Gun Confiscation Reference November 2017

November 2017

[Reverse chronological order]

November 17, 2017
Splinter news: BAN GUNS
https://splinternews.com/ban-guns-1820487148
November 13, 2017
Redhawks Online: Guns must go
https://www.redhawksonline.com/2017/11/13/las-vegas-shooting-response-keep-or-eliminate-guns/
November 10, 2017
Boston Globe: Hand over your weapons
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/11/10/hand-over-your-weapons/6IxJLanMKGak7RvCLipwbN/story.html
November 10, 2017
News-Press - USA Today Editorial Board: Renew ban on military-style assault weapons
https://www.news-press.com/story/opinion/2017/11/10/renew-ban-military-style-assault-weapons/851942001/

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BAN GUNS
Alex Pareene 11/16/17
I have not, traditionally, held entirely orthodox liberal opinions on the issue of gun control. For political reasons, for practical reasons, even in part on principle, I never thought a far-reaching gun ban was realistic, or even necessarily desirable, in the United States. (A strictly enforced ban would necessitate massive, nationwide police action, for one thing, and would assuredly also involve disproportionate policing and additional incarceration of people of color.) I continue to believe that, as Democrats attempt to win victories across the entire country, there will be tough trade-offs and brutal internal arguments on gun rights—much more so than on other hot button issues, including even abortion access.But it’s obvious that we, as a nation, need to disarm.
Spree shootings have become an epidemic. Six of the ten deadliest spree shootings in American history have occurred in the last decade. Three of the five deadliest happened in the last two years. Rampage spree shootings might be culturally “contagious.” Or perhaps they are simply becoming deadlier because it is easier than ever for killers to obtain incredibly over-powered weapons. Regardless, we’ve become numb to garish death tolls.
And yet, those mass shootings still represent just a fraction of the tens of thousands killed by guns annually in the United States. The number of yearly firearm homicides is well below historic highs (along with nearly every other form of violent crime) but that rate stopped falling years ago. It has remained steady at an unconscionably high level for nearly two decades. Our rate of gun deaths remains many times greater than the rates of every other wealthy nation.
And the majority of those gun deaths are suicides. We have too many guns.
There are a few positive signs. There is support for more regulation. Much, much more regulation than we currently have in place. And we should fight for it all: Ironclad background checks and gun registries and assault weapon bans and whatever else can mitigate the problem. But it’s clear that the historical era in which America’s many responsible gun-owners could’ve joined with liberal gun rights opponents to beat back the nuts and install sensible regulation is long behind us.
I think it did exist once. In the midwest of my youth, gun ownership was common and didn’t seem to conflict with progressive values. It was much easier to believe that people genuinely owned rifles because they enjoyed hunting, and not because they fetishized weapons of mass death. And people didn’t walk around in public openly displaying handguns, because that is lunatic behavior in a civilized society. That is the context in which the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban were achievable.
But we can’t get back there—we’re too far gone. The decades-long intentional derangement of white conservatives and the unchecked profit-seeking of arms manufacturers brought us here, and now “gun culture” is a grotesque death cult.
I’d love a compromise, where no one had (or felt they needed) handguns, and hunters and recreational shooters got to enjoy their registered and safely stored shotguns and old-fashioned repeating rifles. But the “responsible” owners are a dying breed. The future of the gun debate in the United States is a ruthless political fight between an anti-gun majority and a hysterical, well-armed revanchist minority. That minority will have one of our two major political parties, the Supreme Court and much of the judiciary, and a lot of arms industry money on its side.
So what should we fight for, knowing the near-impossibility of full disarmament? We will probably not nationalize or expropriate our arms manufacturers any time soon, though we obviously should. We can at least make it possible to sue them into dust. But if you want a gun ban in the United States, here’s a thought: Even if you accept the (obviously, stupidly, grandly wrong) conservative interpretation of the Second Amendment, there’s still no actual right to sell guns. So why not ban that?
https://splinternews.com/ban-guns-1820487148

Las Vegas shooting response – keep or eliminate guns?
November 13, 2017
Redhawks Online:Guns must go
By Patrick Cullinan, Staff Writer
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More gun control is not enough
Finally, it’s important to note why merely increasing gun control (by ramping up background checks or limiting the amount of guns a person can own) would not be enough to end shootings. In order to actually end gun violence, we need to get rid of all guns. This is obvious because Paddock could not have been hindered by any kind of gun control at all.
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There are many arguments still to be had about gun control and gun ownership rights, but the Las Vegas shooting is a terribly perfect example of why so many of the arguments in favor of guns are flawed. The only way to stop these mass shootings from happening is to get rid of the weapon used in them. Surely, the right to walk down a street without being afraid that someone near you may be poised to kill you outweighs an individual’s right to own something that has been used over and over again to wreak havoc on our country.
https://www.redhawksonline.com/2017/11/13/las-vegas-shooting-response-keep-or-eliminate-guns/

Hand over your weapons
By David Scharfenberg Globe Staff November 10, 2017
In other words, the proposals aren’t just difficult to enact in the current political climate; their practical effects would also be quite limited. On occasion, though, leading Democrats will make oblique reference to a more sweeping policy change: seizing a huge number of weapons from law-abiding citizens.
At a New Hampshire forum in the fall of 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke approvingly of an Australian gun buyback program that collected more than 650,000 weapons — a buyback that, she neglected to mention, was compulsory.
And just a few months earlier, then-President Barack Obama offered coded support for the same confiscatory approach. “When Australia had a mass killing — I think it was in Tasmania — about 25 years ago, it was just so shocking, the entire country said, ‘Well, we’re going to completely change our gun laws,’ and they did,” he said.
Democrats have even let the word “confiscation” slip out, on occasion. After the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a radio interview that when it came to assault weapons “confiscation could be an option, mandatory sale to the state could be an option.”
It was an option Cuomo didn’t pursue. But five years after that slaughter of schoolchildren — and with fresh tales of murdered kids on the floor of a Texas church — might gun-control advocates expand their agenda?
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Ultimately, if gun-control advocates really want to stanch the blood, there’s no way around it: They’ll have to persuade more people of the need to confiscate millions of those firearms, as radical as that idea may now seem.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/11/10/hand-over-your-weapons/6IxJLanMKGak7RvCLipwbN/story.html

News-Press - USA Today Editorial Board: Renew ban on military-style assault weapons
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In each case, an AR-15 or derivative was the killer's weapon of choice. In each case, a common theme from witnesses and first responders was the gruesome, blood-soaked nature of the crime scene.
This is no coincidence. The gun (the AR doesn't stand for assault rifle but for the weapon's first designer, Armalite Rifle) is by far the most popular of the millions of assault-style rifles owned by Americans. Surgeons who have treated the wounds call the weapons perfect killing machines that can tear a body apart and create massive hemorrhaging.
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In 2008, when Justice Antonin Scalia authored a Supreme Court decision safeguarding the Second Amendment's right to possess weapons, he noted that that freedom is "not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever."
Thus, some guns can be restricted. A decade-long ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines expired in 2004. It's time to renew it, and close loopholes that allowed gunmakers to circumvent the law by making minor modifications to the weapons.
In a nation already saturated with guns, do we need to keep adding to this civilian armory weapons efficiently designed to maim and tear apart human flesh? Is that really what our Founders envisioned?
https://www.news-press.com/story/opinion/2017/11/10/renew-ban-military-style-assault-weapons/851942001/