After the Parkland shooting in Florida, people have taken to the streets to demand significantly increased gun control.  In a town hall held by senator Marco Rubio, the audience applauded the idea of eliminating Guns altogether.  The Florida legislature has risen the age to purchase guns to 21 [1].  This week, students across the nation walked out of school and protested for stricter gun laws [2].  Countering these arguments, President Trump has suggested that teachers be armed.  Paul Ryan (speaker of the House of Congress) has opposed (in words) additional attempts at gun control.  And the National Rifle Association is as loud and obtrusive as ever.  Here is how I address the arguments that are getting made.

Increasing gun control reduces the number of mass murders.  There are plenty of other weapons that people can use at their disposal.  In 2016, a man drove a car through a crowd of students at Ohio State University [3].  The Unabomber killed people for two decades using bombs sent through the mail [4].  The Boston bombers used bombs made from pressure cookers in their attack [5].  If a mass murderer is going to use a gun, he has to be present and he has to have a line of sight to his victims.  He’s almost guaranteed to get caught (though probably after committing multiple murders).

We should ban assault rifles.  It seems that we want to ban whatever weapon was used in the last attack.  Hand guns are much easier to conceal and are just as deadly.  I do not see any significant advantage to banning rifles.  Additionally, to the knowledge of this author, there is not a legal definition of “assault rifle” that (1) properly eliminates any single form of semi-automatic weapon without an obvious loophole, or (2) doesn’t eliminate guns altogether.

The mentally ill should not be permitted to own guns.  The sentiment of this statement is reasonable but its implementation would be impossible.  Government approved psychologists would decide who is mentally healthy enough to purchase a gun, and they just might decide that anyone who desires ownership of a gun is mentally ill.  This would result with the government having the power over which citizens can and can’t own guns.

People on the terror watch list should not be permitted to own guns.   It behooves us to remember who is on the terror watch list.  Perhaps you remember the deck of cards with terrorist faces on them that soldiers used to try to learn who the worst terrorists were, and so you think the watch list is about 52 people large [6]?  This is a drastic underestimate.  In 2013, Jeremy Scahill reported that the terror watch list was approximately 8 million people long [7].  Edward Snowden showed us that anyone 3 hops away from a person on the terror watch list becomes a suspect [8].  So if you make a phone call with someone who has made a phone call with someone who has made a phone call with someone who is on the terror watch list, then you become a suspect (and the government immediately begins surveillance of you and eavesdropping on your conversations).  This, it turns out, encapsulates almost all Americans.  Without any legitimate evaluation of what the terror watch list constitutes, then this is a thinly veiled attempt to eliminate gun rights.  (I addressed this point more fully in Unconstitutional Attempts at Gun Control.)

We should ban guns altogether.  There are several legitimate reasons to own guns:

• People in rural America have long lag times between the time they call the police and the time the police arrive.  (Lag times of 20 minutes to 1 hour are not uncommon.)  In order to be afforded the protection of a firearm, they must own it themselves and have easy access to it.
• During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, police did not come to the rescue of people.  Approximately 40 people were killed by rioters in those days.  Many store owners were left to their own devices to defend their livelihoods.  Many chose to abandon their life’s work to the looting.  Some store owners decided to defend their property [9].  When the police don’t come, a gun is a very useful tool.  Similar atrocities happened during Katrina.
• Guns can now be made with 3D printers [10].  If one wants to own a gun illegally, it has never been easier to do so.  We may have to deal with the reality that those criminals who want guns will get them.
• Guns prevent some crimes.  In Texas, a man with a gun engaged and killed a mass-murderer [11].  A study by the Violence Policy Center found that guns were used defensively 338,700 in crimes between 2007 and 2011 [12].  (Note that this is a significantly lower figure than the N.R.A’s reported figure of 2.5 million during the same period [13].)
• During World War II, Germany invaded England and France.  As part of his speech, Winston Churchill said, “We shall fight on the beaches.  We shall fight on the landing grounds.  We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.  We shall fight in the hills.  We shall never surrender. [14]”  This fight would clearly be more effective if the citizenry had (and knew how to use) guns.  Do we need to worry about Germany?  Perhaps not at the moment.  But we currently have tension with North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Russia.  In 2017, U.S. F22s intercepted Russian bombers and fighters near the Alaskan border.  And it is very likely that Russia recently used a Nerve agent to kill a British spy (on British soil) [15].  The idea of Russia attacking the U.S. is not that far fetched.

Removing guns from the citizenry creates the ultimate imbalance; the government has the largest most powerful weapons and the citizenry is left with none.  If a citizenry chooses this route, the government must be dependable enough not to abuse this power.  Here is a list of activities by the US government that illustrate the opposite: (Note that these events happened when the population was armed.  Additionally, this is not an exhaustive list but just what I could remember off the top of my head.)

• 1798 – The Alien and Sedition acts made criticizing the government a criminal act [16]
• 1830 – The U.S. attempts genocide of Native Americans with the Indian Removal Act [17]
• 1857 – The Supreme Court determined that a black man of slave heritage could not be an American citizen and could not sue in court [18]
• 1930 – 1972 – The U.S. Public Health service injected black men with syphilis to study its effects.  The study lasted 40 years; the men were not informed of the study and they were never treated [19].
• 1940s – The US government incarcerates innocent Americans of Japanese descent; between 110,000 and 120,000 people were incarcerated.
• 2002 – The C.I.A. tortures war criminals, sometimes to death [20,21].  Video evidence of this torture was destroyed by the C.I.A.
• 2010 – U.S. Army rangers (operating on bad intelligence) killed a group of civilians in Afghanistan including two pregnant women and a teenage girl [22,7].  They had been instructed to remove evidence of their presence; they dug their bullets out of their victims with knives while they were still alive.
• 2016 – The U.S. bombs a funeral processing in Yemen killing 140 civilians and wounding approximately 500 more [23].
• 2016 – Police bomb off the hand of a woman who was peacefully protesting the Dakota Access oil pipeline [24].
• 2017 – The U.S. government permits electrical generating wind turbines on native american reservation soil without compensating the native american tribe [25].
• 2018 – Gina Haspel, a C.I.A operative who ordered that video evidence of torture and murder by C.I.A. officials be destroyed, was appointed director of the C.I.A. by president Trump [26].

The guns of the U.S. government are so much bigger than those the citizens are permitted that we could never overthrow the government again.  It’s not necessarily the case that the group with the largest guns wins.  The U.S. lost in Vietnam.  And the U.S. has lost heavily in Afghanistan.  It’s not because those armies had (or have) bigger guns.  It’s because they have guns.  Small arms can mount a significant attack.  Though, of course, larger munitions increase the probability of success in any battle significantly.

So nothing should be done about guns?  Should we just let these murders continue?  Of course not.  There are some very reasonable measures that could be instituted.

• Anyone convicted of a felony should not be permitted to own a gun ever again.  (In particular, anyone ever convicted of domestic violence should not be permitted to own a gun ever again.)
• When a weapon is purchased, there should be an effective background check to make sure that the purchaser wasn’t ever a convicted felon.
• When bullets are purchased, there should be an effective background check to make sure that the purchaser wasn’t ever a convicted felon.  (Los Angeles has shown that this is an effective method for removing guns from the hands of criminals [26].)
• When purchasing a gun, there should be a multi-day waiting (or cooling off) period.  This could last up to two months.
• When purchasing bullets, there should be a multi-day waiting (or cooling off) period.  This could last up to two months.
• Anyone younger than 18 should not be permitted to purchase or own a gun.
• School districts should be given the freedom to implement whatever safety mechanisms are required to keep their children safe.
• Parents should have the freedom to place their children in whatever school they think best meets their safety requirements.
• There should be a national database of ballistic markings.  When a weapon is purchased, the gun should be fired to get an example of the ballistic markings left on the weapon that would then get stored in the national database (along with the owner of the gun) [27].  (Alternatively, bullets could be imprinted with laser engravings.)  This would help police during forensic examinations and catch murderers after the fact, thereby preventing future murders.

These increased gun controls would reduce the number of firearms owned and used by criminals while not infringing on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

[1]  http://time.com/5190653/florida-gun-bill-age-bump-stock-ban/

[2]  https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/14/us/national-school-walkout-gun-violence-protests/index.html

[3]  https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/Ohio-State-University-Active-Shooter-Report-403387996.html

[4]  https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber

[5]  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/16/boston-marathon-explosions/2086853/

[6]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most-wanted_Iraqi_playing_cards

[7]  “Dirty Wars”, Jeremy Scahill, https://smile.amazon.com/Dirty-Wars-Jeremy-Scahill/dp/B00FKNSPIG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1521228783&sr=8-2&keywords=dirty+wars&dpID=51xoRAiyoZL&preST=_SY300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch

[8]  https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=207195207

[9]  https://www.npr.org/2012/04/27/151526930/korean-store-owner-on-arming-himself-for-riots

[10]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printed_firearms

[11]  https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/05/us/texas-church-shooting-resident-action/index.html

[12]  https://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable.pdf

[13]  https://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/defensive-gun-use/

[14]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkTw3_PmKtc

[15]  https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/16/europe/uk-russia-nerve-agent-spy-attack-intl/index.html

[16]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts

[17]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

[18]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford

[19]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

[20]  https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-most-gruesome-moments-in-the-cia-torture-report

[21]  “Secrets, Politics, and Torture”  Frontline

[22]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Khataba

[23]  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/15/saudi-led-coalition-admits-to-bombing-yemen-funeral

[23]  http://time.com/4580721/dakota-access-pipeline-sophia-wilansky/

[24]  Grann, David.  Killers of the Flower Moon

[25]  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-new-cia-director-nominee-helped-cover-up-torture/

[26]  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-ammunition/whats-missing-in-u-s-gun-control-scramble-bullets-idUSBRE90J02K20130120

[27]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_firearm_examination