MASS MURDER

How come it happens here?

That's the question we should all be asking and answering.

Not whether we can better enforce red flag laws? Or child-proof guns so that toddlers can't fire them? Or make background checks universal? Or make it illegal for those on the terrorist watch-list to possess firearms? Or close the gun-show loophole? Or re-instate the ban on assault rifles?

All those other questions ask how we can better deal with the problem.

None of them tell us why we have the problem.

Which means that . . .

None of them will ever solve the problem.

So . . .

How come it happens here?

The answer is simple.

There are more guns here, by orders of magnitude, than anywhere else in the developed world.

According to the most recent statistics, Americans possess, either legally or illegally,  326,474,000 guns. According to those same statistics, America has the highest (120.6) estimated number of guns per 100 people; the next highest is Yemen at 52.8; the vast majority of countries are below 20 and most are in single digits. 

If you want to break it down further, we're still number one.  There are firearms in 42% of America's households.  If you want to assume that number includes hunters and exclude them, one way to do that is to count just the number of handguns.  When you do that, however, we're still tops. 21.9% of  all American households contain handguns.

Maybe you're with the "guns don't kill, people do" crowd and think mass murders happen everywhere and the United States is really no different from other countries. Well, for the twenty-year period ending in 2019, here's the data on that.  There were 121 mass shootings in the United States.  The next highest was Russia at 21. Every other country was in single digits and most of them recorded no more than one.

Thus . . .

It pretty obviously doesn't happen everywhere to the extent it happens here.

Not by a long shot.

So . . . 

How come it happens here?

The answer is simple.

It's the guns, stupid.

And the solution is actually pretty simple too.

If you want to make sure your kids won't get shot in kindergarten, your grandmother won't be offed at a dance hall, your workers won't be taken out at their job, and you won't meet your Maker at a nightclub or concert . . . 

Get rid of the guns.

All of them.

This is a radical idea here in the U S of A.  I will be called a Communist . . . or a Socialist . . . or at the very least a lunatic for advocating it.  Lawyers for the NRA will laugh, smug in the cocoon of gun rights known as the Second Amendment to the Constitution.   If I tell them they have it all wrong, that the right to bear arms was subservient to the need for a well-organized militia, that today's militia (i.e., the National Guard)  by no means requires that 42% of  American households be armed so it can be well-organized . . . 

They will laugh again.

Not according to Antonin Scalia . . .

They will say . . .

Or the current Supreme Court . . .

Rubbing it in.

And though academically wrong, they will be practically right.  

Trump's Supreme Court has made it practically impossible to get the guns off the street.  Just ask New York.  Last July, the Supreme Court struck down its law requiring applicants for a license to carry outside their home to demonstrate proper cause for the license, and this past fall a federal district judge struck down its law barring guns from so-called "sensitive" places -- museums, theaters, stadiums, libraries, places offering services to children, and anyplace serving alcohol -- and then later in the case issued an injunction prohibiting the government from compelling license applicants to disclose their social media accounts or those with whom they lived or from proving their "good moral character". 

The result of decisions like these is that, as a practical matter, America's war against mass murder is hamstrung.  

We can't take the guns away.  

We cannot even keep them away. 

We're in a world where anyone can presumably possess and carry a firearm anywhere and at any time. Some may be subject to background check.  Most won't.  

What to do?

I don't know.

The Second Amendment was passed in the 1780s.  There were no assault weapons or automatic firearms back then. The flintlocks took time to load.  And the militias really did have to be armed by citizen soldiers.  

Though Wyatt Earp could make Tombstone safe by making cowboys check their guns at his sheriff's office in the 19th century, and the federal government could stop more Valentines Day massacres in Chicago by making  submachine guns illegal in the 1930s, those days are long gone.

I do not think the Supreme Court is right about the Second Amendment.

But if they are . . .

It should be repealed.