Many years ago, Mark Moore observed wryly that a good way out of the gun control morass would be for the congress to (i) require an individual license to possess any firearm, hand grenade, etc., and (ii) to charter (and fund, of course) the National Rifle Association as the sole agency empowered to issue such licenses, to any citizen for any weapon it sees fit. I think Mark was onto something. The gun advocates have the letoff of disapproving gun possession post facto for crazies who commit mayhem, and protecting it for anyone who hasn’t yet blown away innocent citizens.
I can almost taste my desire to see the official any-weapon-for-anyone-anywhere lobbying bullies presented with applications by sketchy or scary characters, knowing that if something goes down, the NRA will be on record as having specifically approved of his getting hold of an AR15 with lots of big magazines. Full automatic, and a few thousand rounds of cop of cop-killer teflon cartridges, of course, because the real patriot has a duty to be better armed than anything he might come upon in the pursuit of his peace assuring. Especially, better armed than the oppressive official thug anti-liberty enforcers on the SWAT team.
And if they refuse such an applicant, their awkwardness vis-a-vis their more verbrennte members will be equally enlightening for all.
If only. [lightly edited for clarity 23/VII/12]
Author: Michael O'Hare
Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Michael O'Hare was raised in New York City and trained at Harvard as an architect and structural engineer. Diverted from an honest career designing buildings by the offer of a job in which he could think about anything he wanted to and spend his time with very smart and curious young people, he fell among economists and such like, and continues to benefit from their generosity with on-the-job social science training.
He has followed the process and principles of design into "nonphysical environments" such as production processes in organizations, regulation, and information management and published a variety of research in environmental policy, government policy towards the arts, and management, with special interests in energy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on transportation biofuels and their effects on global land use, food security, and international trade; regulatory policy in the face of scientific uncertainty; and, after a three-decade hiatus, on NIMBY conflicts afflicting high speed rail right-of-way and nuclear waste disposal sites. He is also a regular writer on pedagogy, especially teaching in professional education, and co-edited the "Curriculum and Case Notes" section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Between faculty appointments at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he was director of policy analysis at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. He has had visiting appointments at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and teaches regularly in the Goldman School's executive (mid-career) programs.
At GSPP, O'Hare has taught a studio course in Program and Policy Design, Arts and Cultural Policy, Public Management, the pedagogy course for graduate student instructors, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the introduction to public policy for its undergraduate minor, which he supervises. Generally, he considers himself the school's resident expert in any subject in which there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned the governance and design of California county fairs), but is secure in the distinction of being the only faculty member with a metal lathe in his basement and a 4×5 Ebony view camera. At the moment, he would rather be making something with his hands than writing this blurb.
View all posts by Michael O'Hare
To build support for this policy proposal, it might helpful to frame it as privatizing the issuance of permits since it is widely known that privatized service are delivered with less waste and fraud, i.e., more efficiently, than those that delivered by public sector bureaucracies and their featherbedding employees.
+1!
I should proof my posts before hitting enter!
We all should proofread but hey, it’s the internets.
But I agree that private lobbyist would run our government better than our elected officials. They already are.
If the NRA gives licenses, only white people will have guns.
This idea makes so much sense that there must be something wrong with it.
As soon as Republicans held both houses of Congress they would pass a law granting sovereign immunity to the NRA - that’s the flaw.
Cranky
Can we get them bonded and licensed, too? Whenever an NRA-issued gun injures or kills someone, take a no-fault, uncontested $7M out of their hide. Ditto for stolen firearms; you own it, you lock it up. And make them party to the wrongful-death lawsuit. They are welcome to increase gun-licensing fees to cover these payments, and they’re welcome to actually *regulate* their supposed well-regulated militia—say, by denying guns to gun nuts—in order to reduce the incidence. Too expensive? $7000 per license? Oh well, freedom isn’t free, right?
You need an exemption in the licensing for law enforcement and military personnel in the line of duty.
Sure, go ahead. If we, as a society, can handle the policy that laboratories can buy untaxed reagent-grade ethyl alcohol, then I’m pretty sure we can handle having separate civilian and non-civilian gun licensing systems.
I say again (and I’m quite serious): this is the kind of analysis I look to RBC for. Aside from the obvious cowardice of the NRA, what are the flaws in this plan?
I’m not sure if the agreement NERC signed with the FERC when it agreed to convert from a membership organization to the designated manager of the nation’s electric system (Electric Reliability Organization) is available to the public or not. But I would be deeply surprised if NERC or its member entities accepted that responsibility without requiring some limited grant of sovereign immunity or guaranteed indemnification from the US Government - otherwise, their liability would be infinite. Simililarly with the Price-Anderson Act. The NRA isn’t stupid enough to sign an agreement that will inevitably involve it in a situation of unlimited liability. Unfortunately.
Cranky
I’d give them them some reasonable grant of sovereign immunity. Financial liability isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the point. *Political* liability is - even the sovereign can’t protect themselves from that.
Every one of those permit-grantors should think long and hard about what it’s going to look like if this particular permit holder winds up in the wrong part of the paper. Will people agree that this looked like a reasonable person and that something surprising happened? Or will they ask: What in the world were you thinking?
They were thinking ‘everyone has the right to bear arms’, so they issued a licence to everyone who asked for one. What else? Without some form of liability, they won’t care. (See the insurance for gun owners proposal in an earlier thread.)
Yes, please do.
http://prorev.com/idguns.htm
I think we should respond to this massacre by doing nothing. The larger picture is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg
Violent crime has been plummeting in the USA. As long as we’re on this pace, I don’t see any reason to get all authoritarian.
Interestingly, the plummet correlates to a dramatic increase in income inequality. Also baffling experts is the lack of crime during this current recession:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24crime.html?_r=1&hp
It’s nice that atrocities like this may not have sufficient impact to counteract an apparently salutory trend. This does not however make them anything other than atrocities.
Look at the gear this nutball was easily able to acquire: a bulletproof helmet, a complete set of bulletproof torso armor, and bulletproof trousers; gas grenades; and a high-powered assault rifle holding 100 bullets. None of this is stuff you could ever imagine using except in a pitched battle with multiple heavily armed opponents. The torso armor isn’t a vest a frightened person might put under their sweater, let alone the helmet; and 100 shots without reloading? None of this stuff is useful for any normal notion of self-defense (and if you’ve got time to gear up with this stuff and face down a heavily armed mob, you really ought to call the police).
Sure: in a country as blood-soaked as ours 12 more deaths probably didn’t even move the needle for the day, let alone the year. But even modest moves to restrict gear that has no conceivable non-military purpose might have saved at least half those lives. There are people all across Colorado - all across America - who would be very disappointed to hear you talk of their loved ones as mere statistics.
Yep. You can practically count the “legitimate” firearms on one hand.
a) For large game, you use a rifle. In all my years listening to gunshots echo around my house in deer season, I can’t recall anything but single shots. Do people actually hunt with semiautomatics?
b) For small game or skeet, you use a small-bore shotgun, right?
c) For defending your home, or daydreaming about defending your home, you use a shotgun.
d) For your wildest concealed-carry fantasy, where you leap to the defense of the 7-11 clerk with a handgun, you need, at best, a revolver.
e) For competitive target shooting, you use tiny magazines in tiny calibers. Those beer cans aren’t going to get up and attack you while you reload.
Anything else—i.e. anything with a magazine—strikes me as either (a) an accessory for your “Red Dawn” and/or “Falling Down” roleplaying fantasy, or (b) an standard-issue murder and mayhem weapon.
But, hey, like the constitution says, Red Dawn-themed fantasy roleplay being necessary for the security of a free state ….
BM,
1.
I remember after Loughner’s attack in Arizona the commenter Brett Bellmore was outraged that anyone would propose restricting clip sizes. His entire argument was that the convenience of casual target shooters disinclined to reload more often outweighed the public safety concerns associated with high-capacity magazines otherwise useful only in murderous assaults or sustained gun battles. Given that he was a gun-enthusiast willing to talk to a bunch of obvious Commies on a board like this, I can only assume this is the moderate part of the gun-enthusiast spectrum.
His entire argument was that the convenience of casual target shooters disinclined to reload more often outweighed the public safety concerns ..
And yet, the gun people insist that restricting magazine sizes would have made no difference at all in Aurora, because Holmes could easily have carried a number of smaller magazines and easily swaped them.
So I wonder which it is - we shouldn’t restrict the size because it’s time-consuming and inconvenient to switch magazines, or we shouldn’t restrict the size because switching is trivial and would do nothing to slow down a mass murderer.
a) For large game, you use a rifle. In all my years listening to gunshots echo around my house in deer season, I can’t recall anything but single shots. Do people actually hunt with semiautomatics?
Yes. Although I preferred lever-actions myself, because I shoot left-handed. Bolt actions are the most common, I think. But some people do use semiautomatics.
b) For small game or skeet, you use a small-bore shotgun, right?
Depends on preferences. I used a 20 gauge for upland birds except pheasant. Duck and pheasant I used a 12 gauge. I never hunted geese but I can’t imagine using anything smaller than a 12 there. I never did any competitive trap, but my impression is that 12 gauge was the usual size there. My impression is that people who have one all-purpose shotgun are most likely to have a 12 gauge. I knew a lot of people who hunted quail and dove with 12 gauge shotguns.
c) For defending your home, or daydreaming about defending your home, you use a shotgun.
Only if you’re sensible or very well-practiced with .45. And if you’re using a shotgun, the number to remember is #4 (shot size).
d) For your wildest concealed-carry fantasy, where you leap to the defense of the 7-11 clerk with a handgun, you need, at best, a revolver.
A semiautomatic is easier to shoot accurately than a revolver. The springs suck up a lot of the recoil.
e) For competitive target shooting, you use tiny magazines in tiny calibers. Those beer cans aren’t going to get up and attack you while you reload.
Mostly, but not entirely. Single shots and small bores are very common in target shooting. But long-range target shooting (silhouette matches) typically use big-game calibers like .308 and 8mm. Most center-fire weapons with internal magazines have a capacity of five rounds. Those may have to be blocked down to 3 rounds (especially shotguns when hunting duck and geese).
Let’s not forget about the gas mask. One should always take a gas mask to the theater just in case. I’ve heard that ladies in WWII London carried their gas masks in designer bags. That’s the spirit we need in these times. We will fight them in the school yards, we will fight them in the shopping malls…
Warren, maybe, just maybe, your point is his message.