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Getting sorted.
It’s not the kind of thing you want to see coming over the wire.
Four people were dead including the gunman following a hostage-taking incident on Saturday in Aurora, Colorado, the same town where a man shot dead 12 people and wounded 58 more at a movie theater last July.
Will there be another spike in the fleeting chatter over gun control? David Frum’s blog has been tracking the talk. Frum himself draws a stark conclusion: “Guns endanger more than they protect.” Much as growing numbers of Americans view the government as a guarantor of our security more than an obstacle to our freedom, guns are beginning to look more like an obstacle to our freedom than a guarantor of our security.
Nevertheless: we’re buying lots and lots of guns — even in the wake of our too-frequent grisly shootings. Plus there’s this pesky thing called the 2nd Amendment, and the Supreme Court’s body of gun law, culminating, for now, in the largely, but not recklessly, gun-friendly Heller decision. We can do ourselves a favor in thinking that our cries for increased gun control come and go with the news because there isn’t a big enough constituency for a single, federal response to gun violence. (It’s not because the media is always on to the next thing. It’s not because we’re pathetic, selfish beings who don’t care about others.)
Viewed from this standpoint, we could do one of two things: give up on gun policy, or recommend a big round of state-by-state buyback programs. State-level programs make sense right now because Washington has enough to worry about — and because it’ll work for us to discover that we can make real strides against gun violence without depending on Congress or the White House.
Why buyback? Simple. Unlike every other substantial, far-reaching gun-control policy I can think of, buyback is immediate, voluntary, market-driven, popular, and effective. The recent buyback event in Los Angeles captures these qualities:
“I’m bringing in a 9-millimeter handgun because I want to get it out of the house because I have teenage children,” one woman told The Los Angeles Times. “I would hate for them to do what that guy in Connecticut did.” [...] As [LA Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa explained ahead of his city’s buyback program, it’s also about taking action. “I think everybody was so traumatized,” he said. “People said, ‘I don’t wait on the Congress, I’m tired of the endless debates about responsible gun control legislation, I want to do my part.” As it were, one of the first guns collected at Wednesday was a Bushmaster XM-15, the same assault rifle that Adam Lanza used at Sandy Hook.
Do buyback programs get guns out of the hands of “crazies?” Not necessarily. Do they prevent others from buying new guns? Nope. Buyback programs are not, ahem, a silver bullet. But they are the best available means for getting guns out of the hands of people who turn out to not really want them — and for getting people to make that realization for themselves. That does important work: it helps us sort gun ownership more effectively and authentically, allowing us to focus on the real practical problem that guns make possible. You find the most and least responsible gun owners among those who really, really want guns.
But more than that, buyback allows us to indulge in the usually dangerous feeling that, in the wake of a crisis that scares and offends us, we must do something — on as sweeping and symbolic a level as possible, usually. Buyback manages to be sweeping, symbolic, substantial, and comforting even as it advances a sensible policy with no risk of overreach. It doesn’t hardwire overreaction into our laws and regulations. It doesn’t hand more power to Washington at a moment when Washington seems so poorly equipped to wield power. And it puts the onus on Americans to think with at least a little greater integrity about their relationship to guns.
What’s not to like?
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