Some guns confiscated in California in 2011 after Attorney General Kamala Harris (remember her?) announced a statewide sweep to collect firearms seized from individuals legally barred from possessing them. Now here’s a question to ponder: What percentage of those guns were once legally in the hands of responsible owners?

Jennifer Rubin, who cranks out high-quality columns at an impressive rate, had a couple of really good ones just these last two days. The first was headlined, “Punishing a shooter’s parents delivers some justice. But not enough.”

She points out that such newfangled prosecutions may be satisfying, and can be justified in certain cases, they don’t actually solve the problem of mass killings, or even address who is ultimately to blame in the larger sense for these repetitive nightmares.

Which is, as Pogo would say, us.

In America, we tend to look at these interconnected incidents as isolated, as though only the individuals who pull the trigger, or those who place the weapons in their hands, are to blame. And of course, they are profoundly and absolutely to blame. But you can prosecute each and every one of them (that is, the ones who survive the incidents), and it does nothing — or at least, too little — to prevent future such copycat abominations from happening.

Excerpts from the Rubin piece:

Moreover, prosecuting people related to the shooter deflects from the grotesque public policy failure: ready access to such weapons. Treating these incidents as individual crimes, with a subsequent search for a specific person to blame, allows the real culprits — the gun lobby and the weak-kneed Second Amendment absolutists, as well as the hyper-partisan Supreme Court — off the hook….

We do know how to reduce gun violence; Republicans simply refuse to challenge the MAGA movement’s gun fetish. The center-left think tank Third Way has documented the disparity between blue states with stricter gun laws and red states with lax gun laws. “The red state murder rate was 33% higher than the blue state murder rate in both 2021 and 2022,” the group reported this year. “2022 was the 23rd consecutive year that murder plagued Trump-voting states at far higher levels than Biden-voting states. … From 2000 to 2022, the average red state murder rate was 24% higher than the average blue state murder rate.”…

The gun problem is as much a democracy problem as anything else. Gun measures such as universal background checks and red-flag laws garner supermajorities. Even in deep-red Tennessee, for example, large majorities support raising the age to 21 to purchase an assault rifle (64 percent), requiring safe storage of weapons (76 percent) and mandating universal background checks (80 percent). When it comes to an outright ban on assault-style weapons, support is nearly as high. Multiple polls show 60 percent or more favor such a measure. But as long as heavily gerrymandered states produced hyper-conservative state legislatures and the Senate filibuster allows sparsely populated red states to dominate, the popular will is thwarted…

And so forth. But you know this stuff, right? You are people who read.

You probably also know that there are 333.3 million people in the United States, and 393 million guns in private hands.

It’s a matter of arithmetic, regardless of your philosophical bent. And know that no matter how responsible you are, some of those guns you hold so responsibly are inevitably going to fall in far less responsible hands at some point — when your house or car is burglarized, or after you’re dead, or even after your heirs are dead. They are very durable implements.

There are just too many of them. The problem is simple, and obvious. Solutions are not, and Jennifer has pointed out some of the reasons for that. But that’s no excuse not to try to address the actual, larger problem, while we’re rightly composing our criminal charges for individuals…

Related Posts

• Apparently, ‘tactical’ now means ‘I wanna play soldier!”
• Three approaches to a new Second Amendment
• If I were inclined to be a pessimist, here’s what I’d worry about
• If not for the presence of the gun
• Ways to talk to each other about a tough issue
• Can ‘baby steps’ keep guns from killing babies?
• DeMarco: “Dos” and “Don’ts” for next year’s Christmas greetings
• OK, now the shootings are happening too close
• More people will be openly carrying guns in SC. Does that make you happy?
• Lindsey tries to outstupid ‘Trumpo’