June 14 was an ordinary day in America.
The very same day James Hodgkinson shot four people at a practice for Congress’ annual baseball game, elsewhere in the country, 24 Americans were shot to death by other Americans.
28 Americans were shot to death the day before June 14. 32 Americans were shot to death the day after.
Understandably, it was the shooting of our nation’s lawmakers that made headline news. Most of the 24 who were shot to death elsewhere didn’t make the front page. One of them was a 10-month-old baby who was shot in his father’s arms by three gunmen in Houston.
Congress’ ball game went on. During the three-hour game, another 15 people were shot to death in America. Congress may have healed temporarily, though America went right on hemorrhaging.
Though shootings happen in other countries, the vast scale with which they happen in the United States is a uniquely American phenomenon among wealthy countries. While an answer to gun violence in America may seem inconceivable in our impossibly polarized state, there is an elegant solution. Read on.
The scope of the problem
How big is the problem?
From 2000 to 2015, 187,932 Americans were shot to death by other Americans. Here’s some perspective on that number:
- 187,932 is 62 times the number of people killed on 9/11 – that’s about four 9/11’s every year for 16 years.
- 187,932 is (way) more than the number of Americans who died in combat in the following wars combined: the Vietnam War, the Korean War, World War I, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican–American War, the Philippine–American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the War of 1812, as well as the American Revolutionary War.
Add eleven 9/11’s to the combined casualty lists of those wars and you’ll have 187,932.
How does the U.S. compare to other countries? That 187,932 number works out to an average of 11,746 shot to death per year. Here’s how that stacks up:
- More people are shot to death in America in three weeks than all the following countries combined for an entire year: Canada, Australia, France, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, Iceland, New Zealand, Greece, Japan, Israel, Norway, Netherlands and South Korea
- In Japan, a country with a population of 127 million, six people were shot to death in 2014. Six. In just five hours, more people are shot to death in the U.S. than are shot to death in Japan in an entire year.
Traditional solutions
It’s fair to say that Republicans and Democrats approach this problem differently. What these approaches have in common is that neither work.
Republican solution: more guns
“If we had more weapons, we could have subdued the shooter more quickly,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., explained in the aftermath of the congressional shooting. More guns is the traditional GOP approach to solving gun violence.
Problem: there are already 1.13 guns for every man, woman and child in America. More guns doesn’t seem to be working. All countries with substantially less gun violence than the U.S. also have substantially fewer guns.
Democratic solution: ban assault rifles. Make it harder for high-risk individuals to buy guns.
Problem: though banning assault rifles is a poster child gun violence solution of democrats, rifles of any kind (including assault rifles) account for only 3.5% of all gun-related homicides in America. Handguns are the hands down choice of people who choose to shoot other people in the United States.
Even if restricting the sale of assault rifles could make a dent in American gun violence, it’s a moot point. The NRA and legions of proponents of 2nd amendment rights will not permit government to constrain the supply of guns in any way shape or form. This is an American reality. Assault weapons will not go away, nor will gun sales to suspected terrorists on no-fly lists.
The simple solution to gun violence in America
So how do we curb gun violence while allowing Americans to buy all the guns they want?
For the answer, we need to return to the scene of the crime in Alexandria.
In an otherwise ordinary day in America, upon closer examination, there was one thing that was odd about June 14: the congressional baseball shooter was the owner of record of the weapons he used to commit the crime. That’s unusual. The guns used by most shooters actually (officially) belong to someone else. As many as 97% of guns used in homicides are acquired through straw purchases, where someone purchases a gun legally at a gun store or gun show, then sells it to someone else.
Hidden in this statistic lays the elegant solution to gun violence in America: simply hold the gun owner of record accountable for the crimes committed by his or her gun.
That’s it.
In order to make this happen, a national gun registry would be needed that would track gun ownership, as well as a formal process to transfer title of gun ownership, similar to that used when selling cars. Speaking of cars, requiring gun owners to purchase firearm liability insurance would further amplify the effect of enjoined responsibility.
So what would happen if the owner of record of a firearm were held accountable for crimes committed with his or her gun? It’s easy to envision several immediate positive changes:
1. Straw gun purchases would plummet. If gun owners were held accountable for the crimes committed with their guns, they would be much less likely to sell their guns without a valid title transfer
2. Gun thefts would drop. If gun owners were on the hook for stolen guns, they would have greater incentive to secure their guns
3. Gun owners would be far less likely to loan a gun to a friend or relative.
Not surprisingly, the NRA is hostile to the concept of a national gun registry – this despite the fact it in no way infringes on 2nd Amendment rights. Though the Constitution may allow you to own a gun, it doesn’t say anything about prohibiting the government from knowing that you own a gun. If this seems like a scary notion to those who await the federal invasion of Texas scheduled for any day now, well, perhaps paranoia should count as one of the mental defects that disqualifies people from owning firearms.
The following are common counterarguments:
- What if my gun is stolen? My recommendation is this: if you can demonstrate that thieves got your gun by blowing the hinges off your steel gun safe that was bolted to the foundation of your house, then you should get a pass. However, if your gun was taken out of a glove compartment or a glass display case, well, you’re screwed. If that seems unfair, perhaps you can complain to the loved ones of the victim that was killed with your gun.
- What about the hundreds of millions of guns already in circulation? It will take time for those guns to be siphoned out of the population as crimes are committed with them and the guns are confiscated. That timeframe can and should be sharply accelerated with buy-back programs such as those implemented in Australia. This will reduce supply and sharply drive up the price of illegal guns.
- What about the little old lady who misplaced her gun? I agree it’s sad that she might do some jail time or community service, but the consolation is that she’ll probably be a little less sad than the family whose loved one was killed by her gun.
This requirement would do nothing to impair perceived Second Amendment rights. You can buy all the guns you want, though if someone gets hurt with one of those guns, you would need to be held to account.
Accountability is something we accept in our society. Most gun owners handle and secure their guns with care and fully expect others to do the same. Though America would likely be better off without assault rifles, the facts show that we could save far more lives by simply requiring all Americans to be as responsible with their guns as they are with their cars.
This simple solution speaks directly to the fundamental problem of guns in America: it is the victims, not the gun owners, that currently bear the full responsibility for gun violence – this despite the fact that victims don’t have a say regarding the choices gun owners make with their guns that result in innocent people becoming victims. Victims don’t ask gun owners to sell their guns to killers and they certainly don’t ask to die.
Some believe the rights conferred by the Constitution regarding gun ownership are boundless. To those, I ask them to explain to the father of that 10-month-old baby that his son’s death was merely an unfortunate byproduct of unlimited constitutional privilege afforded to gun owners to be reckless with their guns. The burden of securing guns and transferring them responsibly is nothing compared to that borne by the victims of gun violence.
In the time it took me to write this article, 12 more Americans were shot to death.