Yesterday, Biden said he would try to get Congress to pass an assault weapons ban during the lame duck session— before the NRA-GOP takes over the House in January. He told reporters that “[T]he idea … we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick. It’s just sick. It has no, no social redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single, solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.”
On July 29, the House passes H.R.1808, an assault weapons ban written by David Cicilline (D-RI) that would have made it a crime to knowingly import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon or large capacity ammunition feeding device. It passed 217-213, two Republicans— Brian Fitzpatrick (PA) and Chris Jacobs (NY) voting for it— and 5 Democrats voting against it:
Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- reelected
Jared Golden (Blue Dog-ME)- reelected
Vicente Gonzalez (Blue Dog-TX)- reelected
Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)- retired
Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)- defeated in primary
The Senate Republicans filibustered the bill and it was never voted on. There’s no reason to believe that the exact same thing won’t happen again in the lame duck session. Polling shows that a majority of Americans want Congress to pass a variety of gun control legislation including a ban on assault weapons. Republicans don’t care. The biggest advocate of unfettered gun rights in Congress, Lauren Boebert (Q-CO), represents a very red district with a PVI of R+7 and a partisan lean of R+15. It’s virtually impossible for a Democrat to win there. But Boebert is looked at so poorly by her constituents that her race— still technically uncalled— was the closest in the nation. Only 554 votes separate her from Democrat Adam Frisch, out of 327,110 ballots cast— 0.06%. Several counties were overwhelming in their hopes she would be defeated. This is how badly she did in these counties:
Pitkin Co- 21%
San Miguel Co- 21%
Eagle Co- 28%
Gunnison Co- 31%
San Juan Co- 31%
Costilla Co- 33%
Had she actually lost her seat, it would have sent a clear message to other NRA-zombies that soon or later their disconnect from the American people is going to cost them.
Earlier this month, Max Fisher and Josh Keller asked why the U.S. has so many mass shootings and concluded that there are too many guns in circulation. “When the world looks at the United States,” they wrote, “it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film. But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings? Perhaps, some speculation, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad. These explanation share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.”
The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.
…Americans make up 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American, according to a 2015 study by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama.
Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people— a distinction Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.
Worldwide, Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.
…Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States.
Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.
The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.
After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
