When politicians talk about civility and public discourse, what they’re really saying is that they would prefer for people to remain silent in the face of injustice. They want marginalized people to accept that the conditions of oppression are unalterable facts of life.
Roxane Gay, 2022
Shortly after I arrived in Kabul in April 2007, Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. So many mass-shootings have occurred in the United States since 2007 that you probably forgot about that incident unless you were closely affected by it.
I remember this incident in particular because my colleagues and friends were worried about my safety in a war zone. But I began to worry about the violence back home in America. Later that year I checked the crime statistics in San Francisco (an ostensibly ‘safe’ city), Oakland, and Richmond.
| City | Population | Killings | Per 100K |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kabul | 3.5 million | 99 | 2.8 |
| San Francisco | 800,000 | 107 | 13.4 |
| Oakland | 400,000 | 138 | 34.5 |
I do not have access to the murder statistics of Kabul in 2007, only the people killed by insurgent attacks in the capital while I was there. But those insurgent attacks, not murders, were the concern of my colleagues. Most disturbingly, my colleagues were also not particularly concerned about the murder rate in American cities. Perhaps the best news of the last 20 years is that American violent crime rates have been dropping. But from what level? Samuel Colt invented the mass-produced handgun in 1836. Handguns have been the dominant suicide and murder weapon since then, and cast a massive shadow on our culture. Duels in the Wild West; movies that glorified those duels; the origin of Batman; the assassination of presidents Lincoln and McKinley. This prevalence of gun violence has inured Americans to the scale of it. In the U.S., murders are just local news.
What Kabul taught me is that the prevailing level of violence in the U.S. is what we call warfare in other countries.
Juxtaposing Unexpected Statistics
I think that both gun-rights and gun-safety advocates assume that battlefields are where most gun deaths occur. This is relevant because the Second Amendment of the US Constitution reads (in its entirety): “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” There is disagreement about how to interpret this convoluted sentence. At minimum, it pertains to state security using a well-regulated militia. In addition to warfare, the use of rifles and shotguns for hunting is also generally accepted among Americans. The main debate is about the right to handguns.
Before focusing on the handgun debate, we need to examine that ‘battlefield death’ assumption. Warfare has become far less deadly for Americans than most civilians assume. Better training, better protocols, better armor, and better medical care have all made a huge difference. Over eight years of hundreds of thousands deployed to Iraq, 3,481 soldiers were killed in action (KIA). Over twenty years of hundreds of thousands deployed to Afghanistan, 1,833 were KIA. Total deaths were much higher, when we include soldiers killed in accidents (937 and 385 respectively), American non-military contractors (3,588 and 3,814 respectively), and local civilians (at least 184,382 and 43,074 respectively). But I focus on soldiers KIA because it plays such an important role in the assumptions of both gun-rights and gun-safety advocates. Each year, ten times as many Americans die from firearms compared to the total number of KIA in Iraq. The following table gives a sense of scale:
| Year (selected) | US KIA, Iraq | US KIA, AF | Death by Gun, US | Suicide by Gun, US |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 486 | 48 | 30,136 | 16,907 |
| 2007 | 904 | 117 | 31,224 | 17,352 |
| 2011 | 58 | 415 | 32,351 | 19,990 |
| 2015 | 8 | 22 | 36,252 | 22,018 |
| 2020 | 11 | 11 | 45,222 | 24,292 |
I selected a representative distribution of years for the table, just so your eyes would not swim with too much data. Iraq KIA dropped after Obama’s Iraq demobilization, whereas Afghanistan KIA increased during Obama’s Afghan “surge”. Meanwhile firearm deaths have been steadily increasing, and the number of those deaths that were self-inflicted has remained between 55% and 61% over the entire period. At least 60% of firearm deaths were identified by handgun. Records for most of the remaining 40% do not specify the type of weapon.
The scale of the lethality of firearm use in the United States is normally not discussed in this way. Firearm-deaths have surpassed traffic deaths per year in the US since 2013. Should we regulate firearms in the United States? Even the Second Amendment refers to a “well-regulated Militia”. Bearing arms is a right, but does “shall not be infringed” mean zero regulation?
A Simple 16-Inch Rule
I have long believed that we need to think about handguns completely differently from long-barreled firearms. For purposes of state security, resisting invasion, and hunting animals, handguns are useless because of their poor aim. As it turns out, there was an attempt to ban or severely restrict handguns in the 1930s. It was eventually watered down into the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934, but even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives states that the original intent was to ban firearms with a barrel shorter than 18 inches. Since the 1960s, the definition of a rifle is a single-projectile firearm (in contrast to shotguns) with a barrel length of at least 16 inches, and the NFA has been amended to recognize that minimum barrel length. This leads to a very straightforward policy recommendation:
The US shall prohibit all firearms with a barrel length shorter than 16 inches (406mm).
(Fulfillment of the National Firearms Act as intended in 1934)
Handguns do not serve the purpose of state security, and therefore are not relevant to the Second Amendment. Most firearm deaths are by handgun, and handguns are only really useful for murder and suicide, not for military defense nor for hunting. In trials of police officers for wrongful death of people in their custody, officers have often tried to plea that they thought they were pulling out their taser. When drawing and aiming a long-barreled gun, there is less probability of mistaking it for something else. This leads to the second part of the policy:
No exceptions. All existing firearms with barrels shorter than 16 inches (406mm) shall be permanently disabled or destroyed. They shall be prohibited to all law-enforcement and military agencies and personnel. The manufacturing of any firearm with a barrel shorter than 16 inches (406mm) shall be prohibited in the United States and in every territory under US jurisdiction.
This policy is aimed to address the massive and increasing number of American deaths by firearm. It will not prevent the rare (and horrifying) massacres by mentally ill people, but it will reduce their access to at least one class of weapon. I do notice that gun-rights advocates tend to call for better mental-health screening immediately after massacres, perhaps to deflect from the fact that they do not want to regulate firearms in any way. However, these conservatives tend to be the same people who oppose comprehensive public healthcare. If conservatives want to argue for universal healthcare as a way to flag people who are a potential danger to themselves and others, then that would be a second policy that might really help.