Gun Control, The Roundabout Way

I have lived nearly all of my life within a slow-burning conservative revolution. The broad trends of the past 30 years of American life have been to atomize social bonds, redefine the citizen as a consumer, elevate corporate rights over those of the worker or the individual, lionize police brutality as an expression of justice, and cruelly mock anyone who thinks differently. As a person who supports none of these goals I feel like a stranger in an increasingly strange land. 

Few things reinforce this alienation more than what now appears to be a truism of American politics:

There is no tragedy so horrific that it will prompt America to re-examine its love for the gun.

The mass shooting is now a defining fact of American life and culture--much like binding arbitration clauses, student debt, and the lack of meaningful parental leave.

There are more firearms now in private ownership than there are people who live in America. The most reliable predictor of whether a person will buy a firearm is whether they already own one. Two conclusions follow from this. First: The median American gun owner is, by any objective measure, sitting on top of a fucking arsenal. Second: The next mass shooter may already own the weapon he will use.

Say Congress managed to pass a permanent version of the 1994 assault weapons ban, in the exact same language: it would do nothing about the countless number of those weapons already in private hands.  There are more than enough of them to guarantee that a gun will always be available to a motivated buyer. No traditional gun control measure can address this basic reality.

None, that is, if the firearm itself is the thing being regulated.

After every mass shooting the Gun Lobby is quick to remind us that "guns don't kill people" per se. Okay. Let's accept that premise. What about bullets?

The AR-15 was designed to fire a particular type of ammunition, itself designed for purely military purposes. That bullet is lightweight, accurate, and lethal over moderate distances and does not produce significant recoil. We could restrict or ban ammunition of this specific caliber and others like it. We could also ban ammunition that falls within a certain set of specifications so that we do not end up playing a game of "caliber whack-a-mole". And we could limit the places where bullets can be sold.

Federal law enforcement is prohibited from maintaining anything that even resembles a database of gun owners. The background check system you're run through when buying a pistol, for example, does not log the fact that you personally purchased a pistol on a certain date. Fine: what about bullets? We could require ammunition sellers to log "suspicious transactions" or "large-volume transactions" much like banks do. We could require them to maintain a log of the purchasers.

Gun manufacturers and sellers enjoy a liability shield--they can't be sued for crimes committed with guns they have made or sold. Fair enough: what about bullets? After all, it's not the gun that kills people.

Because the gun control discourse centers on the gun itself, the right wing has spent much of its energy crafting media and legal narratives that emphasize the right to own guns per se. But what about bullets? It has to be worth a try. 

None of the above proposals would end mass shootings. But it's clear that the ease of access to guns enables those tragedies to occur. If we cannot regulate the gun itself, we should at least try to regulate its externalities. Moving the discourse around gun violence away from the gun itself, and toward bullets and liability, just might create the political opening that serious change requires.