From President Obama: VOX article on El Paso

[rogue emissary]

Democrats have been discussing the same ideas on guns for 25 years. It’s time to change that.
There should be a Medicare-for-all or Green New Deal for ending gun violence.

The Democratic debates crystallized how far Democrats have moved to the left on all sorts of issues over the past few years. Candidates for the presidency advocated for single-payer health care, a Green New Deal, free college, 70 percent taxes on the ultrawealthy, decriminalizing crossing the border without papers, and upholding “reproductive justice.”

But there’s one issue, even as it’s gotten more attention, where major Democratic politicians haven’t moved much: guns. When it came up in the debates, candidates raised the same ideas they’ve had for decades: universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and generally keeping guns away from dangerous people. Only Cory Booker, who brought up his gun licensing plan, and Eric Swalwell, who pointed to his assault weapons confiscation program but has since dropped out of the presidential race, broke new ground on the issue — receiving little support from others on stage (although some candidates have backed licensing elsewhere).

If you want to make a serious dent in gun violence in the US, this should worry you. Just imagine a world where Democrats get everything leading candidates typically say they want on guns. Congress passes and President Elizabeth Warren signs a comprehensive bill that includes universal background checks, bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and a red-flag law that lets law enforcement take away guns from dangerous people.

It would be, to be sure, a massive political and policy victory — the culmination of decades of work by gun control advocates. The media would characterize it as a sea change in gun politics. The National Rifle Association and its Republican allies would be livid.

Yet it almost certainly would not be enough. We would still likely see mass shootings, like the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, on a regular basis, in addition to the incidents of suicides, urban violence, and domestic abuse that are tragically even more common.

That’s because America would still have the weakest gun laws among developed nations, and it would still have the most firearms out of any country in the world — and the research has consistently found that places with more guns have more gun deaths.

The problem is dire: The US, with its enormous civilian-owned arsenal of guns, leads the developed world in gun violence. A 2018 study in JAMA found that the US’s civilian gun death rate is nearly four times that of Switzerland, five times that of Canada, 35 times that of the United Kingdom, and 53 times that of Japan. There are, on average, more than 100 gun deaths in the US per day.

The typical proposals on guns pick at this problem but come nowhere close to solving it. Background checks can screen out some people from getting a gun, but recent studies suggest even universal background checks, on their own, don’t have a big impact on gun deaths. An assault weapons ban could make some mass shootings less deadly but wouldn’t address the 70-plus percent of firearm homicides that involve a handgun. A red flag law could help law enforcement take guns away from dangerous people, but by definition, these laws only work after red flags arise, which is often too late.

Gun control policies that don’t confront the core issue — that America simply has too many guns — are doomed to merely nibble around the edges. Everywhere in the world, people get into arguments. Every country has residents who are dangerous to themselves or others because of mental illness. Every country has bigots and extremists. But here, it’s uniquely easy for a person to obtain a gun, letting otherwise tense but nonlethal conflicts escalate into deadly violence.

To change the status quo, Democrats should go big. They need to focus on the abundance of guns in the US and develop a suite of policies that directly tackle that issue, from licensing to confiscation to more aggressive bans of certain kinds of firearms (including, perhaps, all semiautomatic weapons or at least some types of handguns).

I am not naive. I don’t think that this would lead to sweeping Australian- or UK-style gun control legislation passing in 2021. But this broader conversation has to start somewhere.

The time is now. The NRA is in chaos, as its leadership is caught in a civil war. The Parkland, Florida, activists have forced guns into the spotlight. A recent Morning Consult poll found that Democratic voters put gun violence second only to climate change as the issue they wanted to hear about in the first debates.

Just like Bernie Sanders helped launch discussions about single-payer and free college in 2016, a push in 2020 could help get the party to where it needs to be on this issue if it really wants to address America’s gun problem. . . .

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/1/18683860/democrats-2020-gun-control-mass-shootings

Barack Obama
Until all of us stand up and insist on holding public officials accountable for changing our gun laws, these tragedies will keep happening:

Link to tweet

It's a long article but well worth the read. I posted here as it addresses multiple 2020 democratic gun proposals.

[ancianita]

1. I've come to appreciate VOX's even handed analyses. I read it on FB frequently. Thanks.