Cultivating a Realistic View of Gun Control

Fact:  Emotionally some people love guns.   Probably the vast majority of gun owners are responsible, hard working citizens whose guns are no threat to others.  But with even the responsible gun owners the mere fact they own guns creates the possibility of accidents, or that guns could get stolen in a burglary, or the owner could sell them to someone less responsible.   So any gun ownership creates some level  of risk to society.  

Fact:  Emotionally some people want to see guns disappear off the face of the earth.  Unfortunately guns represent a tool for those who want to enforce their will on others.   History is littered with the bones of civilizations that imagined that they did not need to be prepared to meet force with force.

Fact:  Historically tyrants have denied access to weapons as a means to control populations and use the population as a resource for their own gain.  While our democracy is a huge step forward in human evolution toward elevating civil society over the rule of brute power we cannot be certain some powerful future forces will not find a way to elevate personal ambition over civil society.  While current technologies in our military make the notion of protecting oneself from the government with your guns ludicrous in the dawning era of drones, satellites and electronic surveillance, we cannot say that having some part of the population have access to guns would not provide some form of protection from some forces seeking to hijack government.

Fact:  One side says guns kill people, the other side says guns don't kill people, peaple do.  In fact ammunition is what kills people.  A gun without ammunition is not much different, in terms of effectiveness as a weapon, from a brick or a big stick, and probably slightly less dangerous than a hammer or hatchet.

Conclusion:  What if we could find the technology to individually identify each round of ammunition.  When a person bought ammunition the purchaser would have to pass a background check and each round would be registered to them.  Then if that round of ammunition is used in a crime the person who is the registered owner would be strictly liable for civil damages to the victim(s) or their families.  

Benefit:  People who love guns, and are willing to take responsibility for the risks inherent in gun ownership, and in insuring their ammunition is not lost or stolen, could have and use as many guns as they want.  When they use their ammunition they would have to collect the shell casings and return them, or destroy them, to be relieved from potential civil liability.  This system, over time, should make ammunition unavailable for the mentally unstable and so expensive as to be unavailable for the casual criminal.

Problem:  Goverment would have a database identifying who had ammunition.  This creates some risk of rogue government, but gun-owners would have plenty of warning if Congress sought to make ammunition or guns illegal, and if Government really is going rogue the fact they know who has ammunition is the least of our problems.  The risk is low and can be ameliorated by a strong commitment to civil society.

Our Political Future

Politics is crazy sometimes.  Economist's tell us that in the United States the areas of the country that are dominated by Republican's are also generally the areas of the country where they receive more federal tax dollars in benefits than they pay in taxes.  The areas of the country where people pay more taxes than they get back in benefits tend to the controlled by Democrats who want more taxes and spending.

Yet in Congress it is the Republican's who are wanting to cut and chop government spending and Democrats that are usually resisting.  The exception, of course, is defense spending.  Many Republican's regard our mind boggling levels of defense spending as untouchable.  At least here politics maybe makes some sense - it's my impression (haven't researched it)  the last round of military base closures 20 years ago ended with the bulk of the military bases being in Republican controlled states - I suspect that fact is a big part of why Republican states get more Federal dollars back than they pay out.

When we look at the negotiating positions of members of Congress on the approaching debt ceiling and, shortly thereafter, the deadline to impose 6% across the board federal spending cuts, we find it is the Republican members of Congress who represent areas of the country who will probably be hit the hardest by cuts in federal spending who are pushing the hardest for big cuts.  They are trying to steer the cuts toward social spending, but the fact is defense accounts for 50% of the spending our income taxes support.  Republicans controlled the agenda for most of the last couple decades and they have continually nibbled away at social programs, then turned around and lavished new money on defense and handed out tax cuts.  As a result of their policies to only path toward getting the country back toward a balanced budget involves either higher taxes or major cuts in defense, or start stealing money from the Social Security trust fund or Medicare.

What are their constituents going to think when the economy in Republican parts of the country get slammed by cuts in Federal spending?  Are the Republican's in Congress that confident in their ideological marketing that they think they can keep voters who vote their pocket book voting for them through (another) deep downturn?  Will Republicans trade ideological purity for irrelevance, as they have in California?