When I think about the issue of gun control in the United States, the first thing that comes to mind is that it’s a struggle between those who believe strongly in their right to carry firearms versus those who want to regulate the sale and use of firearms (which is supposedly a threat to the former group.) As far as regulating firearms, the policies I hear about most often involve requiring extensive background checks for the purchase of firearms. That is, regulating the sale of firearms by businesses.
What I didn’t know, and hadn’t thought twice about until today, thanks to an article by Jim Kessler in Utne, is that “federal law allows any individual to sell his or her own firearms to anyone else,” and that 89% of gun crimes are committed by people who are not the original owners of the gun. Kessler suggests that a better solution to the problem is: “Don’t restrict gun rights, but instead deepen the sense of gun ownership.”
After reading the article it makes a lot of sense to me. The problem with gun violence perhaps isn’t that background checks on sales are not tight enough. The guns that are used to commit these crimes were likely purchased legally. However, federal law is virtually silent on the issue of gun trafficking. People who purchase guns legally can too easily sell their guns to those who will use them to commit crimes.
For many Americans gun ownership is essential to national identity and that doesn’t seem to be going away. That’s why I love Kessler’s re-framing of the issue: deepening the sense of gun ownership means owning your gun and not selling it indiscriminately. Those who take the right to bear arms so seriously, and don’t want it threatened, might see the benefit of policies striving to deepen the sense of ownership — gun crime tends to happen when people *don’t* have a deep sense of ownership of their guns. When you take responsibility for your gun, you preserve the right to bear arms for everyone.
And, of course, deepening the sense of gun ownership would mean actually passing laws that hold the original purchaser of a gun responsible for the gun’s being kept in safe hands. Passing federal laws on gun trafficking. Really, I don’t see why there are no laws on the books already: whose interests are being served by not having such laws?
Kessler’s solution seems to integrate the wisdom of both sides of the current debate. I wonder if it could work…
