Only a beginning

I greatly appreciated yesterday’s March for Our Lives here in DC. The speakers, mostly kids, were eloquently inspiring and the enormous crowd supportive, peaceful and determined. I half imagined they would trash the Trump hotel on leaving, as it stood towards the far end of the “march” (more a “stand”: the group didn’t have a permit to move from Pennsylvania Avenue). But no one seemed to be in a mood to cause trouble, so the police stood around as virtual participants. I imagine they’d be very happy to see fewer guns on the street, as they are among the more vulnerable of our fellow citizens.

The March goals were relatively modest:

1. Passing a law to ban the sale of assault-style weapons
2. Prohibiting the sale of high-capacity magazines
3. Closing the loophole in our background check law

None of these would change the current situation: there would still be several million assault-style weapons in the US and a comparable number of high-capacity magazines. Requiring background checks of those who buy guns online or at gun shows would only affect future purchasers, not the armed potential perpetrators already out there.

Nor are school killings of the type that motivated the March our biggest numerical problem, even if the mass murder of children merits heightened moral denunciation. Most gun deaths in the US are suicides: almost twice as many as homicides. And most homicides are committed with handguns, not assault-style weapons. The gun-related murder rate in the US is more than an order of magnitude greater than that in other developed countries, but not because of school shootings, assault-style weapons or high-capacity magazines.

Achieving the March’s goals would thus not do much to improve the situation, but there is little risk the current Congress will do anything like what the students want. The gun lobby owns the Republican members of Congress, who have the majority in both Houses. President Trump is not going to buck the National Rifle Association, which raised a lot of money for his campaign, some of it now under investigation because it may have come from Russia. The Administration has probably reached the limit of what it is prepared to do with its proposed prohibition on the sale of “bump stocks” (which enable a non-automatic weapon to fire like an automatic one) and a requirement that Federal agencies report more data on people ineligible to purchase guns. Those amount to a nothingburger compared even to the March’s modest goals.

The sad fact is that no solution to the gun problem is possible without getting a significant percentage of the nation’s more than 300 million guns out of the hands of their owners, especially those who possess them illegally. I’ll happily join those demanding less when they turn out the kind of crowds they did on Saturday, because their efforts may contribute to electing a different Congressional majority in November. But at best the March was the beginning of something big, not the end.