Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Hours after last Friday's massacre in Aurora, Colo., New
York Mayor Michael Bloomberg demanded that the two major parties' presidential
candidates explain how they plan to prevent such senseless outbursts of
violence.
"No matter where you stand on the Second Amendment,
no matter where you stand on guns, we have a right to hear from both of them
concretely," Bloomberg said in a radio interview. "What are they
going to do about guns?"
Whether you accept the premise that something must be
done about guns, of course, might be influenced by where you stand on the
Second Amendment and where you stand on guns. But according to Bloomberg, even
people who object to gun control on practical or constitutional grounds are
morally obliged to support it. Such arrogant illogic may help explain why
public support for new gun restrictions has been falling for two decades.
Consider how the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
reacted to news that a man had shot 70 people, 12 of them fatally, at a
midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises." "This tragedy is
another grim reminder that guns are the enablers of mass killers and that our
nation pays an unacceptable price for our failure to keep guns out of the hands
of dangerous people," said the group's president, Dan Gross. "We are
outraged."
But outrage is no substitute for rational argument, and
the response urged by the Brady Campaign -- a petition demanding that Congress
keep guns away from "convicted felons," "convicted domestic abusers,"
"terrorists" and "people found to be dangerously mentally
ill" -- had nothing to do with what happened in Aurora. As far as we know,
James Holmes, the 24-year-old former neuroscience graduate student arrested for
the murders, has no criminal record, no links to terrorist groups and no
psychiatric history that would have disqualified him from owning guns.
Similarly, a New York Times story regretted that Holmes
was "unhindered by federal background checks" when he bought
ammunition online. Since he passed background checks to buy his pistols,
shotgun and rifle, why would a background check for ammunition have stopped
him?
Other gun-control advocates focused on the AR-15 rifle
used by Holmes, a civilian, semi-automatic version of the M-16. Depending on
the details of its design, it might have been covered by the federal
"assault weapon" ban that expired in 2004. But such legislation
targets guns based mainly on their military appearance, as opposed to features
that make a practical difference in the commission of crimes (a purpose for
which they are rarely used). It is hard to see how the presence or absence of a
bayonet mount, a threaded barrel or a collapsible stock, for instance, matters
much for a man shooting unarmed moviegoers in a darkened theater.
Holmes also had large-capacity magazines: one holding 100
rounds for the rifle (which reportedly jammed) and one holding 40 rounds for
his .40-caliber Glock pistol. But reinstating the federal ban on magazines
holding more than 10 rounds, as recommended by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.,
would have no impact on a determined killer, since millions of larger magazines
are already in circulation. Even if all of them disappeared tomorrow, switching
magazines (or weapons) takes just a few seconds -- probably not a crucial
consideration when no one is shooting back.
Instead of restricting guns, magazines or ammunition for
everyone, why not focus on the tiny percentage of buyers who will use them to
commit mass murder? Because there is no reliable way to identify those people
before the fact. As Vasilis Pozios, a Detroit psychiatrist who specializes in
risk assessment, recently conceded to USA Today, "We're just not good at
predicting who does this."
Peter Ahearn, a former FBI agent, made the same point in
an interview with The Associated Press. "There's nothing you can do to
predict that type of crime," he said. "There's no way you can prevent
it."
That message is not reassuring, popular or politically
useful. It just happens to be true.
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