The Mass Shootings in El Paso and Dayton Should Spur Democrats to Propose Big Ideas on Gun Violence
An hour into the first Democratic Presidential debate, in Miami, in June, Chuck Todd, one of the moderators, segued into what he called “the gun question.” He pointed out that Parkland, Florida, where seventeen people were killed in a school shooting last year, was just fifty miles away, and that the outpouring of teen-age activism against gun violence that followed had inspired many on the stage to unveil “robust plans” addressing the crisis. Todd mentioned the assault-weapons ban, a proposal supported by nearly all of the Democratic candidates, but asked Senator Elizabeth Warren what she believed the federal government should do about the “hundreds of millions of guns already out there.”
Todd’s question seemed to present Warren with a perfectly fitted moment for her credo, “I’ve got a plan for that.” Guns killed nearly forty thousand people in the United States last year. In 2016, a study published in the American Journal of Medicine found that Americans were ten times more likely to die as a result of a firearm than residents of other high-income countries, as classified by the World Bank. The dismal statistic has an obvious correlation––the United States has the highest per-capita rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. A 2017 survey estimated that there are three hundred and ninety-three million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, a rate of 120.5 guns for every hundred residents, twice that of the second-highest nation, Yemen.
Yet Warren deflected in her response. She called gun violence a “national health emergency in this country” and said, “We need to treat it like that.” But her solutions felt milquetoast. “We can do the universal background checks, we can ban the weapons of war, but we can also double down on the research and find out what really works, where it is that we can make the differences at the margins that will keep our children safe,” Warren said. “We need to treat this like the virus that’s killing our children.”
A worthy soundbite, certainly, but it was an instance of uncharacteristic circumspection from Warren, who has set herself apart in the Democratic field with her detailed policy proposals, many of them breathtakingly ambitious. Todd was probing whether Warren might support a mandatory gun-buyback program, such as the one that Australia undertook in 1996, after a mass shooting there killed thirty-five people. (Researchers later found the effort was effective in reducing gun deaths.) Even after Todd pressed Warren a second time, she fell back on her “treat it like a serious research problem” response.
I thought of the moment at the debate on Saturday, when the news broke of the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. A twenty-one-year-old gunman had opened fire with an assault rifle inside a crowded Walmart, killing at least twenty and injuring twenty-six others. On Sunday, I woke up to news of another massacre with an assault rifle, this time in Dayton, Ohio, in which at least nine people were killed and sixteen others wounded in less than a minute. Less than a week earlier, a nineteen-year-old man, also armed with an assault weapon, killed three people, including a six-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl, before shooting himself, at a garlic festival in Gilroy, California. According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks gun-related violence, the El Paso and Dayton shootings marked the two hundred and fiftieth and two hundred and fifty-first mass shootings of the year––a rate of more than one per day.
The stupefying regularity of these mass killings can inspire a sense of futility, even as the evidence suggests that the political prospects for gun control are shifting. In 2018, state legislatures passed sixty-nine gun-control measures, three times as many as were passed in 2017, according to a tally by the Times, using data compiled by the Gifford Law Center. Remarkably, gun-control groups outspent the N.R.A. during the midterm elections. The once fearsome group is mired in infighting and financial turmoil. The Democratic candidates seeking their party’s Presidential nomination have been vocally proclaiming their support for measures such as universal background checks, the assault-weapons ban, and federal funding for research on gun violence.
Yet in a Democratic race that has been animated by energy from the left and vigorous debates about sweeping policies such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, the dearth of truly bold ideas and robust discussion on guns is striking. Last month, the lone Democratic candidate who supported a mandatory gun-buyback program, Representative Eric Swalwell, dropped out of the race. Swalwell tried to make gun control a signature issue of his campaign. The California congressman proposed reinstating the federal assault-weapons ban, buying back all existing assault weapons—he estimated that there might be fifteen million in circulation––and prosecuting anyone who resisted. Swalwell put the cost at about fifteen billion dollars. “What is it worth to American taxpayers to not see our families, friends and neighbors cut down in a hail of gunfire?” Swalwell wrote in an op-ed, in USA Today. “Consider this an investment in averting carnage and heartache and loss.”
The most ambitious proposal that has some currency in the Democratic field calls for the establishment of a federal gun-licensing system. Several candidates––most prominently, Senator Cory Booker––support this deceptively simple idea: that buying a gun should be more like driving a car. Anyone interested in purchasing a firearm would be required to obtain a license first. (Currently, under federal law, gun buyers must pass only a background check.) In May, Booker detailed his proposal as part of a broader gun-violence-prevention plan. Under Booker’s plan, gun purchasers would have to make an appointment at a designated local office, answer basic background questions there, submit fingerprints, and provide proof of completion of a certified gun-safety course. The concept is bolstered by research: one study suggested that a permit-to-purchase law for handguns, enacted in Connecticut in 1995, resulted in forty per cent fewer firearm homicides; conversely, another study found that the repeal of a permit-to-purchase law in Missouri, in 2007, led to an abrupt increase in gun-related homicides.
There are other solutions that could be debated: a far more onerous licensing plan; banning all semi-automatic weapons; expanding the federal criteria that bar gun purchases to include violent misdemeanors; making it easier to disqualify someone for mental-health reasons. The obvious critique to far-reaching gun-control proposals is the same one that moderates have unsuccessfully tried to use against Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders: that their plans have no chance of becoming reality. But Sanders’s Medicare for All advocacy during his 2016 campaign is instructive. As my colleague Osita Nwanevu has written, it has thoroughly altered the terms of the health-care debate in the Democratic Party. Sometimes an unrealistic-seeming idea simply needs an ardent champion, someone willing to set political pragmatism aside. Often, that is how norms shift.
Warren herself clearly understands this. When John Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland, accused her of making “impossible promises” and engaging in “fairy-tale economics,” during the Democratic debate in Detroit last week, Warren responded with one of the most stirring lines of the evening: “I don’t understand why anyone goes to all the trouble of running for President of the United States to tell us what we can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.” The right to go to Walmart, or to a food festival, or to church, or to a synagogue, or to school, without fear of being shot, is eminently worth fighting for.
