On October 1, a gunman opened fire on students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, killing nine people and injuring nine others before taking his own life.
Like other mass shootings in recent years, the tragedy in Oregon has once again launched the gun control debate into the forefront of American politics.
On Friday, the White House confirmed that President Obama was considering using his executive power to bypass the political gridlock in Congress and enact stricter regulations on gun dealers. CBS reports:
The new rule would require gun dealers who sell a large number of firearms to perform checks on potential buyers. Gun dealers would also need to be licensed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
As usual, Obama’s attempt at regulation has been met with fierce opposition from the gun lobby. In a statement released on Thursday, the NRA accused the president and Congressional Democrats of, “politiciz[ing] these horrific events” in order to push a “gun-control agenda.”
This sentiment has been echoed by many influential Republicans, including more than one Republican presidential candidate, and, of course, the talking heads on Fox News.
But despite what gun lobbyists, Republican politicians or the conservative media has to say about the issue, the unavoidable truth is that the vast majority of Americans — including gun owners — are in favor of stricter gun control. In fact, gun owners are often more in favor of certain gun control measures than non- gun owners are.
Let’s take the issue of background checks, for example. Earlier this year, a group of professors from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducted a national survey to gauge support for a number of specific gun control policies.
Comparing gun owners and non- gun owners on 5 different questions (Courtesy of Colleen L. Barry, Emma E. McGinty, Jon S. Vernick, Daniel W. Webster)
One of the questions they asked people was whether or not they would support a law requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers to, “make sure a purchaser is not legally prohibited from having a gun.” (Side-note: I find it somewhat crazy that this is not already a law.)
Both gun owners and non- gun owners were overwhelmingly in favor of this kind of background check, but at 84.7 percent, gun owners were slightly more likely to support it than non- gun owners were (83.4 percent).
Though this might come as a shock to some people, it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Most gun-related violence is committed by people who likely wouldn’t pass a criminal background check, and responsible gun owners are frustrated that these few “bad apples” are giving everybody else a bad name.
The survey also asked respondents if they were in favor of, “requiring [the] state to report a person to the background check system who is prohibited from buying a gun either because of involuntary commitment to a hospital for psychiatric treatment or because of being declared mentally incompetent by a court of law.”
The gap was wider on this issue, with 86.2 percent of gun owners in favor, compared to 80.9 percent of non- gun owners.
The survey also found overwhelming support for giving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms more authority to sanction gun dealers for keeping loose records. When asked about allowing the Bureau to, “temporarily take away a gun dealer’s license if an audit reveals record-keeping violations and the dealer cannot account for 20 or more guns,” 79 percent of gun owners said they were in favor, as did 78.8 percent of non- gun owners.
What these statistics reveal is that a huge part of the gun control debate comes down to how you frame the argument, and, more specifically, what questions you choose to ask.
For example, the people fighting against gun control like to cite a Pew research poll from December that found that, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans supported gun rights (52 percent) over gun control (46 percent).
But as with many hot-button issues these days, this binary framing of the debate obscures what ought to be an obvious truth: you can support gun rights while still being in favor of stricter gun rules (kind of like how you can support the police while still advocating for more police oversight).
Let’s be clear: there is no way of knowing whether or not stricter gun laws would have stopped the tragedy in Oregon earlier this month… or the tragedies at Sandy Hook, the Aurora movie theater, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, Columbine… the list could go on.
But as The New York Times points out, these types of mass killings, “are not the typical face of gun violence in America”:
Each day, some 30 people are victims of gun homicides, slain by rival gang members, drug dealers, trigger-happy robbers, drunken men after bar fights, frenzied family members or abusive partners. An additional 60 people a day kill themselves with guns.
We can argue all day about whether stricter gun control would reduce the occurrence of premeditated rampage shootings, but it’s virtually impossible to argue that it wouldn’t help lower the immense toll of day-to-day gun violence in America.
And with an overwhelming majority of Americans — both gun owners and non- gun owners alike — in favor of stricter regulations, I can’t help but wonder: what the heck are we even arguing about??