How To End Mass Shootings: Get Rid of the Guns

The mass shooting over the weekend in Buffalo is a stark reminder of America is the only advance nation with utterly insane gun laws. But the needless and preventable caranage is not limited to mass shootings.  Rather it is an every day occurance with barely a day going by in southeast Virginia with a population of over 1.7 million people where the morning news every day reports one or more shootings overnight.  The solution is so obvious that it screams out to anyone who doesn't have their head up their ass and/or suffer from a gun fetish: get rid of the flood of guns on the streeets, place strict requirements and restrictions on gun purchases, and ban automatic assault weapons.  I'd go even further and impose strict liability on gun owners - and ideally gun manufacturers - so that there is virtually no defense if a gun one owns is involved in a crime or shooting even if the gun has been stolen since the gun should have been kept more securely given that it is a deadly weapon. This latter move might prompt insurance carriers to either refuse to insure properties if a gun is on the premises or greatly increase insurance premiums for gun owners.   A column in the New York Times looks at the easy solution to ending mass shootings.  Here are column highlights:

How long does it take to get over a mass shooting?

Well, for the families and friends of victims of the Buffalo supermarket disaster, where 10 people were killed by a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle, obviously forever. But when it comes to the rest of the country, one man who ought to know says the public has already started to move on.

“That’s the pattern,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “Despite gun violence rates going through the roof, the country only pays attention when there’s a mass shooting, and then the country only pays attention for 24 to 48 hours.”

Murphy was formerly the congressman from the district where 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 people, including 20 children, with a semiautomatic rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Murphy later moved on to the Senate, where in 2016 he staged an old-school filibuster, speaking for over 14 hours to protest the fact that his colleagues weren’t planning to do anything after the Pulse nightclub shooting that killed 49 in Florida [53 more were wounded].

The gunman at the Pulse nightclub used a semiautomatic rifle. See a pattern here, anybody? And what do you think we should do about it?

A) Toughen background check laws

B) Limit the sale of semiautomatics to people with hunting licenses

C) Good Lord, just get rid of them

Yeah, C does simplify things, doesn’t it? After we learned that Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old suspect in the Buffalo shooting, had been able to buy an AR-15-style assault rifle with just a little more effort than it’d take to buy a burrito, inquiring minds wanted to know why.

It turns out that in many states, semiautomatic rifles are basically regarded as weapons of sport — the kind of thing you’d use to go hunting deer or target shooting. . . . A) Toughen background check laws

Congress did indeed ban semiautomatic rifles in 1994, in a law with a 10-year expiration date. After the ban expired, the number of mass shootings increased. And Congress responded by … pretty much ignoring the matter completely. Hey, the Republicans had taken control.

Same thing now, of course. Nobody believes anything as controversial as banning semiautomatic rifles is going to get through the current Senate.

In Connecticut, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, Murphy says tons of his constituents hunt and he never hears complaints about their inability to mow down deer without a rapid-fire rifle.

In some ways, the assault rifle is now a symbol on both sides. “The AR-15 to most people in the firearms industry — it’s a statement. It’s a middle finger,” said Busse, who noted that during the Jan. 6 charge on the Capitol there were AR-15 “Come and Take It” flags waving.

And the ban-that-rifle corps has to admit that getting rid of assault rifles won’t solve the gun problem as long as people in many states are allowed to own pistols and carry them when they stroll about the town.

(We will pause here to recall that the Supreme Court is reviewing New York’s law prohibiting people from toting handguns around without a compelling reason. Any jurist who vents about the sanctity of human life during abortion cases had better examine his or her conscience before ruling in that one.)

The get-up Gendron was wearing — body armor, video equipment attached to a helmet — is becoming more common. A sign of the times, I guess. Fifteen years ago, Busse notes, the firearms industry wouldn’t have allowed gear like that to be displayed at its trade shows.

Get rid of assault rifles. All assault rifles. Ban them. Hunters can work on becoming better shots. The gun industry can diversify — and maybe start marketing swords and medieval knight costumes at its trade shows. I know swords can do a lot of damage, but we live in an age when one victim at a time would definitely be progress.