Americans should embrace and educate the Parkland students and parents who met with President Trump and Vice President Pence in the White House today. They were there to discuss ways to prevent another mass shooting like the one last week at their school. Trump and Pence listened attentively to their concerns, and promised to take meaningful action.
Parkland Students Should Not Be Taken Lightly
The Parkland students who have appeared on camera have distinguished themselves by their poise and preparedness. But when the topic of potential solutions to the problem arises, their answers have focused rather narrowly on gun control measures. Those two facts taken together led some conservatives to suspect that the students have been coached, or worse.
A known Russian source of disinformation on Twitter that masquerades as the Tennessee Republican Party, TEN_GOP, exploited conservative distrust by alleging that the students were ‘crisis actors,’ paid to impersonate victims of crimes. Many people fell for the ruse and retweeted and shared the allegation on social media. But the Parkland students are right – it is well past time to solve the problem of school safety.
A Fact-Based Approach
The right approach for conservatives is not to shun those students, or to mock their inexperience. True, their judgment is not yet fully developed, and is also clouded by grief, but their determination and energy should not be ignored. We need to embrace them, engage them in serious discussion, and help guide their energetic responses.
We need to embrace those students, engage them in serious discussion, and help guide their energetic responses.
Because the students are serious, they must begin with a clear set of facts. They have not received those yet from whoever is advising them. There are several extraordinary articles that should inform any debate on this issue, and this series will draw from those articles. Every person who truly cares about preventing another mass shooting at a school should take 15 or 20 minutes to read them all.
Focus On Preventing Shootings, Not On Guns
I wrote earlier this week pleading that we start a new conversation about mass shootings. One reason we have been unable to solve the problem so far is that every debate has followed the same pattern. The only ‘solution’ offered by the Left is to deprive non-criminals of guns.
It is twisted logic to believe that criminal behavior can be altered by taking punitive measures against non-criminals.
It is twisted logic to believe that criminal behavior can be altered by taking punitive measures against non-criminals. No other area of public policy tries to do that, and no other policy solutions focus on inanimate objects, rather than personal behavior. As long as the discussion revolves around guns, we face the same impasse we have had for 50 years.
Existing Gun Control Laws
The first must-read article was originally published in The Hill in November 2017 under the headline, “What If There Were Serious Gun Controls?” The author artfully takes gun-control advocates down a path, suggesting one law after another that should be passed. At the end of the article, he discloses that every one of the suggestions is already a federal law. Many states have much stricter laws in addition to these.
. . . every one of the suggestions is already a federal law.
There is a lifetime ban on gun possession for anyone convicted of domestic abuse. A federal license is required to sell, import, or transport guns as a business, even at gun shows. Violators face five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Gun dealers must keep careful records of every sale, including the name and address of each buyer. They cannot sell to anyone until the buyer has government permission to buy a gun. Gun dealers may advertise on the Internet, but the actual transfer of the gun must take place at the physical location of a federally licensed firearms dealer.
A citizen may not get a dealer’s license without proving that he or she has a safe place to lock up any quantity of guns they would ship, receive and store. Dealers must pass a strict background check. All purchasers must pass background checks also, and their identities are passed through the national database.
Buyers must purchase a trigger lock with every gun, even if they already have a gun safe. Anyone who buys more than two guns in a week is automatically reported to law enforcement for attention. Manufacturers must put a serial number on every gun.
Nobody convicted of a felony, or who was ever committed to a mental institution, may possess a gun. Neither may anyone who uses marijuana, even medical marijuana in states where that is legal. Handgun owners must be 21. Rifle or shotgun owners must be 18.
Nobody is allowed to purchase an automatic rifle – that is a rifle that ‘sprays’ bullets continuously if the trigger is held down. This includes AK-47s and M-16s and their like, the rifles that shoot 10 to 15 rounds per second. There are a handful of exceptions to this law, for collectors, but they apply only to weapons that already were in circulation before 1986. (Bonus fact: Ronald Reagan signed the law banning possession of fully automatic weapons.)
A New Conversation – Next Steps
It is time to end the insanity of staging the same debate and expecting a different outcome. Next article summarizes basic facts about the debate, including definitions of types of weapons. After that, an examination of the Australia model, and finally, a list of proposed solutions. Stay tuned.
