As I said in my recent video, those of us who oppose gun control measures must not stop there. We must respond with positive measures that successfully reduce gun violence. Maintaining the status quo is obviously unacceptable.
I am still trying to wrap my mind around this completely myself. In the video, I suggest the first step is for the federal government to stop setting such a bad example and Stop All War. After all, the very same Democrats who just had a sit-in demanding action on gun control measures also recently voted to give away another $1.3 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia. If you are truly against gun violence, I’d appreciate some consistency here.
Here are some guidelines that are coalescing in my mind that would tell you how I would vote on any measure that addresses this scourge of gun violence:
Banning stuff simply does not work. As we have seen, these calls for greater gun control encourage people to go buy lots more guns. Outlawing any particular kind of weapon only serves to move that commerce to the underground economy, with all of the extra problems that come with it. The problem is not that people have guns. The vast majority of gun owners in America are perfectly peaceful people. The problem only arises when people use guns to commit heinous acts. So let’s focus on how to prevent these heinous acts before they happen.
Rights must be preserved. I’m livid that even a civil rights hero like John Lewis would be willing to cash in due process. The mere existence of secret watch lists is an affront to our Constitutional freedoms. Rather than being the basis for any public policy, the No-Fly and Terrorist Watch lists must be abolished immediately. Other measures call for expanded background checks and government lists of gun owners, which also fail this due process test. The ACLU has issued an excellent statement on this. While I don’t agree with it 100%, the ACLU has laid out my Constitutional concerns most eloquently.
Any new law must actually address the issue. The Boston Globe has a nice summary of the four main bills currently being argued in Congress. Not only do they fail my test on preserving rights, not one of them would have prevented the attack on Pulse Nightclub in Orlando if they had been law at the time. One of my biggest legislative pet peeves is when laws that already exist fail, we don’t try to fix those problems, we just pass more laws on top of it and claim we Did Something. Show me some legislation that could have made a practical difference or get out.
Those are my main negatives, which can be summed up in one sentence: traditional gun control measures only erode our fundamental rights and give more power to the state, without doing anything to prevent future mass shootings.
I’ve already suggested one positive step, for the US government to stop their own violence, specifically the billions we spend on manufacturing and shipping arms in America and all over the world. I am starting to come up with a few others that may strike at the root of this problem:
We need to get serious about domestic violence. People who commit mass shootings didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They start small, committing acts of violence against those closest to them. Vox does a great job in this article showing the links between prior domestic violence incidents and mass shootings. Fortunately, human enlightenment is rapidly advancing on this issue as we let it sink in that women are human beings with rights and not the property of their husbands. Our laws need to catch up to this rising social awareness. If our laws and their enforcement effectively focus on these individual acts of violence, we can maybe do something about these types before they commit greater acts of mass murder.
We need to get serious about mental health. This one is a little tricky for me. The notion of government defining your mental health scares the living daylights out of me. From there it’s just a short step to define mere dissent as an excuse to rob people of their fundamental rights. And yet, we have to recognize the truth here, almost all of these mass shooters have a long psychiatric record. One question I’d like answered is, what is the role of powerful pharmaceuticals here? I’ve seen much speculation on this, but little serious research (as exemplified by the Vox article linked above). Obviously our current mental health system is not identifying and doing anything about these mass shooters before the fact. I don’t know that I have a detailed solution to offer yet. All I can tell you now is that these mass murderers have already shown us plenty of warning signs but the current system hasn’t succeeded in acting on them before they take their insanity to its extreme.
We must direct law enforcement to focus solely on crimes with victims. Currently law enforcement is simply asked to do too much. We must repeal all victimless crime laws, starting with the War on Drugs. I keep going back to the fundamental Libertarian definition of crime: don’t hit people and don’t take their stuff. If all law enforcement resources were focused exclusively on crimes of theft and violence, they would be a whole lot more effective at stopping such criminals before they even get to the point of committing more heinous crimes.
Always remember these are real people, not abstract political principles. I’ll leave you with one last link. Yes, I know it’s intended to spur Congressional action for gun control. But the short documentary Speaking is Difficult presents an essential truth we must confront directly. Always remember that the victims of these mass shootings are simply people trying to live their normal lives in peace: dancing in a nightclub, having lunch at Luby’s or shopping at Wal-Mart, or just going to work like every other day. It disturbs me because the Libertarian dictum of “live and let live” is no longer sufficient. Violence will come find you. Any positive response we can offer must address the simple realities presented in this video.
My thoughts on this will continue to grow and evolve. I’ll keep you posted on new developments.
This post was originally published on Sean Haugh’s personal blog.