don’t allow it, but to provide uniform training and requirements. Each jurisdiction can then decide to recognize the national permit, have their own with different requirements, or ban concealed carry altogether. And each jurisdiction would register their decision with the national agency so anyone could look at the national agency’s website and know before they entered whether it was banned, local-permit only, or if the national permit would be accepted.
The sixth necessity would be to have the Department of Justice draft a law that allows legal action against individuals who fail to secure their guns or to report the theft, transfer, or sale of their guns and those guns are subsequently used in a crime or accidental shooting by others. The Department of Justice should work with states that have already enacted such laws to determine what has worked, what hasn’t, and what needs to be improved to make the laws effective while also respecting individuals’ rights, responsibilities, and the Second Amendment. The law would be reviewed by the Supreme Court and sent to the states for each state to adopt if chosen.
The seventh necessity would be to have the Department of Justice draft a guideline for red flag laws that would define when guns could be removed from an owner, how removal would be initiated, and which local government entities would have jurisdiction to decide on removal. Again, the Department of Justice should work with states with existing “red flag” laws to learn to define the guidelines. It would also define recommended procedure on how the gun owner would recover his guns from the local law enforcement agency. The guideline would be reviewed by the Supreme Court and sent to the states for each to consider and adopt if chosen.
A final note: A friend told me about a concealed handgun class he went to. It began with the instructor handing them a slip of paper and having them write down all their assets—house, cars, boats, jewelry, retirements accounts, etc. Then he made them roll up the paper and put it inside the barrel of their guns. He explained that is what’s at risk every time you draw the weapon and fire at somebody. After that, my friend paid more attention to that class than any other class before. That needs to be part of the national concealed carry permit.
Appendix
Guns, Poverty, Suicide, and Homicide – Internationally
The comments about guns and poverty were the result of analysis that was done with Wikipedia’s pages on “List of countries by percentage of population living in poverty” and “List of countries by firearm-related death rate.” These two tables were combined into an Excel spreadsheet and then sorted based on the number of homicides per 100,000 citizens and the number of suicides per 100,000. The two resulting tables are shown in the following pages. The two sets of poverty data were provided by the World Bank and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA estimated the percentage of the country’s population living below the country’s own declared poverty line. Some countries have very low poverty lines, and it gives them a skewed result. Brazil is an example; according to their own poverty line, 4.6% of the population was living in poverty, but the World Bank puts the number at 26% living in poverty for Brazil, based on the World Bank’s criteria. Georgia (ex-USSR not the US state) and Montenegro are also examples of this. The World Bank’s data set estimates the people living in the country on less than three different levels: $1.90/day, $3.20/day, and $5.50/day. The problem with the World Bank data is that it doesn’t take into account when the cost of living in a country could be very low or very high. One example is the United States where fewer than 1.7% lives on less than $5.50/day, but the CIA puts the poverty rates as 11.8%. This is why it is important to look at both the World Bank and CIA data for a better picture of poverty.
The results are interesting.
The first table was sorted for suicides per 100,000 citizens. The result was a correlation with the number of guns per citizen and the gun suicide rate, but one that doesn’t hold with all countries. The United States, at 7.32 gun suicides per 100,000. has the highest rate and with 120 guns per hundred citizens, it has the most guns in the hands of private citizens in the world. The next six countries all have rates of gun suicide greater than 2.0 and greater than twenty guns per hundred citizens, except Croatia which has thirteen per hundred, but Croatia has the highest poverty rate of the six countries. Countries with fewer than five guns per hundred citizens have the lowest gun suicide rates. The exception is Peru with high poverty and almost as many gun homicides as the United States, but a low suicide rate, something that needs to be checked to ensure that gun suicides aren’t being under-reported. So, with a few exceptions, the more accessible guns are within the population, the more they are used for suicide. Five countries, all with very low gun ownership, did not report any gun suicide data.
While there is a correlation between the number of guns and gun suicides, it would take a massive reduction in the number of guns before any reduction in the number of gun suicides would be seen. And as was discussed in the chapter on guns, reducing access to guns would reduce the number of gun suicides, but would not reduce the number of overall suicides. Owning a gun doesn’t provoke people to suicide, it just provides them with a means readily at hand for the suicide. Lacking a gun, the likely result is that a different method of suicide would be utilized.
Table 10. Gun Suicides
The following table was sorted for gun homicides, and sixteen countries had higher rates of gun homicides and they all had higher poverty by either the World Bank criteria or the CIA data provided, except for one, Uruguay. The range of gun ownership varied from the Philippines at 4.7 guns per hundred citizens to Uruguay at 31.8 guns per hundred citizens. There are a number of countries with less than 1.00 gun homicide per 100,000 citizens which have high levels of poverty, and all but three have very low levels of gun ownership with less than eight guns per hundred citizens. Again, there are a few countries that don’t follow the pattern.
Uruguay has high gun ownership, 31.8, slightly lower poverty than the United States, but a gun homicide rate slightly higher than the United States. The Wikipedia data is eight years old at the writing of this; newer data from Latin American news outlets shows higher rates of gun homicides and gun ownership. The news outlets theorize that these are coupled with organized crime bleeding over the borders from Brazil.
The Philippines’ high gun murder rate, but low gun ownership, breaks the pattern, but it has to be considered in light of state-sponsored vigilante killings that had been occurring at the time. The government’s crackdown on drug dealers is the reason they are in the top homicide rate with very low gun ownership. Greece and Serbia are another exception in that they have high poverty, high gun ownership, but low rates of gun homicides. Greece has long had a reputation as having one of the lowest crime rates in Europe, but how that is created is not clear and it doesn’t fit with the pattern seen in most countries. Except for these three, there is a general pattern. High rates of gun ownership in countries with low poverty don’t have murder rates anywhere near that of the United States. Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Austria are examples. High rates of poverty have high rates of gun homicides, except where gun ownership is very low, less than eight guns per hundred people.
Now only fifty-eight countries were considered, as many lacked data on gun homicides. Several had such low rates of poverty that neither the CIA nor the World Bank have provided data for them, even though they have high levels of gun ownership. Norway and New Zealand lacked poverty data, but each has more than thirty guns per hundred citizens and are likely in the same category as Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Austria.
The conclusion is that reducing the quantity of guns won’t have an impact on gun homicides except if it is brought down to very low levels, where over 90% of the guns would need to be confiscated, and that is just not feasible in the United States.
Table 11. Gun Homicides
Guns, Poverty, and Individual States
The correlation between poverty and guns also holds true when individual states are compared against each other. The table on the next page is sorted based on the rate of gun deaths (homicide and suicide) per 100,000 adult citizens.[v] The key factor in the table is GDP per citizen, which is the gross domestic product of the state divided by the population of the state. Now the interesting thing is that Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska. and Colorado have oil revenue, which is concentrated in too few hands to provide overall benefit to the state as much as manufacturing would. If you remove the oil revenue, then the GDP per person would drop below the national average and place them solidly into the overall pattern. The states are color-coded with how they voted in the 2020 election with red for those that have consistently voted Republican, blue for Democrat, and light gray that switched in 2020 from Republican to Democrat.
The conclusion here is that states that have low GDP per citizen also have the highest levels of gun homicides and suicides. <Table is updated from the table in the book>
Table 12. Gun Deaths per State
[i] “Means Matter:Lethality of Suicide Methods,” Harvard School of Public Health, January 6, 2017. hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/ means-matter/case-fatality/.
[ii] Kegler SR, Simon TR, Zwald ML, et al. “Vital Signs: Changes in Firearm Homicide and Suicide Rates — United States, 2019–2020”. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022;71:656–663.
[iii] Abadi, Mark, Pasley, James, and Ardrey, Taylor. “The 30 deadliest mass shootings in modern US history include Buffalo and Uvalde”, Business Insider, May 26, 2022, businessinsider.com/deadliest-mass-shootings-in-us-history-2017-10
[iv] Campbell, Richard. Structure Fires in Schools, National Fire Protection Association. September 2020, nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-tools/Building-and-Life-Safety/Structure-fires-in-schools
[v] Firearm Mortality by State, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.html