In practically every discussion of gun violence, some Second Amendment  type inevitably invokes the old, cringe-worthy cliche: Guns don’t kill people, people do.
So let’s re-frame what happened last weekend in Orlando. A person — one who pledged allegiance to ISIS — murdered 49 people and injured more than 50 others in an atrocious act of hate violence.  His tools of choice: a semi-automatic assault rifle and a semi-automatic pistol, both of which have high-capacity magazines as standard equipment.Â
Guns don’t kill people, but they make it pretty simple for someone with the worst of intentions to kill or wound a lot of people in a matter of moments. That’s what happened in Orlando, just as it happened in Newtown and San Bernardino and Aurora and oh my God, the list just goes on and on.
Sadly, Â that list will grow.
So it’s time to abandon the abhorrent “guns don’t kill people, people do” mindset. It’s dismissive, reckless, negligent, and it ignores reality. Â And that reality is this: repeatedly, the wrong people have been able to get their hands on guns that fire off tens of rounds in seconds, with tragic results. To these people, the guns are easily accessible, powerful, efficient instruments of death.
Look, I’m reluctant to wade into public debates about guns; they become vicious and divisive so fast, and they are generally unproductive. But this country really needs to have an honest conversation about guns, and I’m tired of holding my tongue.
In my lifetime, I’ve watched people use firearms to cause so much death, injury, and fear. I remember watching breaking news reports from Columbine in a friend’s dorm room and feeling so confused. When a Virginia Tech student killed 32 people on the school’s campus, and then himself, I struggled — and failed — to make sense of the tragedy.  When a gunman killed 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, I was horrified.
The Orlando shooting has been painful. It was an attack on the LGBTQ community, and specifically on LGBTQ people of color. Friends, acquaintances, and colleagues are grieving the loss of life and because, once again, someone singled out people just like them as targets. But this time it wasn’t some seriously misguided bathroom bill, or someone spewing garbage about building a border fence. This time it was mass violence.
And now I’m watching the gun debate unfold again; the same one we’ve had every single time the wrong person gets his hands on a powerful weapon and opens fire. In his eight years in the White House, President Barack Obama has delivered 14 speeches after mass shootings. On Monday, the Daily Show pointed out that he’s hosted only 12 state dinners over that same time.
I am so pissed off. This county has been talking about the problems posed by semi-automatic weapons coupled with high-capacity magazines since I was a child. The US had a national ban on those sorts of weapons and magazines at one point, but gunmakers found easy loopholes and the ban expired years ago. Some states have their own laws, too. In New York we’re fortunate to have the SAFE Act, which does something very important: it limits the size of magazines that can be sold in the state. Â The magazine limit builds on a 1994 state law restricting magazines to 10 rounds.
I don’t hate guns, and I don’t think they should all be banned. Semi-auto rifles and handguns do have valid civilian uses; hunters don’t always bring down their targets in one shot, for example.  And while I don’t really buy into the idea of guns as a means of personal protection, I suppose that if you’re going to go down that path, a handgun that can fire a few shots quickly is important.  (But I’m also going to point out that a gun in the home is more likely to injure or kill a member of the household than some bushy haired stranger.)
But some of the systems on the market have no business in civilian hands, and the Orlando shooter’s gear falls into this category. He bought the firearms legally; he passed a background check even though he had been interviewed by the FBI twice and was on the agency’s terrorism watchlist. US law doesn’t prohibit people on the watchlist or the no-fly list from buying guns.
So that’s how the shooter was able to get a Sig Sauer MCX rifle, a matte-black machine with styling so aggressive that it looks like it was plucked right out of a SWAT officer’s hands. Gun enthusiasts have made a big show of criticizing the media for referring to the gun as an AR-15, the most common assault rifle. They’re right, it’s not an AR-15: it’s worse. SigSauer built it to be lighter, shorter, and quieter. Its standard magazine holds 30 rounds; no civilian needs that.
The rifle and its stock magazine appear to fall under New York’s assault weapon and high-capacity magazine bans.
The Orlando shooter also carried a Glock 17, which the company’s website says is “the most widely used law enforcement pistol worldwide.” The handgun’s standard magazine holds 17 rounds, but doesn’t qualify as an assault weapon in New York. A 10-round magazine is available, and would be legal in New York as long as the gun’s owner doesn’t load it with more than seven cartridges outside of a shooting range.
Folks, the magazines are a major problem here, and this is what state governments and Congress could address immediately. Semi-automatic rifles and handguns fire the rounds as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger. A gun that holds five rounds (a magazine size that’s more in line with hunting rifles) can fire fewer shots in succession compared to a gun carrying a 30-round magazine.Â
Congress clearly doesn’t want to ban guns; at least its GOP members don’t. But what about addressing the magazines? Why not set a maximum size of 10 rounds? Or five rounds? The restriction won’t put an end to gun violence and  probably won’t stop a determined shooter, but the change would at least minimize carnage down the road.
This is where we’re at, and that’s the saddest part. Too many lawmakers are unconcerned with finding common-sense ways to regulate and restrict something that routinely causes tremendous public harm. It’s partly the fault of their constituents, who see any attempt to make guns less destructive as some great intrusion on their liberties, and who raise a fuss accordingly. It’s also partly the fault of the gun industry, which has figured out it how to market the hell out of these products and sell them for a hefty price.
So do I think that any positive changes to gun laws will come out of the Orlando tragedy? No. But I so desperately want to be wrong.
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2016.
Gun control laws simply encourage crime. You referenced how lucky we are to have the SAFE Act. I guess you missed the fact that crime has been going up ever since it was passed when it was on a down turn before it was passed. I’m going to assume you neglected to reasearch crime rates in areas with higher gun ownership and less gun restrictions. You will find less gun regulation and higher gun ownership per capita leads to less crime. All the states with the highest crime rates also have the strictest gun laws. I understand the need to point the finger at something when a tragedy occurs, but deaths by firearms don’t even make it to the top 10 reasons for deaths in America (check the CDC annual reports if you don’t believe me). Another thing to point out is that a 30 round mag is STANDARD capacity not high capacity, and an assault rifle cannot be semi automatic assault rifles are full auto. The media uses these terms to sensationalize their stories without realizing that the terms they are using describe a totally different weapon.
In other factual news Rochester is the murder capital of the state, and even got the title of the murder capital of the country a few years back (we were of course replaced with another city with wild gun control). Your chances of someone breaking into your home and killing you are significantly higher then your proposed accidental home firearm injury… Or maybe you don’t watch the news and read weekly police reports.
The final item I want to address is the hype about making people on the government watch list not be allowed to own firearms. The idea sounds great in theory until you understand how the watch list works. Quite honestly it doesn’t. I have had the unfortunate experience of meeting with people and families who have been put on these lists with no recourse due to things like being friends with the wrong person on Facebook, or having a similar last name to someone they do not know or have never met. Now every time they travel they are molested by TSA, and looked at as dirty criminals. The worst part of this is there is no recourse to fix this. Government mistake or not if you are accidentally on the list (Dept of Homeland security themselves say that more than 95% of the people on the terrorist watch list are there by accident and are not a threat) you have no way to fix it. All of the information as to how you got on the list is protected from FIOA requests so you don’t have any indication as to why your life has been turned upside down. So I cannot support the motion of striping away someone’s right to own a firearm or any other rights based on a 95% failure rate, and quite honestly you shouldn’t either.
Besides those points nice article, just needs a bit more research.
Strange days. So many voices on the left rushing to discard due process. So much trust in secret government lists. While a naive demagogue and and a corrupt authoritarian compete for the presidency of our republic.
If we don’t fight for our protections granted under the Bill of Rights they’ll be gone in a generation.
Every mass shooting is different. However, what’s the same or similar are the guns, ammo, and magazines used. Lawmakers should focus on those.
I’m reluctant to add mental states to the list, because then you’ve got this thinking of, “Gee, if that person ever got a gun, well maybe we should lock him up, you know, better to be safe.”
Government should do what it can. Less guns equals less shootings and no guns equals no shootings. It’s simple.
Remember, if you own a Sig Sauer MCX rifle and aren’t using it to kill a bunch of people, then you’re not using the product as intended. Maybe we should climb out the window and bring common sense back in.
MB – ” Less guns equals less shootings and no guns equals no shootings.”
No, no it doesn’t, at all… Firearm deaths per 100k”
Honduras 67.18
Venezuela 59.13
Swaziland 37.16
Guatemala 34.10
Jamaica 30.72
El Salvador 26.77
Colombia 25.94
Brazil 19.72
Panama 15.11
Uruguay 11.52
US 10.54
Number of guns per 100 people:
US 112.6
Serbia 75.6
Yemen 54.8
Switzerland 45.7
Cyprus 36.4
Saudi Arabia 35
Iraq 34.2
Uruguay 31.8
Sweden 31.6
Norway 31.3
“Set a maximum size of 10 rounds.”
“The change would at least minimize carnage down the road.”
Except that 17 years ago Eric Harris brought 13 10-round magazines to Columbine from which he discharged 96 rounds. This can’t possibly be the best solution we can come up with.
Could we all take a moment to acknowledge that even hard-core opponents of gun control are ok with banning civilian ownership of anti-tank weapons; surface-to-air missiles; chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, incendiaries, land mines, and a host of other military technology. So there’s a line between “ok for civilians” and “not ok for civilians.” Now that we’ve established that, can we please have a conversation about which side of the line machine guns should lie on? Maybe with actual reasons why?
mlscott – What about banning ownership of a tank with a functional 76mm cannon, because that’s something you can buy in the US. I don’t hear anyone calling for a ban on these.
Why are people focused on rifles? They’re the 6th leading cause of homicide, following handguns, knives, Fists/legs, blunt objects, and shotguns. But we’re mad about rifles because what, democrats and the media told you to be mad about them?
Tank for sale – http://www.armyjeeps.net/walkerbulldog0326…
Homicide “weapon” choice – https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crim…
Good article by Thomas Sowell
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowel…
Guns that are for military special forces shouldn’t be available to the general public. You know what special forces use all the time that hardly anyone can get? Plastic explosives. Guns are different though. They’re special. They’re protected.
OK, Mr. Moule, let’s have an honest conversation about guns. Let me premise that I am not an NRA member, I never owned a gun and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have fired a gun. That was at target shooting ranges.
You say you are tired of the old cliché`: Guns don’t kill people, people do. That’s the same as: Cars don’t kill people, drunk drivers do. You see, it’s not a cliché`. It’s a profound truth. You may have heard of the sit-in charade democrats went through in the House of Representatives to protest Congress’ refusal to pass four of their gun control laws. By their own admission, they said none of those laws would have prevented Omar Matteen from buying his guns. So, what are we talking about? Funny how you mention Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook but, when you mention Orlando, you failed to mention the perp was a muslim. You see, Sig Sauer rifles don’t have a problem with gays, but muslims do. And, somehow, you forgot about San Bernardino, Bruxelles and twice Paris where the victims were people from all walks of life who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don’t think Barack Obama and the democrats have the slightest interest in curbing crime. In fact, I agree with what Wayne La Pierre said of Clinton some years ago: Democrats are comfortable with the current level of crime. It allows them to divert attention from what they really want to the straw man, which is what gun control really is. If dems wanted to reduce crime, they would be in favor of curbing the flood of illegal immigrants into our country among whom there are many criminals. If dems wanted to reduce crime, they would be in favor on keeping mentally troubled individuals locked up in the proper institutions. If dems wanted to reduce crime, they would allow the FBI to scour social media and keep an eye on mosques. If dems wanted to reduce crime, they would propose doing away with “gun free” zones because they are an invitation to any nutcake to come and shoot people, and being assured that nobody will shoot back. That’s just for starters. But you don’t see the dems proposing any of that, do you?
Gun control is not about crime. It’s about CONTROL. Barack Obama wants to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. THEY are the enemy because they can vote dems out of power. The Omar Matteens of the world are always going to get their “assault weapons,” whatever that means. I can assault you with a baseball bat or my santoku knife. And I’d feel a lot more comfortable in a room full of NRA types than in one full of muslims.
Guns do kill people. They are the weapon of choice for true cowards who cannot argue, debate or otherwise express themselves face to face with others. So a coward selects a communication method that will be loud and clear. The gun method makes it easy for the coward to send a message from across the room without necessarily engaging the recipient.
The true and only issue with guns is this…guns amplify the message, the destruction and death.
So when democrats turn the government into a tyrrany the citizen militia will have to struggle with 10 round mags and a bullet button while their personal security and their brainwashed corrupt military and cops get unlimited rounds. Pff… Fuck you dems and libs I’m not willing to gamble the 2nd amendment over some snake politician assault on the 2nd amendment. Wtf is wrong with stupid Americans!! Our government is importing Islamic terror and you morons are allowing your own civilian militia to get neutered. Your a bunch of weak cowards!!
“They are the weapon of choice for true cowards who cannot argue, debate or otherwise express themselves face to face with others”
Interesting that the right has been trying to have honest debates with the left for years, but the response is NO-you’re a racist and not worthy of a debate. Or how about this one regarding “climate change”, or “global warming” or ” global cooling” or whatever you call it now–“the science is settled”.