Wresting Gun Policy From the Hands of the Radical Fringe: A Q&A With Garen Wintemute

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/171783/wresting-gun-policy-hands-radical-fringe-qa-garen-wintemute

Sasha Abramsky: What happened in Connecticut last Friday was by some measures an appalling aberration; yet by other measures it was all too predictable. How can we understand this event as something more than an aberration?

Garen Wintemute: We may very much want to understand and to predict. But predicting exactly who and where and when and what the body count will be is simply impossible – because no two of these events are alike. And one of the great mistakes is trying to prevent the last one – because the next one will be different. But will there be another similar event, will there be another body count? That’s an absolute certainty. Firearms are readily available. We have created ‘global gunning,’ much as we have created global warming. We have made a whole series of policy decisions that have made the widest possible array of firearms available to the widest possible array of people for use in the widest in the widest possible array of circumstances. And we are paying the price for those decisions; or, in this case, are children are paying it for us.

S.A. What can be done about this? You’ve got the issue of mental illness; the issue of gun control. You read about Syria’s chemical weapons, for example; they’re in a binary state – you need both elements to make them deadly. It’s the same thing here. You’ve got two elements. How do you stop them fusing?

G.W. We don’t know how big a role mental illness played here. But let’s step back; we have conversations like this at times when there’s been a mass murder, particularly of children, because we’re wired to see these catastrophes as salient events. But take Sandy Hook, Oak Creek, Aurora, Columbine, Virginia Tech, all of them together come to ninety-one dead. It’s awful. But we lose, on average, eighty-eight people every day to firearm violence in the United States, and we have more than two hundred people every day injured seriously enough to go to the emergency department. You ask me what we do? The answer is first what we do not do is try to figure out a way simply to prevent mass shootings. That won’t work. The one option we might have had in the past is closed to us now. That’s the option Australia took; they got rid of high capacity weapons. But we have nearly as many firearms in this country as we have people; our context is different. We could ban high capacity magazines. That would be fine. But there are tens of millions of them already in circulation. What do we do about those? We could ban further sales of assault weapons. But we need to understand there are millions of those guns in circulation in the U.S. already. Unless we are willing to recover those weapons, we are going to continue to pay the price for the decisions we have made over the last 30-50 years.

We need to have solutions that will make a difference in the presence of 300 million firearms. Our chance to emulate the model set by Britain and Australia and Canada is gone. The guns are here now. We all participated at one level or another in letting that happen. And we will continue to pay a price. But we can make a difference. We can make a dent, and that’s worth shooting for.

[Toronto]

1. Perhaps start by outlawing semi-automatic weapons

Like any addiction, cold turkey works for very few. Start by outlawing all semi-automatic weapons. People would have to turn them in voluntarily- initially. After six months impose a huge fine for possession. After one year impose a criminal conviction, plus a fine, with commensurate prison time. How many God fearing citizens with clean records would want to run the risk of a criminal record.

Once people have recovered from their addiction to semi-automatic weapons, legislate under precisely what conditions people can own a hand gun. Make it difficult.