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The Approach to Guns and Government

There are two basic ways to protect ourselves from guns: who owns them and the types they can own.

How we approach gun laws is a reflection of how we approach government. The standard line from conservatives about government is that they want small government, limited government, drownable-in-a-bathtub government. The background to their zeal is the idea that citizens must be protected from the dangers of government, and the key to protecting us is to keep government as weak and small as possible.

Of course, conservatives discredit the position by going big on military spending, on law enforcement and prisons, and on forcing pseudo-Christianity on everyone by government mandates against abortion, against gay and transgender people, and so on. But it’s a position that can be examined separately from their failures to steward it.

The rules to protect society against weapons, or against anything, can be broken down along the same lines as protecting against bad government. You can seek to shrink the quantum of harm posed, as conservatives claim to want to do with government.

In the case of guns, that would mean rules to limit ammo capacity and type, rates of fire, ease of use (concealability, mechanism of firing, etc.). You shrink the guns down so they don’t pose the same level of threat even if they are broadly available.

The other argument is that government shouldn’t necessarily be small, but it should be run by people of good character, and we should do more to ensure that we elect and appoint people who have the national interest at heart. This is what Democrats try to run on. They try to appeal to reason and sanity, compassion and science.

Of course, it can be hard to detect bad actors, as the wolf disguises itself as a sheep. But that’s the other method: ensure that people are educated and wise and that they will not try to be abusive jerks.

And again, in the case of guns, you have that other way of making them safer: background checks, licensing requirements including training and safety classes. You add red flag laws and follow the military method of disqualifying people who have shown flawed morals or dangerous behaviors.

I want to reiterate these two methods both work for other problems, be they financial fraud (limit access to funds, vet those with access), drugs (limit potency, vet those with access), or whatever problem you might seek to solve.

But in every case, the answer is obvious enough: do some of both. Adjust over time based on changing needs and circumstances. That’s what the founders did. They tried and failed with the Articles of Confederation, so they tried again. And they elected George Washington the first president, picking someone of (by that day’s standards) good morals and a commitment to good government.


I don’t particularly care about the guns themselves. But I do buy the argument that changing the types of guns available will shape what is done with them. I also think licensing makes sense, particularly if well-maintained licensing cuts some of the red tape for honest folks so they can buy or sell guns with less bureaucracy. But if that’s not possible, if the pain of bureaucracy is required to keep citizens safe from guns, that seems worth it.

And I do care when the ATF can’t use computers to trace gun crimes. I care when any organ of the government is made to act stupidly because it helps get idiots elected. It’s a stain on our nation that we would intentionally fund stupidity because Republicans can’t be honest with their voters and legislate reasonable government.

We have problems with law enforcement. Among the many problems is that we send them out on the streets to deal with gun crime, to effectively bail water from a boat with an unpatched hole that the Republicans know about and won’t lift a finger to deal with. It’s throwing cash into the graves of citizens.

We need to change the laws, but the Republicans hold a veto. The media should never let them pretend there weren’t options to protect people in the face of these massacres. It is Republicans’ choice if America does nothing. I once again ask you to register to vote. Please register to vote (Vote.gov). Please vote for candidates who will fight for smarter rules on guns.

Realignment of Police Responsibilities

On the benefits of shifting what police do for communities.

What passes for defund is really a mixture of policies around policing and other responsibilities. If the police have to be ready for a dozen different calls, they can’t be very prepared for any one of them. They have to be versatile, and that means giving up on specialization.

If you don’t know if the weather tomorrow will be rainy, snowy, or hot and sunny, when you go out you’ll need three different hats. Knowing the weather and dressing for it is a luxury that the police currently do not have, due to overloading them with too many different tasks.

Instead, realigning policing means:

  1. Police aren’t the first responder for as many situations.
  2. Police will often take on a supporting role, rather than lead.
  3. The police can specialize more as other organizations take over some of their current responsibilities. This should make the job of police safer and steadier.

The recent Black Lives Matter protests give a good working example for how policing should be reworked. Instead of having the police be the front-line response to protesting, communities could have folks employed specifically to coordinate and work with protests. The new function would be able to observe and listen to protesters without being the face of violence or force, and so that already would reduce tension.

Throughout the opioid crisis, police have had to administer anti-narcotic-shock drugs to revive people (though, many other community servants have also been put in that position). There needs to be a dedicated civic health response, which is something that requires healthcare reforms. Involving the police complicates the health response, because they have a duty to enforce the broken drug laws, and the drug users have good reasons to seek to avoid interacting with police.

The reimagining of policing is often about shifting the social landscape around policing so that the community is safer—and the police are part of the community that is made safer through changes.

These changes will go hand-in-hand with reducing criminalization, which will lead to lower institutionalized populations. Overpopulation of prisons and jails makes the job of guards harder, as density, per se, endangers the orderly operation of those facilities.


A longstanding hope of mine has been for self-driving cars to become a reality, so that police wouldn’t have to write traffic tickets. Black folks wouldn’t be pulled over as much, and policing would shift as a result. With self-driving cars, there will still be stops, but they will be nonpretextual. They will be situations where authorities get a call that something wrong happened. If the problem fits in the narrowed police jurisdiction, they would still respond. If it fits in to a different jurisdiction, then the other authority would respond. It’s among many reasons that government should be investing more heavily in accelerating self-driving.

That’s the kind of innovation that we need. The average duty of police is very much a rollercoaster of adrenaline and downtime. It’s not a healthy way to live—jumping from all-out to tumbleweeds and back. One of my hopes is that as policing is realigned, part of that shift will involve the police workers themselves gaining new light-duty roles for half of their work hours. Giving them more opportunities to experience the community in an engaged, non-aggressive task would do a lot to help heal their own traumas and smooth out that rollercoaster.


The election is in 20 weeks. Please do enroll to vote if you haven’t yet.

Thoughts on the Direction of the Gun Debate

Rubio’s “Laws Don’t Work” Argument

Senator Rubio argued that if someone is truly determined to carry out a horrific act, the law will not stop it. This is true, to a point. The argument bears much more heavily on demand-driven products like illicit drugs, but we don’t hear Rubio calling for the end of prohibition.

The gun case, if sensible legal hurdles block even one in a hundred, without significantly infringing on sportsmen, it’s hard to understand why we shouldn’t make that change in law. More importantly, if it fails to stop the madman from acquiring on the black market, then we can at least bring extra charges, ensuring the liability toward those supplying murder weapons.

All in all, we should take the steps we believe will help, and evaluate as we go (i.e., use science and reason).

Mental Health

Pass a bill if you think mental healthcare is the way to go. Please pass one anyway, as it’d do us all a lot of good to have the ailing be treated.

But it takes multiple components to create these massacres, and one of the necessary components is the gun and the ammunition. Over time, our ability to predict and treat may improve. For now, it is inadequate. Restricting guns is our best bet.

The NRA and Paid Actors

One of the repeated attempts to undermine changes to gun laws is to accuse people of being “paid actors.” Family members, schoolmates, and other community members affected by a shooting are all targets of this tactic.

But the people putting forth these accusations are invariably paid actors. Politicians that take money from the NRA. Right-wing media types are paid to be extremist soapbox goons. The NRA’s actual spokespeople, from their executive on down, are literally paid to stop proper functioning of government to regulate commerce.

If the gun regulation community wants to pay people to advocate, they should feel free to do so. The NRA has done it for over a century.

Other Ideas

Public notice or direct notification to guardians, the school or workplace or therapist, if someone buys a gun or ammunition. This matches with the anti-abortion parental notification laws. At least a heads-up could help either alert security guards and administrators, or maybe even spur reporting or clamoring around an unstable individual so that treatment be rendered before the worst happens.

Learn from previous bans and stop using silly surface characteristics to categorize weapons. Learn from other ban systems. Use a whitelist instead of a blacklist. Use an FDA-style (ugh!) marketing compliance system where they have to apply to sell a gun, an accessory that modifies a gun, etc.


Doing nothing is worse than stupid at this point. It’s grossly negligent. If the Republicans cannot bring themselves to do anything useful, it’s time for them to go. We need a conservative balance to the progressive and liberal impulses of the majority, but we cannot afford that balance to be an anchor against any common sense actions for the general welfare.

The NRA has a lot of sway, but they never actually pass anything or do anything to address the issue. They don’t pass a bill for mental health. All they do is take in money and spew out lies. The only way to stop a bad guy without a gun is to sell the bad guy a gun and let a good guy with a gun shoot him.

The bottom line on guns is as it has been since the late 1990s: with every act of violence the probability of major changes to gun laws goes up. The NRA, gun enthusiasts, whoever, can bitch about that fact but they won’t change the math one bit. If the NRA or gun owners or legislators want to forestall more bad laws from being enacted, they should work on solutions before that probability reaches 0.5 or greater.