Vegas

Another year, another "worst mass shooting in American history."  It's an honorific that is quickly losing all sense of tragedy or weight since we have a new event so often and we do absolutely nothing to stop the next from happening, a pattern that shows no sign of breaking anytime soon.  Still, it's worth it I think to at least look at the components of why.

Don't expect the numbers to shift anything, at least this time.  Mass shootings are, quite literally, an everyday occurrence.  We've all grown used to the fact that 4-5 people are being shot somewhere in the country so the only thing that makes these things newsworthy is if they happen on a large scale.  Point is, we are long past the time where you can count on the horror of a mass shooting to have any real world consequences in a political sense.  When events like this become part of the everyday life and culture, the only possible thing that really push them back out into the extraordinary is if the sheer scale of the dead hits something previously thought impossible.  I don't really know what that tipping point is- hundreds dead, maybe?  Thousands?- but if that's what we're waiting for then a whole lot of other people are going to die before we find it.

Also, we should stop paying so much attention to the motives and reasons of the shooter.  They are, in the grand scheme of things, not all that relevant.  As the NRA and their stooges love to point out every single time this happens, there will always be crazies.  And on that, they have a point; you can't legislate and craft an effective gun control policy that will foresee every murderously homicidal motive people can craft for themselves.  What we should be more concerned about is that no matter the motive, everyone before this shooting and everyone after it who wants to build an arsenal to kill as many people as possible will be able to do so without any real impediment.  That's really where our focus needs to be, the supply side.  If we want to really stop people from using these guns for their intended purpose than the easiest way to do so is just not allow those guns to be sold.  But since no one is really advocating that, it's not gonna happen.  And even if there were, the Supreme Court decisions in the DC vs Heller and McDonald vs Chicago cases would kill any law enacting such a ban dead the moment anybody filed a suit against it.

One more thing on that point, it's brought up, again by the NRA/stooges, that people who want to do harm can always buy guns on the black market so it doesn't make sense to stop people from legally buying all the hardware they ever wanted legally.  My main question to these people is, where do they think black market guns come from?  The quick answer is: they come from legal purchases.  To be fair, some of the guns are stolen from their owners, although only DC has a law requiring owners to report the theft to law enforcement.  But mostly, they come from straw purchasers and let's say flexible dealers.  Why not just shut those dealers down, you ask?  Well, because it's against the law for the ATF to share gun trace data with... pretty much everyone.  There have been exceptions made to the law since it passed which allows the ATF to share the data amongst other law enforcement agencies (keep in mind the amendment establishing these conditions was passed in 2003.  The law enforcement exception didn't come along until 2008 and the exception to access the data beyond one specific criminal case didn't happen until 2010) but the ATF is still legally barred from releasing that information to the public.  Ignorance and conjecture for everybody, woo-ho.

The law also requires the FBI destroy approved sale background checks within 24-hours so the actual ownership of a gun can't be easily tracked from person to person and also bans the ATF from requiring gun shops and dealers to submit their inventory records for federal review.  So if someone is selling things on the side and later reports it "missing" there's no real way to confirm they ever received the gun in the first place.   So when people say "They should just enforce the laws on the books already" they either don't know or don't care that "the laws on the books" are the exact thing stopping law enforcement agencies from doing that.  So, probably shouldn't listen much to anybody who says that, just to be safe.

The tag for all of that is that even you point out to people that having an unrestricted legal market is the number one thing creating the black market they're all so afraid of, it probably won't change their mind at all.  Because, like most things associated around guns, the argument isn't for the logical side, it's aimed at the emotional part of our brains.  By creating this fear of potentially being outgunned by criminals who may one day bust down your door in the night, you create the need for people to have unlimited access to buy the biggest, deadliest weapons they can get their hands on with the added benefit of getting to react like someone is killing their children whenever any gun control measure gets brought up.

None of these things would be possible, though, without the quiet dedication and perseverance of the National Rifle Association, the tumor which kills all hope in decent people everywhere.  There's no real mystery to why the NRA has the stranglehold that they do on this issue- they're the ones who show up everyday of every year with their money and political pressure at every level to keep gun laws weak to non-existent.  Democracies are won by the people who show up, and who do so consistently.  The NRA can weather all the storms of these mass shootings because they know that in a week, a month, maybe two, everyone screaming for gun control measures will give up and go on to something else and when the next day comes, they'll still be there.

What happened in the wake of Sandy Hook is a perfect example of this. Everyone thought that twenty dead kids would be too much to ignore, a tragedy that demanded a response. But four months later the universal background check bill was dead and the public response was... nothing. No calls to Congress, no backlash, just, nothing. And so the NRA went about it's work, confident in the fact that if the opposition couldn't sustain themselves after a killing like that, they would never be a serious threat.

Until a separate counter organization gets built up to match the commitment the NRA shows, or until the supposedly 75% of their membership who support gun control actually do something about their leadership, than the status quo will stay as it is.

Even then, it will be hard to effectively counter the NRA because everyone attempting to do so will be missing any significant facts to clear away the mountains of bullshit the NRA dumps on this topic.  The primary reason for that is something called the Dickey Amendment, which was passed in 1996 after the NRA lobbied to prevent the CDC looking into gun violence because in 1993 they published a study saying that people with guns in their homes tend to shoot other people in their homes more often than people who don't.  Shocker, I know.

Specifically, the amendment bars the CDC from "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control," which doesn't explicitly bar the CDC from researching gun violence and gun deaths, true, but since no one at the CDC is stupid enough to believe that if they do a study about gun violence and someone in Congress uses that research as the basis of a gun control bill, the NRA and their minions will cry foul and say they're violating the spirit or whatever of the amendment and threaten to cut the CDC's budget in retaliation.  So, instead, they do nothing to save themselves the hassle and I don't think anyone can really blame them for that.

The consequence of this is that when it comes to the gun control "debate" nobody has any real ground or authority to stand on because no one knows anything about the exact details surrounding gun deaths and gun violence in the country, which is just what the NRA wants.  Without any clear facts, all we have is emotional grandstanding and pleas to have some vague notion of human decency and kindness and all that jazz.  Predictably, this goes absolutely nowhere, and everybody just gets exhausted and stows whatever feelings they have left away to use whenever the next massacre comes they have enough good will so all the thoughts and prayers they send out don't feel completely meaningless.

But you really have to ask, how bad and how hard have we given up when we feel that's the absolute best we can do?