The gun lobby is on the wrong side of public opinion. Most Americans, including many Republicans, think public safety and common sense demand more gun regulation. This rationality interferes with the gun cultist belief that their right to bear arms is sacrosanct — and gun laws are unAmerican, unChristian, and the thin end of the socialist wedge.
They consider any attempt to keep more people alive as the autocratic act of freedom-stripping, big government acolytes looking to enshrine the tyranny of the deep state.
They hide behind cynical platitudes and specious logic — and cling to the NRA’s casuistic fantasy “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” These armchair Rambos dream of that critical moment when they will stride like John Wayne onto danger’s Main Street — and, with a clean and fatal shot, bring peace to the outlaw town.
It is a smug myth. Three hundred and seventy-six heavily armed officers stood by as 19 fourth-graders were slaughtered in Uvalde, TX, even as two teachers died trying to save them.
The solution to gun violence includes expanding gun regulation. But when the reasonable person says this, the fanatic hears “gun grab.” To complete this straw man fallacy, the gun absolutist whine, “If you make guns illegal, the only people who will have guns will be criminals.”
The gun lobby thinks that is a compelling argument. It is not. It is both a truism and absurd. It is a truism because if you make something illegal, by definition, anyone possessing it is a criminal. And absurd because no serious politician has proposed banning guns.
In June 2022, Biden signed the most significant piece of gun legislation in decades. Yet the law's reach is modest. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act:
- expands mental health services for school children and families
- expands background checks for gun purchasers under the age of 21.
- clarifies definitions of gun sellers and requires routine gun sellers to register with a Federal Firearms License.
- permits states to use grant funds from the Byrne JAG program to implement crisis intervention programs, including red flag laws.
- makes it a federal crime to traffic illegal firearms into the United States
- makes it a crime to make a straw purchase by purchasing a firearm on behalf of someone who is not permitted to purchase a firearm.
- closes the "boyfriend loophole" by changing regulations on firearm purchases by those convicted of domestic assault.
In other words, it does not impact most existing gun owners and does little to impede new gun buyers 21 or older.
In March this year, Biden issued an executive order aiming to make background checks as universal as possible without additional legislation. Not a gun grab. Instead, as Biden said, "It's just common sense. Check whether someone is a violent felon, a domestic abuser before they buy a gun."
The gun nuts do not do well with common sense. Confronting pleas from most Americans that the law must address gun violence, they drag Chicago into the conversation. Their argument is thus: It is almost impossible to buy a gun in Chicago, yet Chicago has a world-beating gun-murder rate.
OK. Where do the guns that kill Chicagoans come from? The same place guns that kill people in all gun control cities come from — states where you can buy a gun, no questions asked. Or where local law does nothing to stop strawman purchases and resales to cash buyers.
It makes as much sense as saying that air pollution is unaffected by emissions laws because there is air pollution in areas with no fossil-fuel power plants. Gun traffickers show no more respect for state borders than the wind does.
Let us further parse the argument that ‘because gun laws mean only criminals will have guns, we should not have gun laws.’ That is like saying laws against murder are pointless because we still have murderers.
The reason we have laws against murder is not because we believe that they stop murder completely but because they reduce the homicide rate. And they give law enforcement the power to arrest murderers.
Take security tags in stores. They do little to prevent professional shoplifters. But stores go to the expense because they do dissuade the amateur who lacks the knowledge and tools to defeat them. Getting rid of the gun show/personal sale 'no background check' loophole would deter the casual criminal from buying guns.
This obvious measure points to the conservative law and order hypocrisy. They love laws against all sorts of things — street drugs, for example. Yet they argue that gun laws would not affect the criminal possession of guns. They need to decide if we should be a nation of laws. Or if we should be like the mythical Wild West (a place that in reality did believe in gun control and was not, as a result, as wild as Hollywood would have us believe.)