HOW TO (AND NOT TO) REDUCE GUN VIOLENCE

Nina Vinik is program director for the Gun Violence Prevention Program at the Joyce Foundation in Chicago.   Not surprisingly, Ms. Vinik is a strong advocate of much stricter gun laws.

Ms. Vinik has written a commentary about how to reduce gun violence, which was published in yesterday\’sMilwaukee Journal-Sentinel.  In it, she cites four actions to be taken which, in her view would accomplish this – which are excerpted below:

Here are four things Wisconsin could do right now to save lives:

1) Expand background checks to all gun sales. Research by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that Connecticut\’s comprehensive handgun permitting and background check law reduced gun homicides by 40%. Repeal of a comparable law in Missouri resulted in a 25% increase in gun homicides. These laws keep guns from moving from the legal to the illegal marketplace, where they can easily fall into the hands of criminals, juveniles or the dangerously mentally ill.

2) Submit records of all prohibited people to the federal FBI database for gun purchaser background checks.

3) Insist that gun dealers wait until the background check is complete before completing the sale.

4) Adopt a procedure to allow a court to order temporary removal of firearms from people who pose a danger to themselves or others.  

Let me say that, in general terms, I am very sympathetic to Nina Vinik\’s position.  I want very strict laws governing gun sales as well, and agree with every one of those four ideas.  In fact, I would add that all ammunition be IDed, just as all guns are, so there is a chance that it can be traced back to who the purchaser was. 

My problem, however, is that none of her suggestions would prevent guns from being illegally obtained and illegally used.*  And the vast majority of shootings, fatal and non-fatal, are by people who have illegally obtained and illegally used guns.

Here\’s something Ms. Vinik did not mention, which I think should be there – and which I am pretty certain she would agree with me on:  mandatory prison sentences – we\’re talking years here, not months – for anyone in possession of a gun during the commission of a crime, regardless of whether the gun was used in that crime.  That would give holders of guns a pretty good reason not to walk out on the street with them….and if you don\’t have a gun in your possession you can\’t shoot anyone with it.

Gun violence is a huge problem in the USA.  One that is not going away.  And we should be doing everything possible to see that only responsible people own guns.

But we fool ourselves to think that laws which restrict the purchase and use of guns will prevent their use by people who obtain guns illegally.  No matter how many such laws there are and how strict they are, these laws have no relevance to people who do not obey the law.  Therefore the big answers lie elsewhere.

The politicians, and well meaning social do-gooders who pat each other on the back upon passage of every new gun control law, would do well to think about that.

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* I read up on the study which supposedly showed a 40% drop in Connecticut\’s gun homicides.  I found that the law Ms. Vinik refers to was enacted in 1995, and that the difference in gun homicides was drawn from a comparison of the previous 10 years (1985 – 1995) to an ESTIMATE (who did the estimate?) of how many gun homicides there WOULD have been in the subsequent 10 years (1995 – 2005), versus how many actually took place.  The study did not compare the number of total shooting incidents (including non-fatal) which, for all we know, was the same or higher.  Add in the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research\’s avid partisanship (click here for its web page, see if you can find two sides of the story anywhere), and it is very hard to take this point seriously.