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In reply to the discussion: Hillary Clinton Speaks at Trayvon Martin Foundation, Calls Trump's Gun Policies 'Dangerous' [View all]benEzra
(12,148 posts)and our suicide rate is comparable to Australia's and most of Europe's, most years (and far below Japan's). But since you're speaking of "where do we go from here", I think that question is made a lot more complicated by the current Holy War against responsible gun ownership.
When I first started posting on DU back in 2004-2005, I (naively) floated a few proposals that I thought might could be a productive middle ground between gun owners and gun control advocates, such as universal background checks (with felony criminal penalties to prevent compiling a registry or other misuse), a tax credit for the purchase of UL-listed gun safes, etc. But in the past four years, I've seen compromises such as those I once advocated, as well as prior compromises by gun owners, wielded as weapons against the lawful and nonviolent. The result is mistrust of all such proposals by lawful gun owners, and I doubt that mistrust will abate until the fundamentalists currently running the gun control lobby are replaced by pragmatists who look for common ground instead of talking points and rhetorical cheap shots.
To me, it appears that the current leadership of the gun control movement isn't so much interested in reducing gun violence, as it is interested in criminalizing ownership by the nonviolent, at least those of the working class and middle class. When the people pushing "mandatory training" or "safe storage" or "universal background checks" are simultaneously talking about compiling registries, banning and confiscating the most popular guns, and outlawing self-defense, it undermines even some good-faith proposals that might have merit.
I think universal background checks might be do-able, still, but the proposals currently being pushed aren't about background checks so much as they are about registration and petty harassment (e.g. making it a crime to share a gun with your life partner even if they have a clean record, or to introduce new shooters to the shooting sports at anywhere but a formal range). And in the context of the current culture war, I see little interest on either side in crafting a compromise. Even my idea about a tax credit for gun safes would inevitably be twisted by the prohibitionists into a requirement that all guns be unloaded and locked away at all times, and in that environment no such proposals are really viable.