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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
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.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
There is generally a sense among gun owners that there have always been more concessions to be made. Any "compromise" with gun owners needs to be an actual compromise, not just a "you lose one more inch" style compromise.
I'm not huge into the gun scene, but some of the compromises I've heard could be:
Easier gun modification, specifically silencers. Its a pain in the ass to get a silencer on a gun right now. And unlike how Hollywood depicts them, silencers do not "silence" a gun. They turn it from instant hearing loss without ear protection to hearing loss under prolonged use. They also require subsonic rounds (otherwise the crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier defeats the purpose).
Some form of national gun transportation standardization. There are scenarios where you can legally own a gun, have it locked up in your trunk, drive across the wrong state line and suddenly you are violating a law.
Some form of concealed carry reciprocity. States all have their own versions of concealed carry (or don't allow it).
There are 51 versions of gun laws out there. Standardizing them in a way that doesn't treat California or New York laws as basis for standardization would potentially be appreciated. One way I could see them doing this is create different levels of constitutionally approved gun restrictions. Maybe 5 levels. With level one being the strictest, maybe equivalent to cities in California, New York City, or DC. And level 5 being the least strict, something you might see in rural Alaska. Municipalities are allowed to choose one of these levels of strictness, but they can't keep making up all their own restrictions and bullshit.
One thing I'd personally be interested in seeing it to remove all special exception carve-outs for law enforcement or active military. Instead there is only one category of carve-out: "Militia". The police and military can be assigned to this carve-out. But there is also a path for regular citizens to join the militia (devil would be in the details here).
This is just sort of politics though, and it happens on every other issue. Gun owners like to use phrases like 'one more inch' quite a lot but the reality is that these things do go back and forth. Sometimes they lose inches, sometimes they gain them back (see Heller, Assault Weapons Ban, NYSRPA v. Bruen etc. etc.).
I mean this sort of thing really does seem like an unequal compromise because it amounts to putting a hard cap on gun control but still allowing very lax states. Why would Democrats agree to that, especially when all polling indicates that gun control is a winning issue for them?
At the national level they could argue to change the specific restrictions in the strictest gun control category. At the state and local level they get to fight over upgrading the strictness level of gun control.
Also the whole attitude of 'we can win, so why compromise ' is part of why gun owners are so "uncompromising".
Well that's just politics on both sides though. If I have policy preference X, and think I can get it done, why would I compromise for less than X? I wouldn't begrudge the same behaviour from pro-gun activists..
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