I’ve been thinking more lately about common ground in this debate, and why there’s none to be found. Chiefly I’ve been thinking about an idea that would, in theory, address a lot of concerns on both sides. But this, like many other ideas I’ve had, can probably be filed under politically infeasible. I’ve wondered why we don’t, instead of continually fighting over turning the ratchet up on down on who or who isn’t a prohibited person, we compromise, and put a bit more faith in social pressure instead of law?
Our opponents have shown that they are unable to think of owning a gun as a constitutional right, even if they’ve learned to parrot the saying post Heller. That’s apparent in the proposals that people should be prohibited from purchasing a gun because an army recruiter turned them down, or because they were kicked out of school, in response to the late tragedy. What’s next? Being a disgruntled recently fired employee? How is anything a right which is subject to such a whim?
It’s worth thinking about how this country survived for so many decades with no background checks at all. Years ago, before the advent of industrialization, people moved around far less. Most people probably never went beyond more than a few dozen miles or so from where they were born, and people knew a lot more about what their neighbors were up to before our mass migration during the industrial revolution. In short, the town gun maker or shopkeeper knew who not to sell guns to, because he likely knew everyone in town, and knew which individuals were trouble.
The revolution in transportation brought about by industrialization and urbanization eradicated that world. The chances that a gun dealer personally knows all his customers is practically nil. Combine that with modern taboos against discrimination in all forms, and you have a recipe for a situation where neither person in the transaction knows much about the other, but who nonetheless want to do business. This was the core situation the electronic background check was meant to try to solve, but to date we’ve tried to solve that only with black-and-white, one-size-fits-all laws, where the government is in charge of the decision making process. Personally, I put more faith individual people than I do in government.
I’ll concede for people prohibited by the current system, except the Lautenberg misdemeanors, we’ll keep that as is. Those folks will still be flagged as denied by the system. It will remain illegal to sell to those folks knowingly. But we’ll limit the scope of the outright prohibition to only that category. Beyond that we’ll provide the dealer with a complete five year history of arrests and convictions, and provided no disabling convictions, leave the decision up to him or her. Hell, in the name of transparency, let’s make it a smart phone or tablet app, available to everyone. All you need is a name, date of birth, and zip code, and you can run the same check a dealer does on anyone. Since we’re doing this, there’s little reason to restrict access based on state of residence at the federal level.
But our side will require immunity from civil suit for the decision, either way it goes. In other words, if the person is not prohibited, and the dealer or individual sells to them anyway, they can’t be sued for it. Likewise there can be no discrimination suit for turning a sale down. Otherwise it’s going to be an invitation to our opponents to attack us. In addition, even with immunity, our opponents will be quick to pounce the first time someone sells a gun to sumdood who was recently arrested of peeing behind a dumpster on his way home from a bar, but who later does something with the gun that ends up on the 6:00 news.
There’s something very attractive about the idea of replacing legal obligations with social pressure, but it requires everyone in the room to be adults. If there’s anything that the reaction to this recent tragedy has shown is that virtually no one in the mainstream media, or among our opponents, are capable of being adults, and accepting we can’t fix every problem with a new law and more government. I can promise you my model would work far more effectively at achieving the goals our opponents claim to desire, but they could never muster the trust required in their fellow citizens to accept it would work effectively. They’d quickly use the outliers as examples of how it didn’t work, and call for more laws. But under which model do you think more marginal characters would be denied access to firearms through lawful channels, while freeing up the law abiding to engage in less restricted commerce? It amazes me why they can’t see why there can’t be any common ground on this issue. Common ground to them is, “You agree with me!” Give and take is a foreign concept.
