It's About The Guns....Obviously

I've gone back and forth on the gun issue for decades, but I'll confess it's been a low-salience issue for me just as it is for the vast majority of voters not heavily immersed in gun culture.  My perspective on the gun control debate has mostly been guided by my partisan political preference, where the risk-reward calculus on the gun issue overwhelmingly favors Democratic lawmakers looking the other way as the gun supply proliferates and the body count rises.  I've always personally preferred the idea of more legal limits on firearm ownership, but since the country quietly moved the other direction since the 1990s, I didn't think it was worth the risk of fracturing whatever is left of the Democratic coalition still in love with their guns.  Even now, after the Trump realignment, I don't think we should underestimate that number as having the potential to swing elections.

With that said, it feels like we've hit a tipping point in the 2020s.  The poisonous radicalization of the Internet and its ability to both create and glorify mass shooters simply cannot coexist with a gun supply that keeps outpacing population growth.  Mass shootings have been a thing since I was in college, but the ones that seemed most shocking in scope in the past are business as usual today, with each previous high-profile shooting serving as inspiration for the next.

And while mass shootings via assault rifles in the suburbs dominate the headlines, they pale in comparison to the body count of handgun shootings primarily in our cities.  Just as it's impossible to keep our expansion pack supply of assault rifles out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them, it's also impossible to keep our expansion pack supply of handguns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them.

The obvious answer to the gun issue has been staring me in the face for decades but I finally put my finger on it in the last year or so:  America has a gun volume issue, a vicious cycle of supply and demand reinforcement that has made our problems worse and will continue to.

The United States had approximately 100 million guns in 1990.  Thirty-five years later, that number has quadrupled to nearly 400 million.  The country that ranks second in gun volume is India, which has 72 million guns.  India, of course, has 1.5 billion people.  Per capita, America has 10 times more guns than any other country in the world.  It also has 10 times more mass shootings than any other country in the world.   Correlation doesn't always mean causation, but it's pretty hard to ignore that arithmetic.  

And therein lies the problem.  When there are more guns than human beings within the United States borders, how do you stop anybody from getting one?   Whether it be teen mass shooters in schools or the Bloods settling scores with the Crips, it's always going to be ridiculously easy for just about any of them to get their hands on a firearm when there are 400 million to choose from.  Much as we like to think hypothetical new laws would be a silver bullet, no pun intended, we have little hope of success until we bend the demand curve for guns down and wait for the supply to follow the same trajectory.

We have two different supply and demand models.  The rifle market is dominated by hunters and by gun fetishists, people whose identity is defined by their arsenals.  As a percentage of the population this group is relatively small, but they nonetheless number in the tens of millions and wield tremendous political strength.  Rifles are generally not used to commit a high percentage of the violence, but they are used in the vast majority of high-profile mass shootings.  Nobody even seems to be able to agree on what does and doesn't constitute an "assault weapon" and I certainly don't know enough on firearm assembly to break the stalemate.  That definitional ambiguity will probably make any attempt to ban them ineffective, even in the unlikely event that such a ban was to pass.

The other supply and demand model is for handguns, which are responsible for most shootings.  Here, our perverse culture of firearm saturation constantly feeds upon itself.  Because so many handguns are in circulation in the first place, more gun crimes happen and fill the hearts of everyday Americans with fear.  Everyday Americans then respond by buying a gun of their own for personal protection.  This additional demand drives supply up higher, and a disproportionate number of the new guns manufactured continue to find their way into the hands of those who shouldn't have them.  This drives up fears in yet another cohort of everyday people who then decide they need a gun of their own.  Rinse and repeat.....

If introducing yet-again more guns into circulation "made us safer", as gun rights advocate argue, we'd have seen it play out in the last 35 years when the U.S. population has increased by 33% while the guns in circulation have increased by more than 200%.  Nearly quadrupling the number of guns in the next 35 years seems incredibly unlikely to change that.  At that same time, it's hard to tell people they shouldn't be able to protect themselves, meaning it won't be easy to convince law-abiding citizens concerned for their own safety or their families' safety to pass on buying a gun as is needed to bend the supply curve down.

I am no fan of the bullying tactics employed by antismoking groups to humiliate and overcharge smokers over the last few decades, but it was unquestionably effective in driving down tobacco use.  Some variation of the same template would be needed to drive down demand, followed by supply, of guns.  What worked in reducing the number of smokers is not really transferable to firearms in that the customer base of guns is vastly more engaged about their gun purchases than smokers ever were about their cigarette habits.  Still, there are options such as a carnage tax on weapons and ammunition or insurance and license requirements, consistent with the approach used to snuff out smoking, that could be imposed on guns without violating the Second Amendment.

At least for me, the tipping point on gun access and supply has been crossed, but it remains unclear whether it was has with the country.  Throughout recent history, gun violence has always been a "you problem" to the majority of Americans.  They offer "thoughts and prayers" and move on with their lives.  "You" get to pick up the mop and clean up the bloody mess where your child perished.  "You" get to sponge their brain matter off the walls.  Until it happens to "me", it's not salient.  It will only become salient with an uptick in mass shootings substantial enough that more people feel at risk.  Until then, the minority who values their guns more than anything else in life will keep on winning.

Obviously, any kind of gun reform is a nonstarter with Republicans controlling the legislative process.  We're familiar with the pattern: after offering thoughts and prayers, Republicans will filibuster several news cycles complaining that the real problem is mental health and not guns right up until the story gets upstaged by something else.  Once it does, the same Republicans will resume with their 75-year project of defunding mental health programs.  But it's a little less unthinkable that, by 2027, a hypothetical Democratic Congress could get Trump to get the ball rolling.  I don't think Trump has any real vested interest in gun culture and if he believed there was a critical mass in favor of gun control in the country, I could see him making a deal.

Of course, even with any legislative and judicial momentum for enacting and enforcing gun control measures, there will be more failures than successes.  It's not as if a switch will be flipped and mass shootings will drop to zero or even by half overnight.  With 400 million guns in the country, we'll only start to see the violence begin to atrophy when supply goes down.  Even in the best of times, this would be a long-term project and would require a trial and error legislative approach. Some things would work and some things wouldn't. Lawmakers would have to be vigilant and honest about things that weren't working and alter their solution proposals from there.  And if we've learned anything in the last 20 years, it's that "vigilance" and "honesty" aren't in abundant supply among our polarized elected officials, so I'll forgive readers for being cynical about their aptitude to take this difficult issue on with any success even with a national consensus.

Still, I think the framing I've outlined above is the most persuasive approach.  We have a gun volume problem.  There are far too many guns in circulation and no realistic way to stop people who shouldn't have them from getting them because of that volume.  If we could figure out a way to dramatically reduce the supply without making the law-abiding people most vested in gun ownership from feeling that their arsenals are under siege, we would likely see a corresponding decline in gun violence.  That's a big ask in our ferociously polarized country, but as more people have to worry about mopping up their own children's blood off the school building floor other than just wishing thoughts and prayers to others when they have to do it, it seems a little more doable. At the very least, I'd bet on a national consensus on gun reform happening before a national consensus on health care reform.