Gun Control Laws Will Never Stop Gun Violence
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you are one of the people who think that gun violence can be prevented by the passage of the next gun control law, or maybe the one after that, you are going to forever be disappointed.
In order to understand why I say that, we must look at how laws influence behavior. It is impossible for any law to prevent unwanted behavior. Instead, what laws do is prescribe the punishment for a person who violates the law. Laws, and the enforcement of their prescribed punishments, are used in an attempt to dissuade people from behaving in an unwanted manner. Laws themselves do not stop crimes from occurring.
Let me offer a couple examples that will help illustrate my point.
If you grew up in the United States and went to high school sometime in the last, say 70 years, then you witnessed firsthand an example of a particular law’s inability to prevent crime. It is illegal for anyone under the age of 21 (in most states) to possess or consume alcoholic beverages. If you ever attended a party while you were in high school, you saw just how often and easily the law forbidding that behavior was violated.
In fact, according to statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and extrapolated by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), “About a quarter of car crashes with teens involve an underage drinking driver.” According to statistics maintained by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), in 2016 alone, 2,433 teens between 16-19 years old were killed in traffic accidents, and 292,742 were hospitalized as a result of a traffic accident. That means that 608 of those kids killed in crashes were driving drunk, and more than 73,000 of the kids injured were victims of a drunk teen driver.
Another example of the inability of a law to prevent crime is one most adults witness, or commit, on a daily basis. Ever exceed the speed limit while driving your car? Ever see other drivers exceed the speed limit? But, aren’t there laws that are supposed to prevent that?
I can offer hundreds of other examples that demonstrate the inability of laws to prevent unwanted behavior, but I would hope that you get the point I am trying to make. But here is the kicker: none of those kids who are drinking underage, and none of those drivers who are violating traffic laws are doing so with evil intent. They are just going about their daily lives, or out having some fun with friends. They are not America’s most wanted. They are not someone intent on committing a drive-by shooting, killing a rival gang member, or becoming famous by committing a mass murder.
For a moment, try and imagine that you are that evil person with nefarious intent. You are likely either a person who, somehow, never learned the difference between right and wrong or you are someone who is mentally unstable and is driven by some inexplicable urge to hurt others. Or quite possibly, you are both.
Now this is the important part, so please give this some thought: How is a law, any law, supposed to prevent you, a motivated evil doer, from procuring a gun and committing an evil act when laws cannot even prevent good people from committing crimes?
Laws are unable to prevent illegal drugs from entering the country, or from being manufactured here, how are they going to stop guns? Especially when a person with mediocre mechanical aptitude can make their own gun in their garage in under a day.
There are countless examples showing how easy it is to make homemade guns, but an excellent example is the video above produced by Vice TV examining the illegal gun market in the Philippines.
To think that laws can prevent evil people from getting guns requires a level of naiveté that I cannot remotely fathom, and completely ignores the inability of laws to stop the flow of illegal drugs, or to stop you and I from exceeding the speed limit.
Laws Do Not Prevent Crime, They Only Prescribe Punishments
The simple fact of the matter is that laws cannot prevent a motivated law breaker. This is not just some random retired cop saying this either. There is ample evidence proving exactly what I have said. Every day in America, criminals who are already prohibited persons (persons legally prohibited from possessing a firearm) use guns to commit crimes, and not just against unarmed citizens. In fact, there are dozens of recent examples where law enforcement officers have been killed by a prohibited person using a gun they obtained illegally. One of those recent examples is the murder of Sacramento Sheriff’s Deputy Robert French, a personal friend and academy mate. Bob was neither my first nor my last coworker murdered by a criminal with an illegal gun.
In the past when I have tried to make this point, people who disagree have offered what boils down to two main arguments.
One argument is that I lack empathy for the victims, and that I have no idea what it is like to lose a loved one to gun violence, thus my opinion matters not. If the loss of multiple coworkers, including a man I was friends with for more than 20 years, is not enough to show I have a very real personal stake in this, I can also offer the fact that during my career I was forced to shoot and kill a man. That man, who was trying to kill me at the time, was suicidal and had been fighting serious mental illness for decades. He should not have had a gun, yet he was armed with two at the time of our encounter. It does not get much more personal than someone trying to kill you.
Additionally, I want to make another point in regards to the empathy argument. We should never legislate based on emotional responses. It is easy to get angry when something bad happens, but acting out of emotion leads to irrational responses. If you truly hope to have a positive, measurable effect on a problem, you must examine the problem logically, without emotion or bias, and address the root cause.
The other main argument I am confronted with, for lack of a better term, is usually voiced something like “Then why bother having any laws at all?” This is a ridiculous stance to take, to say the least. Just because I am stating that laws cannot prevent a crime does not mean we should have no laws.
Laws set the standards for what is acceptable and what is not in that particular society, and they prescribe the punishment for violating those standards. For the majority of humans, that is all that is required to get them to stay within the boundaries of acceptable behavior. For those few who cannot follow those rules, the laws prescribe the punishment they shall receive when they break the law.
In my previous two examples of speeding and underage drinking, if there was no penalty for speeding, none of us would ever freak out and check the speedometer when we spot a cop car while driving, and kids would be even more likely to drink alcohol and drive if there was no potential for severe punishment.
It is not the laws that prevent us from committing crimes, it is the repercussions we face if caught breaking the law that motivates us to behave.
Mass Shootings
Before we delve into this topic, let me clarify here at the onset, when I say “mass shooting” here I am not talking about the statistical majority of incidents that technically qualify as “mass shootings.” In reality, the overwhelming majority of incidents that qualify as mass shootings are actually part of another crime or are gang related. They are not the school, bar, fair or concert shootings that make national news for weeks on end, that are held up by politicians as examples demonstrating a need for more gun control. You know, the type of mass shooting that everyone pictures when they hear the phrase “mass shooting.” Those types of mass shootings are in fact the statistical minority, and it is those statistical anomalies that I am referring to here.
In the case of a motivated, violent or unstable person who wants to commit a mass murder, or mass shooting, the potential repercussions for their actions are usually part and parcel of their plan. The majority of these mass murderers plan to go out in a “blaze of glory” and thus, no matter how extreme you make the punishment, it will never serve as a deterrent.
In fact, FBI statistics as reported by CNN show that 70% of mass shooters are dead at the end of their rampage, with 40% of them having intentionally killed themselves, while the other 30% are killed in a shootout with law enforcement or an armed citizen. When you understand that the vast majority of these murderers have no intention of living after the act is completed, it stands to reason that the vast majority of these random mass shootings could not possibly be prevented by fear of future punishment.
As for the majority of the incidents that make up the total number of mass shootings, they can be reduced, but not by enacting additional gun control laws. Those incidents are most often committed by people deeply involved in criminal activity who do not care about who they hurt or what laws they are breaking.
This fact is not just supported by anecdotal evidence offered by a retired cop, but is actually supported by a study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. One of the findings made in that study was “Most gunshot victims and survivors were young minority men with prior court arraignments. Most attacks occurred in circumstances where gangs or drugs played an important role.” For people who are heavily involved in drug crime and gangs, one more gun control law does not matter to them.
What then? Do Nothing?
With all of that said, please understand that I am not remotely suggesting that we do nothing to try and reduce the number of people killed by violent criminals with guns. And I say reduce, not stop, because despite what many anti-gun politicians promise, it is not remotely reasonable to think we can ever prevent all gun deaths. There are however a number of things we can do, some of which have an actual proven track record of reducing gun violence.
For the last decade, the very same politicians who constantly clamor for more gun control have been in fact softening punishments on the very people who commit the overwhelming majority of violent crimes with guns. They have passed laws reducing penalties for crimes, including gun crimes. They have removed mandatory sentence enhancements for crimes involving guns. They have shortened prison sentences, and removed or attempted to remove three-strikes laws.
They have called law enforcement and the entire justice system racist, but the fact of the matter is, the overwhelming majority of gun violence is committed by gangs, which are primarily made up of ethnic minorities, most with criminal records, and their crimes are committed against other ethnic minorities, many of whom also have criminal records.
The number of people committing the bulk of violent crime with guns is a tiny portion of the population of this country. Most are repeat offenders. Most come as no surprise to law enforcement, because we have dealt with them before, and locked them up, only to see the cases plea bargained away or dropped altogether.
Talk to any cop who has been on the job more than a few years from an area with gang problems and you will hear tons of similar stories. Arrest guys with guns and drugs, case gets knocked down to simple drug possession, gun charges dropped, bad guy back on the street in no time.
One night, from about a mile away, I saw a drive-by occur. I followed the suspect vehicle, which had four on board, until I had sufficient backup units with me. We stopped it, detained the gang bangers, recovered a handgun, a couple expended shell casings, and found the trunk of the car was full of weed. CSI even GSR’d (gunshot residue test) all of them. One of the four detained was the registered owner of the handgun (that was one of the only two times in my entire career that the lawful owner of the gun used it in a crime). He was 21 years old and despite his extensive gang ties, had never been convicted of a felony and was legally able to buy the gun. Units at the scene of the shooting found bullet holes in apartment walls, and lots of scared people, but thankfully no one had been hurt. Arrested all four occupants of the car for multiple felonies, and a couple days later, the DA dropped ALL of the charges because “we couldn’t prove which one of them fired the gun.”
That might come as shocking, but sadly, that was actually the second time in my career the same thing happened. Only difference is the first time, the gun was stolen and there was no weed in the trunk of the car. BUT the DA dropped all of the charges because none of the four suspects would admit to firing the gun. Two of my coworkers, both good friends of mine, arrested the same guys a couple weeks later with yet another stolen gun. Want to guess what happened with that case?
In 2015, Omaha Police Officer Kerrie Orozco was killed by a felon with a gun. The felon could not legally get a gun, so his girlfriend Jalita Johnson bought it for him. The act of doing that is called a straw purchase, and is a federal crime. Johnson plead guilty, and got nothing more than probation. A cop, who was a brand new mom, is dead, and one of the people responsible for her death got nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
This right here is where the problem lies, and where the solution can be found. It is not for the lack of gun control laws, but in the lack of enforcement of the laws in general. Between politicians removing penalties for crimes and prosecutors taking the easy way out, there is no actual punishment. The people committing crimes with guns are in and out of the revolving doors of the system, back on the streets committing more crimes with more illegally obtained guns.
We need to lock up, for a long time, people who are committing crimes with guns. We need to enforce the laws on the books, and rather than give them a slap on the wrist, hammer the suspects. We need to stop letting the “poor, misunderstood” felons out of prison early. We need to prevent politicians like Gavin Newsom from granting clemency to 21 felons, 19 of which were in prison for gun crimes, at the same time he is signing ever more ridiculous gun laws into existence, gun laws that only affect law abiding citizens.
The solution is very simple. Harsher punishments for the people who actually commit crimes with guns, or “gun violence.” Stop punishing law abiding gun owners who have done nothing. Punish the criminals instead. It is about time we as a society get serious about this, and stop blaming a tool instead of the user.
If you really feel the need to pass more laws, how about one making it much harder for prosecutors to drop or plea bargain gun charges away? How about one preventing politicians from granting clemency to violent criminals who used a gun in the commission of their crimes?
If you like the content you see here, visit our home page for more articles, and remember to sign up for our newsletter.
