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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.

Well, the issue is that while gun control proponents like that frame, you are actually talking about three completely different issues with three different plausible solutions.

  1. Crime. This is the vast majority of non-suicide gun deaths, but most generally gets no attention (except when being aggregated to push gun control, or to scare boomers about cities). Simple solutions that don't really impinge gun rights exist for this such as: actually prosecuting straw purchasers, targeted Terry stop regimes, border security, and other general law enforcement scrutiny being increased such as beat cops and more enforcement against domestic violence complaints (in other words, stop dropping charges when the girlfriend recants a week later).

  2. Mass shootings. A tiny minority of deaths that drive lots of discourse. Hard to fix without significantly affecting gun and free speech rights simultaneously.

  3. Suicide. Something I think most people don't actually care much about, other than using it to aggregate "gun deaths" at a higher number. To the extent people genuinely care, the fix is also quite hard without also impinging the 1st and 2nd simultaneously. Low hanging fruit might include cooling periods t prevent spontaneously buying a gun and killing yourself on the same day.