You can't ban guns outright in America. Not even because of the 2nd Amendment. I'm talking about logistics. There are way too many guns in way too many rural and hard-to-reach areas to systematically remove and dispose of them. How would you even start a process like that? Gun buybacks are good, but you never see crazy-huge turnouts.
The only way to actually do this would be to literally go door-to-door to every registered gun owner (thereby incentivizing illegal and untraceable ownership) to confiscate the gun and reimburse the owner. This is completely unfeasible from a logistics and a financing perspective, and that's before you consider the fact that many of these nutjobs (not all gun owners, but the ones who won't give them up quietly) would likely start an uprising against the government in the process. So now you've got the fucking National Guard storming some backwoods patch of land in Georgia because so-and-so wants to be a big man and stand up to the government.
And all of that ignores the already-sizable amount of guns owned illegally or untraceably. How do you find those? Raids? It's a PR nightmare.
So you can't ban guns in America. We've unfortunately gone too far down the rabbit hole and stuck in it for this generation. Maybe over time, we can roll the tide back, but it's not going to happen any time soon. But, fortunately, there are things we CAN do, and soon. Things like:
- Tighter regulation on gun purchasing in relation to customer background and a semi-frequent license renewal process (every 3-5 years would be my preference) that entails a test for mental health, safety and competence.
- Reinvestment in our public mental health facilities. This guy may not have been mentally ill, but many of these shooters are, and the more people we can help before a homicidal episode, the more lives we'll ultimately save.
- Addressing the severe imbalance in our wealth distribution that creates an environment for poor people to turn to drugs and violence as a means of survival, necessitating their (almost-always illegal) gun ownership.
Ultimately, most gun owners are sensible, normal people. My brother-in-law is a gun owner. He takes one of my nieces to the range all the time. It's a great way for them to bond, and he always emphasizes safety and respect for what they're doing. I've seen his gun safe - it looks like it could take a fucking nuclear blast. I've never once seen one of his guns outside of the context of him taking it out of the safe to go to the range or him putting it back into the safe after coming back. I imagine most gun owners have the same attitude.
I asked him once if he'd be fine doing an extensive background check and doing various tests every several years to keep his gun license, and he had no problem with that. Again, I'd imagine most people who own guns wouldn't care, because these things sound like common sense.
The problem is that every time you want to even slightly tighten the grip on gun control, you're going up against the NRA, the manufacturer lobby, Fox News and every other public conservative figure in America. They won't budge a fucking inch, and have managed to fool thousands of people that the answer is, in fact, MORE GUNS. The NRA's ideal America is one where we send our children to school in bulletproof vests, teach them how to assemble AK-47s and essentially train them to be good soldiers.
And so, as a result of all of this, three people died today for no reason at all, two of them innocents. A fiance had to watch in a control room while the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with was shot and killed simply because he was there. There will be no justice for her, or for the reporter's family. We'll mourn their loss for a few days, it'll stir up conversation, and then we'll get on with our lives. Because gun death is the status quo. People talk about a dystopian future where America loses all of its guns, but we're already living in a dystopian future where we can't stop killing ourselves with them. Personally, I'd like to focus on the problem that's actually happening.