Tomorrow marks one month since the tragic loss of 12 lives in the Aurora theater shooting. Since the shooting, nearly 1,100 more Americans have been murdered with guns.
There are several approaches to preventing gun violence. Most gun owners favor a combination of background checks, training and criminal sanctions to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. For the most part, these are reasonable considerations. However, there’s little evidence that criminal sanctions are any more of a deterrent to criminal behavior than general gun ownership.
To contrast gun owners against the gun lobby (two very different groups), the gun lobby advocates mass proliferation of guns as a deterrent to criminal behavior.
The evidence for the “more guns, less crime” theory is skimpy at best. Most proponents of this theory cite Australia as a negative example where they claim categorical gun control has resulted in a 200% increase in crime since 1997. They neglect to point out that crime was rising at 3 times that rate before Australia’s law passed. Their second favorite example is England where they claim a near total ban on private weapons has driven crime through the roof. Likewise, they neglect to point out that the murder rate in England has fallen dramatically since the ban.
The gun lobby will never point out the ‘other’ major correlation: Just as gun ownership peaked in 1993 at 53%, the crime rate in the U.S. began to fall and continued to fall alongside gun ownership through 2007.
The truth is that there are no easy answers for effective gun violence prevention. That doesn’t mean there are NO answers.
What we know is that every crime is:
1) Motive
2) Means
3) Opportunity
If we’re serious about gun violence prevention, we have to limit all three of those factors. Motive is the human factor. Improved mental health services, education and community policing can help. Means are the guns themselves. There may be a (paranoid) desire, but there is no realistic need for 100-round magazines that can fire out of a semi-automatic weapon in 90 seconds. Opportunities to commit crime can be limited through robust (private or public) security measures and a common sense system of background checks.
As Coloradans, the majority of us respect the logic of the 2nd Amendment. Most gun owners recognize that rights carry responsibilities. Nobody is trying to take those rights away, but every right has limits. Most people wouldn’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater and defend themselves on the 1st Amendment. Likewise, responsible gun owners don’t expect others to give up their rights to life and liberty because they really like popping off a hundred targets in a row without reloading.
Despite broad support among gun owners, the general public and a broad coalition of more than 90 national organizations with broad cross interests, we have yet to hear a plan from either presidential candidate. Governors in Colorado, Wisconsin and Texas have all deferred or flat out denied the need for a plan to address gun violence.
That simply isn’t acceptable.
Special interest groups like the NRA–whose source of membership revenue is less than half of their total annual budget–are not all powerful. Many analyses show that they deserve much less credit for influencing elections than they’ve taken.
Leaders owe it to the victims and survivors of mass shootings like Aurora and Oak Creek to speak up and fight back. We owe it to ourselves to demand a plan to address the highest rate of gun violence in the democratic world.
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