Guns and rosy hope to change the odds of mass shootings

Bill Knight column for Thursday, Friday or Saturday, Nov. 23, 24 or 25

At the risk of annoying people I like and respect, I must say: There’s hope in a new bipartisan bill to strengthen background checks for guns.

“Gun control” does nothing to stop lying criminals, gun-owning friends say. Guns are just inanimate objects. True. But too often, a gun is the tool of choice in dealing with misunderstandings or fear, anger or crime, and while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they’re relatively routine only in the United States.

Meanwhile, justifications for doing nothing range from mental illness to acceptance of U.S. violence.

But maybe doing something can happen in a measure that could start at least cutting the odds of mass shootings here. The sponsors of the bill – which would improve background-checks for gun sales compiled by the National Instant Criminal Background Check system – are Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R.-Texas); co-sponsors include Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.).

The bill, the Fix NICS Act, has no opposition from the National Rifle Association (or its members – 74 percent of whom support background checks, according to the New England Journal of Medicine – or the public – 94 percent of whom also support background checks, according to a poll by Quinnipiac University).

It’s needed, these lawmakers say, because the federal government can’t force states to upload criminal and mental-health records needed to bar unfit purchasers from buying guns. So this creates incentives for states to share data and accountability for noncompliance, and adds domestic violence to the system.

“For years agencies and states haven’t complied with the law, failing to upload these critical records without consequence,” said Cornyn, Senate Majority Whip. “Just one record that’s not properly reported can lead to tragedy, as the country saw in Sutherland Springs, Texas. This bill aims to help fix what’s become a nationwide, systemic problem so we can better prevent criminals and domestic abusers from obtaining firearms.”

The idea isn’t to confiscate millions of guns but to prohibit some from owning (and discouraging criminals from trying). A former newsroom colleague who owns more than a dozen firearms commented, “Cracking down on people who sell/buy illegally is not going to keep sane, lawful people from owning guns.”

The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” But conservative Republican Warren Burger when he was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1990 said that the notion that the Second Amendment gives an unconstrained individual right to a gun is “a fraud on the American public.”

At the root of the crisis is why the United States experiences so many mass shootings. Explanations like Americans are violent or are mentally ill have been debunked. (One 2015 study – “Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy” – shows that that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental-health issues.)

Also, America has no more crime than other industrialized countries, but crime here is more lethal.

What can’t be neglected is the number of guns. The United States has 270 million guns. Americans make up about 4.4 percent of Earth’s population but own 42 percent of all guns. Also, 31 percent of the gunmen in about 90 mass shootings worldwide 1966-2012 were American, according to a 2015 study by University of Alabama professor Adam Lankford, who found countries’ gun-ownership rates correlate with the odds they’d experience a mass shooting.

And it’s not exclusively ownership, either. Weak controls on buying guns is key, too. Switzerland’s ownership is high, too, but it has stricter laws . Its murder rate is one of the world’s lowest, and has had one mass shooting in recent decades, in 2001.

Melinda Wenner Moyer in Scientific American reports studies showing that four reforms could make Americans safer: require people to apply in-person, at local law enforcement agencies for permits to buy guns; ban anyone convicted of any violent crime from purchasing guns; make all serious domestic-violence offenders surrender their firearms; and ban active alcohol abusers from possessing firearms.

“The evidence shows these laws could make a significant dent in U.S. gun violence if implemented in every state,” Moyer says. “In particular they could reduce the terrible death toll from mass shootings.”

Speaking of likelihoods, the odds of the bill’s passage are unknown.

“In retrospect, Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun-control debate,” wrote British journalist Dan Hodges, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 youngsters at a Connecticut elementary school. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”