The deadliest acts of mass murder in the United States since 9/11 all share one feature: The killer in every case used an assault-style weapon or a firearm equipped with a high-capacity magazine. This was again the case on Monday, at a shooting at a Kentucky bank that killed five, and in the recent shooting at the elementary school in Nashville that killed six, including three 9-year-old children.
And yet, the country has failed to adopt the policies needed to keep these weapons out of the hands of those who would abuse them. At the most obvious level, mass shootings are a serious and worsening problem that imposes substantial burdens on the public. But they are something else as well: a national disgrace that illuminates the inability of the American political system to adopt numerous popular public-policy strategies that together could substantially reduce the prevalence and destructiveness of these events. One of those measures—the federal assault-weapons ban—was in place for a decade, but it was allowed to lapse in 2004. The gun lobby is challenging every valuable gun-safety law throughout the United States, with the belief that Republican appointees on the Supreme Court will protect the right to sell lethal weaponry to as many Americans as possible. …
The gun lobby has a counterintuitive (and self-serving) suggestion for dealing with the proliferation of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines: more gun sales and more gun carrying, so that “a good guy with a gun” can kill a mass shooter. Unfortunately, the best empirical evidence suggests that this will be a self-defeating policy, because the proliferation of guns will lead to more gun violence, resulting from increased gun thefts, more road-rage violence, and diminished police effectiveness.
The occasional episodes where a good guy with a gun thwarts a mass shooting will be offset by the growing parade of ills from what the then-president of the National Rifle Association—testifying in support of the 1938 federal gun-control act—called the inadvisable “promiscuous toting of guns.” Even Ronald Reagan once said that there’s “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons. [Guns are] a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” …
Any approach that doesn’t include a federal assault-weapons ban with accompanying restrictions on high-capacity magazines will be inadequate. State bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines have helped, but killers have circumvented them, buying their weapons in neighboring gun-friendly states. …
Referencing unpublished work by a supportive researcher, an NRA lawyer told the Supreme Court in the Bruen oral argument that allowing more citizens to carry guns would have no impact on crime, ironically conceding that even the most pro-NRA assessment of the data found no benefit from more gun carrying. The best, peer-reviewed evidence, though, reaches a far more ominous conclusion concerning the march toward deregulation. Sadly, America’s lead as the most homicidal affluent nation will only grow unless more fundamental reform to its gun policies is undertaken, and the American people are allowed to have their say.
— John J. Donohue in The Problem America Cannot Fix
