Gun control doesn't need to be 100% or even 50% effective to be a good thing

I.

So I find myself saying on DU a lot "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good", and today I feel the need to say that to opponents of new gun control laws.

Bans don't have to actually keep everybody or even most people from actually getting weapons. They have to make it more expensive and more of a pain in the ass for people to buy them. They have to affect the demand curve. And they can (not always in the way we like: one result of the '94 assault weapons ban was that AK-47-style weapons with the bayonet lugs filed off went from being kind of fringe items to incredibly popular virtually overnight -- this is yet another reason I don't think the AWB is the right template to start from here; the Brady Bill is a much better place to look).

About 30% of American households own a firearm. Simultaneously, the number of civilian-owned guns is about equal to the US population. That means if a household has one gun it likely as not has five (yes, it's more complicated than that, but that gets the point across).

I'd like that to change. I'd like there to be fewer guns made and sold in the US. And one way to do that is to make it more onerous to buy them. If fewer people are buying them, the gunmakers will manufacture fewer of them for the civilian market. That would be a positive thing.

II.

Above, I contrasted the AWB with the Brady Bill. Both were early '90s responses to the epidemic of gun violence that the nation was bathed in at the time. In broad strokes, the Brady Bill concentrated on the buyer and seller, while the AWB concentrated on the gun. It's not that gun-based legislation by nature doesn't work, mind you: the 1934 NFA has been very effective for over 80 years. Deaths by automatic weapons are basically unheard of (though deaths by sawed-off shotgun, which are banned in literally the same clause, are not, which is something to consider). That said, if someone shouldn't have an AR-15 they also shouldn't have a handgun (and, as I'll keep hammering, handguns are what actually worry me, notorious events like this aside).

The Brady Bill required purchases from a licensed firearms dealer to first go through a national background check. Purchases from someone other than a licensed dealer cannot use that background check system (this is the misleadingly-named "gun show loophole"; it doesn't actually have anything to do with gun shows). It instituted a waiting period which some states extended (I'm for this, not because it matters in itself but because, again, it makes buying a gun more of a pain in the ass and so lowers demand).

In contrast, the AWB said that guns that accept detachable magazines (we don't need to get into gun-tech porn here; this is the feature that makes mass shootings possible) couldn't have things like bayonet lugs or grips of a certain shape or folding stocks or a magazine that attached at a specific place on the gun. I want to make it very clear that I think this law was both stupid policy and politically costly. It was stupid policy because it didn't meet my goal of actually making guns more onerous to buy. Instead the manufacturers had to change brand names (yes, literally in some cases) and file down the bayonet lugs. It cost us the House and it cost Gore Tennessee in 2000, and it accomplished nothing. Abandon it, and expand Brady.

III.

How could we expand Brady? Well, I mentioned the so-called "gun-show loophole" above. We could mandate that all transfers be processed through a licensed firearms dealer. People will wail and gnash their teeth, but this would conceivably actually do something. No, it wouldn't have stopped this guy who already had passed a background check. That's not the point. Mass shootings aren't really the point, for that matter, as hard as that is to believe right now: deaths from "normal" shootings outnumber deaths from mass shootings by about 1000:1, and those are made possible by the proliferation of guns in our country.

We could establish a gun registry like every single other country seems to have. Yes, they have problems. Yes, compliance rarely reaches 60%. That's not the point. Again: it makes firearms more of a pain in the ass to buy, which lowers demand for them, which means eventually fewer get made. That's the goal. It's a political non-starter, unfortunately, unlike expanding background checks, but maybe we could start state by state.

IV.

For about 3 more weeks I live in the country with the second-highest absolute number of civilian guns in the world, India. India, like the US, is large and geographically diverse, with a strong Federal system. The solutions for, say, Mumbai or Kolkata will not be the solutions for rural Arunachal Pradesh or Jammu, just like the solutions for Chicago are not always going to be the solutions for Brock, TX.

It surprises many Americans to learn this, apparently, but India doesn't have particularly strict gun control, by world standards. While there's not an Constitutionally-enshrined right to keep arms, there's a broadly-respected commonlaw doctrine that in principle such a right does exist, although like all rights is subject to restriction. And, you know, it probably makes sense for the buffalo farmer who lives in a part of the country with a lot of jackals to own a rifle. Even the large cities are not gun-free; I live right near the Maharashtra Rifle Association, and I've even used their firing range (I used to be a competitive target shooter). Some people keep their guns in lockers there; others have permits to keep them at home.

But there just isn't that much interest in owning a gun in the first place, compared to the US (the high absolute number of civilian-owned guns mostly just reflects the size of the population; the rate of gun ownership is pretty normal compared to the rest of the world). We need to make interest in owning guns less, so that fewer of them are made. One way to work towards that is to make buying a gun more of a hassle, like it is in India (OK, maybe not that much of a hassle, but Indian bureaucracy is what it is and would be hard to replicate anyways -- the day I learned that the Hindi words for "yesterday" and "tomorrow" are the same word, every interaction I had with the Indian government started making more sense).

V.

So, anyways: while mass shootings drive the national conversation about gun control, they're probably the wrong lens through which to view gun proliferation because for all their notoriety they aren't the "big" problem. One person shooting one other person with a handgun is the big problem. (And one person shooting himself with a handgun is twice as big as that problem, and making guns more of a pain to acquire can help with that too.)

Gun control is not an all-or-nothing thing. It's a way to bend both the demand curve from a market side and (hopefully) the social acceptance of guns from a societal side. (Though the history of the AWB reminds us that that sword can be two-edged.)

We've made some amazing strides in reducing gun violence over the past two decades or so; it's down by more than 50%. I want it to keep going down until we look more like Canada than Brazil (we're about halfway between them in terms of gun deaths; for that matter we're about halfway between Canada and Brazil in a lot of things). One part of that is that guns simply need to be rarer on the ground. Which means we need fewer people to want to buy them, so that the people that make them make fewer of them.

The response to a proposed law shouldn't be "that wouldn't have stopped X". That shouldn't be where our heads go. The response should be "will this, a generation from now, mean there will probably be more or fewer guns in civilian hands?"