Each time there’s a shooting like the one that took place in Oregon on Thursday, a choir of politicians and pundits rises up to pretend they have known all along how to stop such incidents from happening. If only people had listened to them in advance!
What they wanted to tell everyone all along was that one or another gun control proposal would have solved the problem.
They are not only wrong, but they are also fueling the dumbest kind of policy discussion possible, the demand that lawmakers do something, anything, even if all of the solutions under discussion are proven failures.
As we have noted previously, the proposed gun control remedies for this very serious problem are utterly unserious. Universal background checks? Oregon already had them, and the shooter passed. The assault weapons ban, which Hillary Clinton backs? A joke, given that rifles (that ban’s main target) account for only 3 percent of annual gun homicides.
The only gun control remedy that could ever work in this lifetime is massive and widespread confiscation, a policy that President Obama took time once again Thursday to praise on national television. Yet even if the Second Amendment could be repealed tomorrow, which it cannot, the presence of roughly 300 million privately owned firearms would still make confiscation hopelessly impractical.
Moreover, while gun control laws fail to achieve their purported ends, they are not just useless but actually harmful. In practice, gun control laws are about locking up more black defendants in urban environments and giving them longer sentences when other charges and evidence against them is deemed insufficient.
Federal gun control laws are enforced with greater racial disparities than any other crime, including drug crimes. Fifty-six percent of those convicted for federal gun offenses in 2013 were black. Blacks commit only an estimated 16 percent of mass shootings, roughly in proportion to their share of the population. If the policymakers are aiming at mass shootings, this fact alone suggests that they are off-target with their gun control laws.
This adds an additional irony to the current political debate over domestic public safety. America has only now entered an era in which “law and order” and “tough on crime” legislation are perceived as the outdated result of an earlier moral panic. Yet many of the same people calling for reforms and an end to mass incarceration reliably panic and demand harsher laws and longer sentences for largely unrelated offenses the moment a shooting occurs. It is as if they have never even thought about the arguments they make the other six days of the week.
If there is an answer to the problem of mass shootings that doesn’t involve enormous infringements on human rights, it is not something that can be solved easily by feel-good laws pushed by self-interested politicians.
