Against Incremental Consensus on Firearms

I like incrementalism, but the NRA has made it impossible. Even the massacre of children, churchgoers, country music fans, and teenagers, hasn't helped. So let's change the context. I wrote against the Second Amendment for Pacific Standard:

When I say "repeal the Second Amendment," I am not saying that we should criminalize all private ownership of firearms. The burden of such mass criminalization would mostly fall on non-white and poor people anyway. But we must dethrone firearms as a specially protected class of objects in our most important political documents. They should be treated like all other tools: assessed, regulated, studied, insured, and subject to legal remedy when we need to hold both owners and manufacturers responsible for their use. In fact, these moves to keep better track of firearms and hold appropriate parties liable ought to be a nice incremental consensus position. It isn't, thanks to the Second Amendment.

Las Vegas, Bump Stocks, and the NRA

NEW at Pacific Standard

On the day after the deadliest mass shooting in modern United States history, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders responded to questions about gun control legislation by telling reporters that "there will certainly be a time for that policy discussion to take place, but that's not the place that we're in at this moment."

If there is a "place" and "moment," are we there yet? And if not now, when?

In the weeks since a gunman fired more than 900 rounds into a crowd of concert-goers, killing 58 and leaving over 500 more wounded, we've re-learned the key lesson about reducing gun violence in America: We still can't do it.

To be clear, the right wing is perfectly willing to use violence to make a political point, but only when it allows them to dehumanize already vulnerable people. Sanders, for example, concluded that press conference by talking about Chicago—which is to say gun violence among black people in Chicago. (In the interest of fact-checking: Chicago's gun laws fail because right-wing states like Indiana and Missouri allow individuals to purchase weapons and traffic them into the city.) Speaker of the House Paul Ryan always responds to questions about gun violence by talking about mental health. And people with unmet mental-health support needs are vastly more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Sanders, Ryan, and their partisans are uninterested in such details, of course, because the goal is to derail the conversation onto any topic except how to keep killers from getting powerful guns.

The NRA and Philando Castile (and Dallas): I Welcome Their Hypocrisy

Throughout the day yesterday, as people on social media mourned the death of Philando Castile and expressed their outrage at his killer, I saw one constant thread: People pointing out the hypocrisy of the NRA. Numerous articles appeared talking about the ways in which the NRA's call for the broadest view of the 2nd Amendment doesn't seem to apply to black people (including from principled libertarians). This is all true, they are hypocrites.

It made me think, though - what if the NRA did issue a statement on Castile? What if, now that black individuals bearing semi-automatic or automatic rifles (probably) shot cops in Dallas, the NRA got behind an assault weapon ban?

My response - I welcome their hypocrisy. Please stay silent.

I am a long time critic of the proliferation of firearms in our society, writing for CNN about violence on college campuses/guns on college campuses in particular. Throughout, I have recognize that there is no tragedy that could lead the NRA to support any type of gun control measure. Sandy Hook didn't. Nothing could. Therefore, I do not seek to persuade, but to marginalize.

The NRA has long deployed racist ideology to make white America afraid of black America, and thus convince white people to buy firearms. At absolute best, the NRA would seek to separate Castile from the hundreds of other black victims of state violence. To say - this man was an unjust victim. To say - this man had his second amendment rights violated. And then to ignore the broader issues.

The problem with America's police, from a policy standpoint, is not that they treat CCW holders too aggressively, but that use of force standards trains officers to treat the mere possibility of a threat as an actual threat.

We have two overlapping problems: Police violence. Proliferation of firearms. The NRA will help with neither.

Stay silent, NRA. I welcome your hypocrisy.

Some of my essays on guns:

• Why UCLA Shooting Makes Teachers Nervous (CNN.com, 6/2/16)
• Guns on Campus Jeopardize Education (CNN.com, 2/24/16)
• The San Bernardino Massacre (CNN.com, 12/3/15)
• Professor's Killing Highlights Our Vulnerability (CNN.com, 9/15/15)

The NRA vs Smith & Wesson

From Evan Osnos' post-Orlando article in the New Yorker on the business of guns, I found this very telling. It's about the negotiation between the Clinton Administration and Smith & Wesson to make smart guns - whatever that really means - standard. I'm not sure what the 1999 technology was, but today, as I unlock my phone with my fingerprint in a few seconds, I can't help but think it would be easy to add a similar level of security to the modern firearm. If, that is, the NRA were actually interested in gun safety. Here's the story:

This time, a gunmaker thought he had a solution—one that would not only sell more guns but lower the toll of gun violence. Ed Shultz, who was then the C.E.O. of Smith & Wesson, had grown up attending a one-room schoolhouse, the son of an Iowa hog farmer. Though he called himself a “rabid gun owner,” he was also a pragmatist: easygoing with the press, and experienced. He had manufactured lawnmowers, furniture, bicycles, and other goods. In the hope of ending the lawsuits, he secretly agreed to negotiate with the Clinton Administration. To avoid detection, the talks were held in airport hotels and obscure federal offices. After six weeks, the negotiators were near a deal, and Shultz was sitting across from the Administration’s point man, Andrew Cuomo, who was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Cuomo, now the governor of New York, told me recently, “I was a gun owner at the time, and I have kids in the house.” He said to Shultz, “If you tell me you could sell a gun that my child couldn’t operate, even if it was sitting on the counter, loaded, that is appealing to me.” In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Smith & Wesson manufactured more than half a million handguns with a two-part safety that the company boasted was “perfectly harmless in the hands of a child,” but it abandoned them during the Second World War, when it focussed on producing military guns. Shultz was open to building a new, high-tech version—a “smart gun” that could be fired only by its owner. “He says, ‘I’m not interested in any political statement. I’m interested in a business-survival strategy,’ ” Cuomo recalled.

On March 17, 2000, Clinton and Cuomo announced the deal: among other things, Smith & Wesson agreed to develop a smart gun and take steps to prevent dealers from selling to criminals. Cuomo declared, “We are finally on the road to a safer, more peaceful America.” But on the day the deal went public the N.R.A. denounced Smith & Wesson as “the first gun maker to run up the white flag of surrender.” It released Shultz’s phone number, and encouraged members to complain. He received many threats. One caller said, “I’m a dead-on shot, Mr. Shultz.” Another executive took to wearing a bulletproof vest, according to “Outgunned,” a history of gun-control politics, by Peter Harry Brown and Daniel G. Abel. Online, a boycott took hold, and sales of Smith & Wesson guns fell so sharply that two factories temporarily shut down. In ten months, the stock lost ninety-five per cent of its value, and the company was sold the next year for a fraction of its former worth.

Shultz left the company, and he all but stopped talking to the press. When I happened on a phone number for him, he called me back only to ask how I’d found it. “I need to know where the hole is, so I can plug it,” he said, and declined to talk about the gun business.

When my kids go over to a new house to play, I've learned to ask - do you have any firearms in the house? I'm not worried about mass shooting or deliberate violence, but about unsecured firearms. Here's a piece from the New York Times on toddlers shooting themselves or others.

Incremental progress on lowering gun violence should be possible, both technologically and politically.