It’s not the guns.
The best article on this comes from Leah Libresco. She writes about her transformation from an anti-RA, anti-2nd Amendment person who thinks we should ban guns to someone who realizes guns aren’t the problem. She used to get upset that the NRA was blocking Congress from passing “common-sense gun control measure”
Quick aside: The NRA gives very little money to politicians. Vox wrote that in 2014, the NRA gave John Cornyn, the Texas Senator, $9,900 — more than it gave to any other Republican senator that election cycle.
That’s nothing. In 2014 he raised $14 million.
And he’s one of the biggest recipients of NRA donations in Congress.
Vox concluded, “NRA funding reflects a tiny fraction of the Republican fundraising apparatus”
There’s this perception that the NRA pays off members of Congress. You hear this rhetoric, “Stop taking money from the NRA because children are dying” and “Congress is funded by the NRA.”
Zero basis in reality.
Anyway, Leah Libresco spent 3 months analyzing 33k deaths from guns each year, “and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way… the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence”
The very short conclusion from her research: 2/3 of gun deaths are suicide. The next largest group of people killed by guns, 20% are young men 15-34 killed by other young men (gang violence). And the next notable group is women murdered by a domestic partner.
So her conclusion is, instead of banning guns, let’s tailor our intervention to best help the potential victims. Specifically, better suicide prevention for older men (who commit most suicides), we need more mentoring and identifying of kids in gangs and we need more protections for women in abusive relationships.
And play around with the data yourself with this website.
I’ll end with this: We can’t have a conversation about gun laws in America until the Left first admit that conservatives want to stop mass shootings, too.
I wrote about in my book “How To Change Someone’s Mind”. You can’t ever change someone’s mind if they have contempt for you or if you have contempt for them. It can’t happen. Many people on the Left, after a school shooting they scurry to the top of the moral superiority mountain and point their finger down at you because THEY want school shootings to stop and you don’t. “Blood on your hands!”
Nothing productive will ever happen if we keep operating like this.
Let’s all agree that we want to stop school shootings! And all shootings! And suicides and gang murders and domestic violence! We want all violence to stop. So let’s get to the root of each of these.
It’s not the guns. If only it was that easy.