what if we stopped pandering to gun owners

and enacted comprehensive legislation?

There is a Wikipedia page titled "List of mass shootings in the United States in 2024." Since I started working on this essay on September 4 and as of yesteday afternoon, it's been updated ten times. There is a similar page for 2023, and for 2022, and 2021, and 2020, and 2019, and 2018 — all the way back to 2010, there are enough mass shootings to fill up a long scroll of dates and locations and numbers of people dead and injured by firearms. 

This doesn't even count the majority of gun deaths, which occur by suicide and the rate of which continues to rise. These are separately tracked and often politically ignored. 

However, if you were basing your understanding of gun regulation in America on last week's presidential debate, you might think that it was a fringe issue for both parties, instead of what it actually is: something the majority of the country has been in favor of making stricter for years.

Gallup polls.

Indeed, on Tuesday night, there were no questions from the moderators about gun reform. In an unrelated soliloquy around halfway through the debate, Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of wanting to take everyone's guns away (a common, tired tactic) and Harris responded by reminding people at home that she and Tim Walz were gun owners, so not to worry — she wouldn't take anyone's guns away. Less than a week after this year's deadliest school shooting that claimed four lives and injured another nine in Georgia, gun reform was only brought onstage as a subject to shy away from.

Trump’s website, you won't be surprised to hear, remains unencumbered by any mentions of gun reform or even gun policy, although you’d think by now he of all people would reconsider.

Here's the main thrust of Harris's gun reform position:

As President, she won’t stop fighting so that Americans have the freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship. She’ll ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require universal background checks, and support red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. (Harris Campaign)

(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

My question is: Why not say any of this as millions were watching on the debate stage, instead of solely presenting a reassurance to gun owners? Not even a tame "I support common-sense gun legislation?" The absence of urgency is shocking to me. I understand the current iteration of the Democratic Party is more interested in appealing to Republicans than to its base, but this obsession with pandering to gun owners instead of calling out the inevitable danger of gun ownership is getting people killed. It would be great if at least some politicians could procure a backbone.

Georgia, for instance, is one of the most pro-gun states in America. No red flag or safe storage laws, no universal background checks, and it’s one of 29 states allowing concealed weapons carried without a permit. The Georgia school shooter Colt Gray, for instance, had been questioned in May 2023 over suspicious Discord posts regarding — yes — a school shooting threat. While being investigated, Gray's father Colin Gray told investigators his son had access to hunting rifles that he used "when supervised." In October 2023, they were the object of a wellness check called by Colt's mother Marcee Gray, who in November 2023 was arrested and in December 2023 pled guilty to criminal trespass-family violence. 

One would think — one would hope — that a state with sturdy red flag laws would've prevented Colin Gray from legally purchasing, in December 2023, an AR-15-style rifle, which he then proceeded to give as a Christmas gift to his 14-year-old son.

And yet the truth is, red flag laws are nice, but they're historically limited in their effectiveness. 

An Associated Press analysis found many U.S. states barely use the red flag laws touted as the most powerful tool to stop gun violence before it happens, a trend blamed on a lack of awareness of the laws and resistance by some authorities to enforce them even as shootings and gun deaths soar. (PBS)

It’s not enough. Forgive me, but there's something very American about refusing to enact comprehensive gun reform legislation and instead relying on private individuals to watch each other for signs of violence and instability. Why would a government govern, when it can pass the onus unto its citizens and absolve itself of responsibility, wondering “where were his parents?” before asking itself “where were the laws?” 

Here's the thing about guns: they make everyone's hands dangerous. Once we account for human fallibility, it becomes difficult to believe in safe gun ownership, no matter how well-intentioned its handler.

The gun lobby increasingly touts self-defense as justification for gun ownership — this is false advertising, as most gun owners will actually never fire a gun in self-defense. That is because a gun's raison d'être is not defense, but harm.

It is weird to hear people argue otherwise with any sort of seriousness, as if the pull of a trigger weren’t synonymous with death. This is not debate club. When discussing the dangerous accessibility of lethal weapons to everyday Americans, we don’t have to concede points that are not true for the sake of argument and a lively atmosphere. Not when so many lives are at stake. Allowing the NRA and its ilk to justify loose gun laws vis-à-vis this mirage of self-denfense is unnecessary.

Consider this:

Hemenway found that not only are self-defense gun uses rare -- people defended themselves with a gun in roughly 0.9 percent of crimes committed over this period -- but in many cases they don't lead to better outcomes for crime victims.

"The likelihood of injury when there was a self-defense gun use (10.9%) was basically identical to the likelihood of injury when the victim took no action at all (11.0%)," Hemenway and co-author Sara J. Solnik found. (Washington Post, based on a Harvard University analysis.)

Imagine that.

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Any firearm, but especially an automatic or semi-automatic rifle, is an inherently violent artefact, one of the few whose possession demands constant, untenable vigilance in order to avoid tragedy. People have a lot of bad days. We’re human. So why are we continuing to openly tempt such an easily-swayed fate? It is unimaginable, this perverse instinct that leads us closer and closer to the ground. At least Icarus was heading toward the light.

I am speaking for myself, but there is no situation in which the addition of a gun makes me feel safer. Seeing a gun in public tells me that I now have to rely on the rationality of someone who’s chosen to carry a gun to keep a level head, two things I don’t usually consider directly related.

Take, for instance, this past weekend, when the NYPD shot four people and injured several others while pursuing someone for subway fare evasion (a whopping $2.90, by the way). These are people who are supposedly — grains! of! salt! — trained in firearm safety. 

Forget the farce of paying cops, plural, to chase someone into the subway over fare evasion: can anyone seriously argue this was a scenario in which a gun needed to be fired? Inside a subway car? Where there can be any number of unforeseen circumstances and unpredictable variables? Have we lost our minds?

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Red flag laws are not nothing, but they will never be sufficient because there is no law that can predict when a gun owner will have a bad enough day that they'll want, or be distracted enough, to harm themselves or others. Most countries understand the combination of human error and lethal weapons is not a desirable one and have passed strict gun control laws as a result, leaving the United States with a significantly higher gun violence death rate than much of the rest of the world. (If one person brings up the Bill of Rights, as if the Constitution didn’t once say that a person could be worth a fraction of a whole. Grow up.)

The U.S. has the 28th-highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world: 4.31 deaths per 100,000 people in 2021. That was more than seven times as high as the rate in Canada, which had 0.57 deaths per 100,000 people — and about 340 times higher than in the United Kingdom, which had 0.013 deaths per 100,000. (NPR)

All of these are figures that should make us blind with fury, because despite what the NRA may have us believe, there is no inevitability in guns. A gun is not a natural disaster. A gun is not an act of God. A gun in someone's hand in a school, a parking lot, a bus stop, a candlelight vigil, a church, a synagogue, a concert, a highway, a nightclub, a movie theater, a home — it is not a mistake: it is a policy failure. A gun is a choice, intentionally made by those who've simply decided, with their eyes wide-open to these very statistics, that there are things more valuable than the safety of their neighbors and constituents. 

I don’t want politicians to tell us they’re gun owners, but; I want politicians to act with the knowledge that the rate of firearm deaths by suicide has grown every year since 2019; that in 2024 alone, there have already been 46 school shootings; and that fear of shootings is a major cause of anxiety for children and parents.

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As if I, too, have been trained to put gun owners’ feelings ahead of my own, half of my editing process for this newsletter involved efforts to make it softer. I am self-conscious of my anger, even as over the years I’ve seen video after video after video of terrified parents standing outside a school in the aftermath of a shooting, tearfully wondering if their child was safe.

It is humiliating, begging our government to please enact and enforce laws to make it harder to kill ourselves and each other and hearing, “I see where you’re coming from, but have you considered the 0.9% of gun owners who’ve used firearms for self-defense, even though using a firearm for self-defense carries with it the same risk of injury as not using one? Have you thought about their rights? Bit selfish of you not to. Bit anti-constitutional, to place your rights ahead of a gun’s.”

The inaction, the pandering, the equivocating, the cowardice — it should make us angry.

Because there is no god that can unfire a gun. Thoughts and prayers will not rid a firearm of its teeth, will not replace the politicians who pose with rifles on their Christmas cards, will not bring shame to the lobbyists who get paid to minimize children's deaths. How ghoulish, to imply that there is anything gentle or divine about a gunshot deciding what breath will be your last. 

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