EDMUND BURKEThere has been another mass shooting today. Current reports are that twelve people were murdered and perhaps fifty more injured at a movie theater in Colorado.
This massacre is not very far from Columbine High School, where, thirteen years ago, two heavily-armed kids shot and killed twelve fellow students and a teacher, and wounded another 21 students, before killing themselves. In the intervening years, there’ve been mass murders at Virginia Tech; Geneva County, Alabama; Binghamton, New York; and Fort Hood, Texas. A total of 69 people were killed, and many more injured, in those four incidents. This doesn't include the shootings in Tucson, Arizona where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was wounded. Six people were killed in that incident, which doesn’t qualify it as a mass shooting. Not by our standards in modern America.
What can be done about this? We could require that rifles, handguns, and ammunition magazines sold to and possessed by private citizens hold no more than six rounds. That would make it harder for madmen to kill large numbers of people without significantly impeding self-defense or hunting. Barry Goldwater famously said that if you need more than one round to shoot a deer, you should take up another sport.
The mass shootings are bad enough, but far more blood is spilled in prosaic, daily gun violence. In the last five years, 47,856 people were murdered with guns in America. You can look at the data here. The biggest problem, by far, are handguns. It’s more difficult to devise effective but lawful gun control for handguns because the Supreme Court has held that the Second Amendment guarantees, at a minimum, an individual right to keep a handgun in one’s home. In an article available here, I have described why I believe that effective gun control requires restricting the number of handguns in general circulation. If I am right about that, effective gun control may be unconstitutional.
Will today’s massacre stimulate us to do at least what we can do to reduce gun violence, such as limiting privately-owned weapons to six rounds? Almost certainly, it will not. The NRA has buffaloed politicians into believing that supporting gun control can be a career-ending move. There hasn't been any serious gun control effort at the federal level since 1994 – eighteen years ago – when the assault weapon ban was enacted. That legislation was too weak to be truly effective; but instead of strengthening it, Congress allowed the act to expire ten years later.
We can expect much hand-wringing – and nothing more – as a result of today’s slaughter.