Things that can reduce gun violence and why we don't do them.

Universal background checks could remove guns from the hands of convicted criminals and wife beaters forbidden to have them by law. The gun lobby opposes universal background checks because it is an inconvenience for private gun sales. The lobby wins.

Laws requiring reporting lost and stolen guns to the police would reduce gun trafficking by making it difficult to avoid responsibility for transferring guns to forbidden purchasers. The gun lobby opposes it because it thinks doing so will violate the 5th amendment by implicating the person reporting lost or stolen guns in gun trafficking. The lobby wins.

Permit to purchase after passing a background check issued by local law enforcement can reduce the likelihood of unstable people getting guns even though they can pass a background check like Dylann Roof and Vester Lee Flanagan did. The gun lobby opposes it because somewhere sometime somehow a police officer will refuse to issue a permit to someone. The lobby wins.

Expanding domestic violence protections to dating partners as well as spouses would reduce the likelihood of people with anger management issues escalating physical violence to murder. The gun lobby opposes it because, as one NRA spokesman said, "it could apply after only one date." Yeah, that reasoning won too.

A national electronic registry of guns and owners can reduce violence by making it easier to trace crime guns to owners thus making it very difficult to traffic guns to forbidden purchasers and to remove guns from those who become forbidden by committing felonies. The gun lobby opposes this because somehow the Government will come and take the guns away, all 310,000,000 of them. The lobby wins.

Repealing Stand Your Ground laws can reduce gun violence because they are poorly understood by lay people and law enforcement alike making the escalation of an argument from shouting to shooting more likely. The gun lobby opposes this because, even though it has always been legal to use deadly force if retreat is not possible . . . well, I just don't know but they do oppose it. They win.

How is it possible that such simple make-sense solutions are repeatedly defeated? Because the gun lobby spends ten times the money on congress that anti violence groups do.

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