What if “gun control” is impossible? By Alex Pareene for salon.com

[Douglas Carpenter]

(Credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

That doesn't mean we can't ban some, make them a lot harder to get -- and maybe even tax the hell out of them

Effective gun control in America is impossible. It’s impossible for a million different reasons, some of them new, many of them very old, but it’s impossible all the same. It’s impossible because of our courts, our history, our culture, and, most significantly, our surfeit of guns. There are just too goddamn many guns in the United States to make it difficult for crazy or dangerous people to obtain one, or many.

A U.K.-style blanket firearms ban is obviously impossible, constitutionally and politically. Even Canadian-style firearms regulation, which requires licensing and prohibits or heavily restricts private ownership of most varieties of firearms, besides rifles and shotguns used primarily in hunting, probably wouldn’t stand up to our current conservative judiciary’s literalist (though not originalist) interpretation of the Second Amendment. Without a constitutional amendment — and please remember that nearly half of Americans own firearms — Congress can’t restrict the gun trade to the degree necessary to significantly reduce American gun violence.

There are countries with gun ownership rates nearly as high as our own and much less gun violence. You could attribute that to culture (other Western nations have a less blood-soaked popular media and lack our proud history of fetishizing power and violence and huge fucking guns) or regulation (nearly every other wealthy and gun-heavy nation registers firearms and requires licensing). But another thing Finland and Canada — to name two nations with plenty of guns and not many gun murders — have in common is a strong welfare state. There are also countries with many fewer guns than the United States, but with even higher homicide by firearm rates. They are all countries poorer and less equal than the United States. Social democracy might actually be a better deterrent to gun violence than gun control.

So let’s push for gun registration, and background checks for unlicensed firearms sales, and bans on huge video game-style mass death machines with ammunition designed to pierce armor and tanks, by all means. Let’s also look at taxing the hell out of guns, and using the money to buy ourselves a fairer nation, whose citizens are less terrified of slipping into intractable poverty if they lose a job, with universal access to mental and physical healthcare. I think we’re stuck with our guns, and even our gun culture. We can hopefully do something about the factors that lead Americans to use their guns

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/16/what_if_gun_control_is_impossible/

[Logical]

1. The witch hunters will try to lock this post I am sure!

[MannyGoldstein]

2. Effective gun control is in effect already in certain states

States with strong gun control laws have lower rates of gun deaths. It will never be perfect, but it can be much, much better.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. California should be the ground for federal standards.

Hodgepodge state laws don't work. You don't like Cali, there are others.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. What I am hearing are clip sizes

Doable, even with this congress.

Even some weapon types...not with this congress.

That said, societies at times change radically due to a trauma. We might be there.

That said, gun ownership continues to go down and the majority are no longer gun owners.


I also don't see fear anymore, but deep seated anger, like I have not seen in my life. And it is bipartisan.

(I hate auto correct)

[elleng]

5. 'Ban' is unlikely, but there certainly are ways to regulate/control,

and every state and locality, and the Federal government, should do so.

[pipoman]

7. Did you even read the article?

The constitution is very real.