Why Common Gun Control Proposals Fail (And How To Do Better)

Gun Violence Will Not Be Solved With Soundbites

I’m a gun owner, but I’m not going to talk about the Second Amendment, say ‘criminals will find a way’, or make car analogies. I care much less about the politics and morals of gun ownership than I do about the facts and results of gun control. It’s become difficult to ignore politicians and pundits repeating the same misinformation to push short-sighted or ineffective legislation. Many popular gun control proposals do not adequately address the complex issue of gun violence.

I don’t expect or intend to change your views on gun ownership. Instead, I want you to understand why a reasonable person would oppose many ‘common sense’ gun control proposals, and what we can do instead.

The AR-15

In recent years, media reports on mass shootings often center on the use of an AR-15 or ‘AR-15 style’ weapon. Media sources describe the AR-15 as a high-powered assault rifle, a weapon of war designed to kill as quickly and as efficiently as possible. For those with little or no gun knowledge, banning the common link among mass shooters, a weapon with seemingly no legitimate use, seems logical.

To knowledgeable gun owners, these claims often provoke anger, though not for ideological reasons. Those familiar with the AR-15 know these claims are false, to the point of seeming like deliberate lies. Rather than repeat the same debunking here, I’ll just say that many other posts already explain why the AR-15 is not an assault rifle (lacks fully-automatic fire capability; designed to be difficult to illegally convert to full auto). And as that link shows, it is also not a ‘high-powered’ weapon; it is actually one of the lowest-powered rifles available to civilians, weaker than typical hunting calibers.

These may seem like trivial distinctions given the AR-15’s obvious effectiveness, but they highlight the degree of media distortion and exaggeration around the gun. These exaggerations paint the AR-15 as a weapon of war unsuitable for civilian use; in reality, it’s functionally the same as any other semi-automatic rifle manufactured in the last fifty years. But if the AR-15 isn’t more effective than other guns, why are they used so often by mass shooters?

The simple answer is that they’re used by everyone. As Jon Stokes neatly lays out in his piece, AR-15s are extremely popular among civilians and police for their modularity. They’re configurable to a variety of calibers and barrel lengths to suit every purpose from competitive target shooting to deer hunting to pest control to SWAT operations, and can easily swap accessories to align to the user’s preferences. Instead of trying to find a gun with the right caliber, size, ergonomics, sights, and accessory compatibility, a buyer can simply start with an AR-15 and add the parts they want. A mass shooter is likely to buy an AR-15 not because it is uniquely suited to mass shooting, but because it’s affordable, configurable, and on the shelves of every gun store in the country.

Because of the erroneous perception of AR-15s as uniquely lethal, some politicians argue that a mass shooter couldn’t inflict nearly as much damage if they were armed with a handgun instead of an AR-15. Yet the Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 was armed with only a pair of handguns, and carried out what was then the most lethal single-gunman attack in American history. The Navy Yard shooter had a handgun as well, and the Columbine shooters primarily used handguns and shotguns. In the context of a mass shooting, where the victims are unarmed, unarmored, and cornered at point-blank range, the exact identity of the weapon used appears largely irrelevant.

Banning Assault Weapons

Perhaps you accept that the AR-15 isn’t unique, and advocate for restrictions on assault weapons as a whole, akin to the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban. What effect would this have?

First, a bit of terminology: unlike ‘assault rifle’, which has a very specific military definition, ‘assault weapon’ is a term invented for legal and political purposes. In the 1994 ban, assault weapons were defined by the ability to accept a detachable magazine combined with cosmetic features that have no effect on the weapon’s lethality but might reflect military origins. This has proven to be an ineffective method of restriction.

For example, this is a Mini-14, a rifle functionally identical to the AR-15: Same ammunition, same semi-automatic operation, same use of detachable magazines.

Just so we’re clear, these are all the same firearm, but with different external features. Of these, only the Mini-14 with the ATI stock (left column, third from the top) would be considered an assault weapon under the terms of the 1994 ban. Even under New York’s SAFE Act, a more stringent application of the same principle, only the middle four rifles would be considered assault weapons.

Since the ban relied mainly on the restriction of cosmetic features, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Department of Justice analysis of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban concluded that the ban had little to no effect on crime from when it was enacted in 1994 to when it expired in 2004. Many weapons made illegal by the ban were put back on shelves with minor redesigns to remove the banned features. Additionally, assault weapons had never accounted for many of the weapons used in crime in the first place, so the overwhelming majority of firearms used by criminals were unaffected. Even the New York Times admitted that the assault weapons ban had little effect, and that panic over ‘military-style’ assault weapons was largely unfounded.

And make no mistake, gun manufacturers and gun owners now know these rules inside and out, and are much, much better than they were in 1994 at redesigning existing firearms to comply. Consider a New York-legal AR-15:

This rifle is identical to an ordinary AR-15 in all functional respects, while omitting the cosmetic features (on a standard AR-15, the pistol grip and threaded muzzle) that would make it an assault weapon. A ban on ‘military-style assault weapons’ leaves this rifle alone. Would forcing a mass shooter to use that weirdly angled stock instead of a conventional pistol grip save lives in a mass shooting? It is extremely doubtful.

Don’t think that the solution is simply to ban AR-15s and derivatives by name, either- the ARES SCR is just one example among dozens of non-assault-weapon rifles that function the same way as the AR-15 and accept many common parts, without being related in marketing or terminology.

Magazine Capacity Limits

If restricting the types of weapons people can buy is ineffective, you may think restricting ‘high-capacity’ magazines limits the damage an individual can do with those weapons.

During the Virginia Tech Shooting, the shooter was equipped almost entirely with magazines that only held ten rounds. Columbine, which occurred during the Assault Weapons Ban, involved ten-round magazines as well. It’s counter-intuitive, but magazine capacity limits don’t effectively reduce the violence of mass shootings, and this video demonstrates why:

These law enforcement personnel neatly lay out why magazine limits don’t work: Magazine-fed firearms are designed to be easy to reload. Even shooters with minimal training can reload so quickly that a bystander has no opportunity to rush the shooter while he reloads. Magazines are compact and portable, making it easy for a shooter to carry 300+ rounds of ammunition, regardless of whether that represents ten 30-round magazines or thirty 10-round magazines. At Virginia Tech, the shooter easily carried seventeen magazines in a backpack.

In contrast, the Aurora theater shooter in 2012 was using a one hundred round drum magazine, known for their unreliability. The magazine jammed during the shooting, forcing him to switch to another weapon. The use of an extremely high capacity magazine likely reduced the death toll of that shooting.

And even with magazine capacity bans in place, it’s not hard to speed up the reloading process. Taping magazines together has been a common practice among soldiers for decades. For the New York market, one company developed the Pentagon Mag Coupler, a product which combines magazines to make them quicker and easier to swap:

Without even touching on 3D printing or the ease with which something as simple as a magazine (a metal box with a spring) can be modified to hold more rounds, the bottom line is that magazine capacity limits are not an effective solution. At best they have a negligible impact on a mass shooter’s rate of fire, and at worst they are circumvented by products on the market designed specifically in response to the limits.

Perhaps, then, banning detachable magazines altogether is the solution. But remember, again, that manufacturers and gun owners actively push the laws to the limit. When California ruled that any rifle with a detachable magazine is an assault weapon, the response was the bullet button. This device makes it so that the magazine release requires a pointed tool (such as a spare bullet, hence the name) to operate, making the magazine no longer considered detachable as it technically requires partial disassembly of the rifle with a tool. Even with this law in place, the shooters in San Bernardino illegally modified one of their weapons to accept detachable magazines, making the utility of the law questionable at best when it is so easily circumvented.

Australia-Style Buyback

If banning assault weapons won’t work, and stipulating magazine capacities won’t work, and handguns are comparably lethal at close range, perhaps you think the only viable solution is a repeal of the 2nd Amendment and a mass confiscation/buyback of all semi-automatics, akin to what Australia enacted after the Port Arthur shooting in 1996, while making it a difficult and expensive privilege to own a gun.

Fair enough. Like I said, I’m not going to debate gun ownership as a right, and evidence from Australia and the United Kingdom, which enacted a ban on handguns in 1997, suggests that over time, a ban reduces the availability and supply of illegal firearms. This is intuitive and logical.

However, that does not directly translate to the immediate sociological effects you might expect. Here’s a chart showing Australia’s homicide statistics surrounding the time of the buyback:

While firearm homicides dropped after the buyback, they had already been dropping for a decade before it, and non-firearm homicides actually rose after the buyback. In fact, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, the rates of armed and unarmed robbery spiked after the ban, only returning to their pre-ban levels in 2003–2004, while homicide peaked shortly after the ban and did not start to consistently fall below pre-ban levels until the mid-2000s. With other social factors at work in increasing and reducing crime, it’s not clear what direct effect, if any, the buyback had on violent crime rates.

It is true that Australia has yet to see another mass shooting of similar lethality, but Australia had not seen mass shootings of similar lethality prior to Port Arthur, either. It was a one-off event, neither preceded nor repeated, while overall statistics surrounding gun violence show no clear effect either positive or negative resulting from the ban. Of note is the fact that New Zealand, despite still allowing many of the firearms Australia has banned, has neither experienced mass shootings nor widespread gun crime.

However, gun ownership in the United States has a fundamentally different character from the recreational shooting and hunting popular in New Zealand. In America, an interest in self-defense represents the strongest opposition to large-scale gun control. It may seem alien to some that many Americans demand a right to protect themselves with guns, rather than trust the police to protect them, the norm in most Western countries. Consider, then, that police response times have been steadily rising, while even in the best-case scenario five to ten minutes may not be enough to respond to a threat. Consider, also, that a District of Columbia court famously determined in 1981 that the police have no duty to protect individuals, and only have a duty to protect the public as a whole, which can mean refusing to intervene in violent crime. Consider, finally, that during the recent shooting in Orlando, over three hours elapsed between the time an off-duty police officer reported the attack and an armed SWAT team stormed the building, giving the shooter all the time he needed to kill dozens of people and take hostages.

With the inability of the police to prevent crime before it occurs, the number of illegal firearms in circulation, and the courts outright saying that a citizen is responsible for his or her own safety, Americans turn to guns for protection. Estimates on defensive gun use range from 67,000 per year according to the Violence Policy Center (drawn from National Crime Victimization Survey data), to over 3 million per year according to oft-cited studies by Kleck and Gertz. Despite the ongoing controversy over the true number of defensive gun uses, even the lowest reported number is over double the number of firearm-related homicides (11,208 in 2013) and suicides (21,175 in 2013) in the US combined. Because a gun owner is overwhelmingly more likely to use his weapon to defend himself against violent crime than to take his own life or that of a family member, guns are becoming increasingly seen as tools of defense rather than domestic threats.

To many Americans, the police arrive too late to stop a crime and have no obligation to protect the victim. To them, owning a gun is not a matter of recreation or paranoia, it’s the only thing standing between them and a violent mugger, home invader, or rapist, many of which are already armed and will not be disarmed by legislation that, by nature, can only affect law-abiding gun owners. From their perspective, a buyback wouldn’t cost them a hobby, it could cost them their life.

Because of this, a widespread Australian-style buyback and confiscation is vehemently opposed by a significant number of Americans on ideological grounds. In early 2016, just 27 armed ‘sovereign citizens’ held a standoff against the FBI for over a month, requiring substantial FBI resources to contain and eventually ending in gunfire. Imagine what would happen if, instead of a dispute over sovereign citizens, it were over the dearly-held right to keep and bear arms (a right to which the phrase ‘from my cold, dead hands’ is frequently attached), with thousands of mobs across America refusing to turn over their weapons- or taking their disgruntlement to the polling booth. Even Bill Clinton acknowledges that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, a far less invasive proposal than confiscation, was politically unpopular enough to cost the Democrats seats in Congress. While politicians may talk about copying Australia in the wake of a mass shooting, the idea remains politically non-viable, and only further riles up the gun owners who fear confiscation.

It is unclear what effects an Australia-style buyback would have on crime, and it is not unreasonable to believe that in the short-term, violent crime might rise with armed self-defense becoming less common. With the saturation of illegal firearms, positive effects could take years or even decades to become apparent. While this may constitute a long-term solution to the problem of American gun violence, it is a brute-force method with undesirable side effects, and as long as the American population overwhelmingly opposes it a buyback remains little more than a talking point.

Most importantly, serious talk of a mandatory buyback utterly destroys the claim that ‘nobody’s coming for your guns’. It alienates reasonable gun owners and makes them less willing to support any further restrictions on gun ownership, because they justifiably believe that total confiscation may be the end goal. If gun control advocates want bipartisan support for reasonable measures, talk of confiscation as an option has to stop.

The Nature of the Beast

Before discussing what kinds of solutions will work, it’s important to identify the exact nature of American gun violence.

Mass shootings, despite their media attention, represent an extremely small percentage of firearm homicides. In fact, the numbers are often inflated by using definitions of ‘mass shooting’ different from the common understanding. To most Americans, the term ‘mass shooting’ connotes a terrorist attack or crazed gunman killing a large number of people. The definition used by the Mass Shooting Tracker, in contrast, includes any instance of four or more people, other than the shooter, being injured or killed. A cursory glance at the Mass Shooting Tracker’s statistics for 2015, for example, shows that a majority of the listed shootings resulted in no deaths and were gang-related violence, as opposed to lone wolves going on killing sprees.

This is not to suggest that mass shootings are unimportant, but the overwhelming majority of homicides have nothing to do with spree killers, and many are due, in particular, to gang violence. In Chicago, for example, gang violence accounted for 80% of all homicides in 2012. As far as sources of death go, spree killings are on par with lightning strikes for average yearly fatalities, and an individual is far more likely to die as a victim of violent crime like robbery than at the hands of a mass shooter. In fact, there are almost twice as many gun suicides as homicides. If the goal of new legislation is to reduce deaths due to gun violence, then solutions should strongly favor addressing the factors involved in the majority of gun deaths and not just the small but media-focused minority.

On that note, it’s not AR-15s or similar ‘assault weapons’ that are responsible for the overwhelming majority of deaths. According to the FBI’s homicide statistics for 2014, of the 6,165 firearm homicides in which the weapon used is known, over 90% were committed with handguns. Just 4% were committed with rifles, of which only a fraction would qualify as assault weapons.

The picture these numbers paint is pretty clear: America’s gun violence problem is a product of its violent crime problem, not mental health or Islamic extremism, and is primarily carried out with handguns, not assault weapons. If new legislation is seriously intended to reduce America’s epidemic of violence, addressing the root causes of violence must go hand-in-hand with addressing the availability of handguns, while assault weapons remain a convenient but statistically insignificant scapegoat.

Constructive Solutions

Even with the above solutions being demonstrably ineffective, they are still commonly supported on the principle that ‘if it saves even one life, it’s worth it’. But as the backlash to the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban shows, political parties have only a limited amount of political capital to work with. It would be a mistake to pursue ineffective bans at great political cost when there are more effective and politically supportable ways to address America’s gun violence problem. They include:

1. More effectively sharing state-level psychiatric and criminal records with the FBI, ensuring that criminals and the mentally ill are better caught by the federal background check system. Despite recent efforts to improve disclosure, it is possible for a felon or mentally ill person to purchase a firearm if the relevant records are not submitted by their state to the FBI. When over two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides, many by people with histories of unstable behavior, preventing the sale of firearms to people with self-harmful intent should be a priority.

2. Giving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) more funding to investigate federal firearms license (FFL) holders, to crack down on unscrupulous sellers conducting off-the-books transactions to felons. Currently the ATF only has the manpower to audit approximately seven percent of FFL holders per year, which means an FFL holder could illegally sell firearms for years without being so much as investigated.

3. Allocating funding to the Department of Justice to prosecute straw purchases (when someone illegally buys a gun on behalf of someone not allowed to), or empowering the states to do it themselves. Straw purchases represent the largest source of illegally-owned firearms, but are rarely prosecuted by the federal government.

None of these would step on the toes of legitimate gun owners, as they do not represent additional obstacles to owning or purchase. In fact, many gun owners are extremely vocal about better enforcing the laws already on the books, and would wholeheartedly support these measures. But if further restrictions are needed, additional steps could include:

1. Mandating storage requirements to reduce the statistically significant number of thefts as a source of guns used in crime.

2. Requiring background checks on all purchases. While private sale, also known as the ‘gun show loophole’, represents a tiny minority of the sources for illegal firearms (under 3% according to multiple studies), the elimination of private sale would stipulate a paper trail for each legally-sold firearm that would end at the last legitimate owner and aid in prosecuting firearm theft.

3. Implementing further restrictions on handgun ownership, through more extensive background checks or requiring a legal permit for purchase. As discussed earlier, handguns represent 90% of all firearm homicides, so restricting them is more logical than going after assault weapons.

However, these latter three measures are likely to be opposed by the gun lobby and gun owners, because they represent additional impositions on legitimate owners. This is the point where compromise would need to occur: actually giving some rights back to gun owners in exchange for further restrictions. Here are a few potential incentives that could seriously motivate the gun lobby to accept new restrictions:

1. Provide a nation-wide concealed carry scheme. Currently, concealed carry is subject to the laws of each individual state, and whether a permit is accepted by another state is a case-by-case basis. It’s a byzantine and complicated system with arbitrary requirements in many states. Statistics from Texas and Florida (both states where permits are relatively easy to get) show that concealed carriers are six times less likely than police officers to commit misdemeanors or felonies, and seven times less likely to commit a firearm offense. If we can trust our police officers to safely carry, then fear over trained and licensed concealed carriers seems unjustified.

2. Delist suppressors from the 1934 National Firearms Act. Contrary to Hollywood depictions, suppressors do not actually silence firearms, and are rarely used by criminals as their length makes them difficult to conceal. In Scandinavia, the UK, and most of Western Europe, suppressors are readily available with minimal restriction. In the US, it requires 6–12 months of additional background checks, ATF processing, and a $200 fee; a convoluted process that was only put in the 1934 NFA originally because poachers used suppressors to illegally hunt during the Depression. As a safety device, effective at preventing hearing damage and reducing noise pollution, suppressors have little reason to be so heavily restricted in the present day.

3. Re-open the national machine gun (fully automatic weapons) registry, which was closed in 1986. Since 1934 when the restrictions were originally put in place, registered machine guns have only been used twice to commit homicide. One of these instances was ruled self-defense. The reason legally registered machine guns are not used in crime is simple: illegally converting a firearm to full auto remains easier than submitting a $200 tax and undergoing 6–12 months of paperwork, background checks, fingerprinting, notarizing, and all the other requirements needed to get one legally. This process should remain, but re-opening the registry would allow collectors and hobbyists to legally own what amount to ammo-wasting novelties, a move that would likely be extremely popular among recreational shooters and historical collectors and could secure their political support.

But beyond the possible legislation and give-and-take of compromise, it’s important to remember that gun violence is not merely a product of guns. Even discounting all firearm homicides, the US’s homicide rate is significantly higher than that of the UK or Australia. Violence itself is a product of myriad social factors, and it’s clear that merely addressing gun proliferation will not solve the social issues that drive people to commit violent crimes, suicide, or acts of terrorism. To quote Mitchell Landrieu, former New Orleans mayor:

“This is not just a gun issue, this is an unemployment issue, it’s a poverty issue, it’s a family issue, it’s a culture of violence issue”.

Solving America’s gun violence problem means solving its gun problem at the same time as solving its violence problem. Focusing on just one or the other will not fix our country.

In Conclusion

Commonly proposed gun control measures are simplistic and ineffective. What is necessary is an open conversation about the statistically significant sources of gun violence, namely gang violence and availability of handguns, as well as improvements to our restriction of firearms from felons and the mentally ill. Where this means adding impediments to legitimate owners, they must be accompanied by relaxations on laws that have little public safety justification for their existence, as an honest attempt at compromise.

I will not try to tell you how to solve our social ills that produce violence, because that is far outside the scope of this piece. But I will say that addressing gun violence in the United States should not be a place for partisan rhetoric or grandstanding over ideals. It should be focused on measures supported by statistics and compromising for bipartisan support.

This is not as simple as we’d like to believe, but it’s not an unsolvable problem either. It’s time to leave behind the party politics, and move towards a practical solution, armed with knowledge.