On Wednesday evening, a rifle-toting gunman murdered 18 people and wounded at least 13 more in Lewiston, Maine, when he opened fire at two separate locations—a bowling alley, followed by a bar. A manhunt is still underway for 40-year-old suspect Robert Card, a trained firearms instructor with the U.S. Army Reserve who, just this summer, spent two weeks in a mental hospital after reporting that he was hearing voices and threatening to shoot up a military base.
While the other late-night talk show hosts stuck to poking fun at new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert took his rebuke of the Louisiana congressman to a whole other level.
“Now, we know the arguments,” Colbert said of the do-nothing response politicians generally have to tragedies such as this. “Some people are going to say this is a mental health issue. Others are going to say it’s a gun issue. But there’s no reason it can’t be both.”
Everywhere that gun bans have been successfully implemented either had low gun ownership to begin with, a mostly willing population, or both. The US doesn’t meet either criteria.
The options available are a willing gun surrender or a seizure of all registered firearms. Surrender will result in a nominal reclamation that will do little to actually reduce guns in circulation. Seizure will almost certainly result in thousands of deaths(both among gun owners and law enforcement/military), create a vast black market(due to existing unregistered guns and easily manufactured ghost guns), and the political suicide of any politician that touched the bill due to both wide spread unpopularity and public blame for said thousands of deaths.
The govt could conceivable pass and maintain a moratorium of new gun sales if Democrats gained and held control of both houses AND several Supreme Court Justices died during the period in question. But even this is of questionable value as it would likely need to last at least a decade to have any real impact and the shootings would likely continue in the interim.
Look at all this naysaying bullshit. Honestly 99.9999% of people aren’t going to lose their life over having a gun or not. Maybe a few guns will remain hidden or in black market or whatever, but how many more school shootings will it take before we actually try something instead of just pointing out the reasons it won’t be easy and throw up our hands?
It’s disgusting and I’m tired of it.
People have already lost their lives over ATF enforcement. Ruby Ridge was literally about the topic at hand and served as a rallying point for the type of opposition I outlined. If you don’t think that a seizure will result in widespread deaths you are burying your head in the sand.
As to the other point there are 100s of thousands of unregistered guns, and gun manufacture is easier than ever thanks to 3d printers, cheap CNC mills, and FOSS software. I’ve looked into it in 2012 and it would only cost about 6k to setup a system that could turn out an AR15 every 14 days (Barrels were the bitch). It’s probably more expensive now, but it’s still really low cost compared to potential profits on a black market. Ironically primers are probably the best control point here as they are a bitch to safely make, but if you have a sufficiently talented chemist to manufacture smokeless gunpowder then even this is just inflating marketeer rates.
I get that you are emotional about preventing the tragedies in question, but if you don’t think about implementation you wont get anywhere. It’s why I’ve been looking at it.
I think the issue that a ban will take years to effectively cool the possession of assault weapons is not actually an issue worth stalling over. While a lot of people tend to look at a law as “if it’s not immediately 100% effective it is garbage” in reality if you call for a refund based recall it will take a chunk out of the total guns out there. Patience is nessisarily.
Seizures of weapons in illegal transport or market will eventually account for another chunk. Guns are regularly stolen from home break ins so a lot of personal arsonal will find it’s way into black markets. Over time when the things can be reported when used in gun clubs or spotted in the wild you take away a lot of the “fun” quotent of owning the weapons making surrender much more likely. The legal ramifications of finding the weapons in self defense cases motivates from another end. If you can’t use them for self defense then the argument of what the point of having them gets stronger. A lot of people own these weapons in part for the same reasons they do expensive cars - the joy of using them and the cashe of bragging and showing them off. While 2nd amendment stans might hoarde them for ideological reasons they probably are gunna be forced to make them hard to find and make sure they don’t mention them to young children who might narc on them making kids getting their hands on them less likely.
The more effectively useless and detrimental you legally make something over time you do wear away at the trouble and anxiety required to maintain ownership. What the US should aim for is long game de-escalation. If people don’t start the process it just means the payoff is gunna be that further down the road.
How it went is Australia (trust me, we had shitloads of guns, buddy) was, people who wanted to hand in the small selection of banned guns, did, the people who didn’t, didn’t. Then regularly the cops do an amnesty day, where you can hand in any illegal guns, no questions asked. If they change their minds. People still own guns. You don’t ban them all, just the unnecessary ones, and you regulate who can buy them, kinda like getting a really easy drivers licence.