sluggederbore:
And maybe anyone under 26 years old who owns semi-autos should be required to have a psychiatric evaluation every year, to make sure they're stable enough.
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I once dated a clinical psychologist. Her brother was a police officer. She thought it was funny that the psychological profile of police and criminals had lots of points of overlap.
So, would the police department get a different test from the general run of citizen? Are you sure the test wouldn't miss a lot of people that should be caught or catch a lot of people that are committed to the general good?
The problem of the solutions that attempt to stop criminal use of guns (from 0 to mass shooting) at the purchase point (e.g. UBC) is that no one can predict the future. Testing every year helps, providing you had an accurate test to prove that this person was "probably" or "highly likely" to use his firearm against others this next 364 days, as it shrinks the windows of official observation, but no such test exists, and if it did why would you not take away the knives, scissors, ball point pens and put said person in the clink? Why is this about guns at this point? "Being stabbed really hurts," a friend of mine who was stabbed once told me.
The other option is to stop a crime after it has started. This is less "clean," as there's already a victim of some degree, but there's a clear cut bad guy and bad action.
But does there need to be guns at all? If semi-auto rifles were banned and then congress passed a law banning hunting in all 50 states, after a generation or two, barring social catastrophe, the majority of guns would be out of circulation and common use. Mass shootings would decline for sure, much as incidents of people slipping on horse manure declined after the Model T replaced the horse as the primary means of personal transport, but would they all go away? I like to look at Brazil, a nation that had strict laws (a military dictatorship doesn't like competitors) and no gun culture at all. It still has mass shootings. It also has well-armed criminals. Many of them that are willing and able to shoot it out with other gangs and against heavily armed police with all sides using "weapons of war." Looking at this example, it's safe to assume that guns will not go away b/c they are banned; it's also safe to assume that criminals will always have a need for equipment to help them overcome other armed criminals as well as probably unarmed citizens.
A question of comparison might be "have OTHER violent crimes involving weapons gone down as guns have been removed from general availability? If the statistical answer is "no," then all you're doing is using a grater with smaller holes to slice your same pound of taco cheese.
Or we could balance these two questions:
1) "How do we know that people who want to behave violently would NOT do so b/c they couldn't have a gun?"
2) "How do we know that some people wouldn't act violently b/c they know that their opponent DOESN'T have a life-threatening weapon of self-defense?"
1: We don't. As many violent crimes are crimes of passion and circumstance, I would bet that having no readily available guns might not change the rate of crimes; it might change the scope of damage in a very narrow percentage of events, those already using guns.
2: This is a squishier topic b/c one has to imagine that a certain percentage of people who find physical bullying of smaller people satisfying and rewarding will decide to make this regular behavior. One also has to imagine that some slice of the population, handicapped people confined to wheel chairs, for example, that might have been able to defend themselves with a weapon are now defenseless. Is this number something to balance against the other like a math equation? I think not. Or you can refer to several q & a sessions with imprisoned criminal offenders who mentioned that they would be less likely to rob a house with someone home b/c that person might have a gun. It appears that there is some deterrent effect to criminal behavior due to generally available firearms. I"m not looking up the links for these; you can.
Another weird hiccup of human psychology is that even in places that have become safer by all/most statistical measures, people will obsess with ferocity about the still-extant dangerous scenarios in their head (real or imagined). I remember growing up in the 80s and 90s. Those were some very, very violent times. The news papers always had headlines of violent crimes. Statistically, things have generally improved in all violent crime statistics in the past 30 years, but we feel no safer. (To clarify: this isn't to downplay the horrible tragedies of mass shootings as events. People killed violently is nothing easy to look at. It's a shock for all involved: wounded or unwounded survivors, responders, relatives of victims, et al. ) This appears to be a constant of human nature. One of the weird takeaways that I had from my time in Japan was how much the Japanese considered "scary." Here they were in a really, really safe place and they were still conjuring up boogie men for themselves. My not-so prediction: if all guns were banned tomorrow, it wouldn't make anyone feel safer, except criminals.
Ramble off.
