Gun Control Is The Centrist Position

(Editor's note: This is an opinion piece posted by a Patch reader. If you'd like to post on Patch yourself, find out how here.)

More than 70% of Americans do not support the idea that guns should generally be prohibited to everyone except for police and other authorized personnel. By a similar margin, going all the way back to 2008, the public also believes that the 2nd amendment constitutionally guarantees the right of all Americans to legally own firearms. The Supreme Court of the United States has upheld this right time and again.

Belief to the contrary could be aptly defined as the "far-left" position on the ideological spectrum. As it were. there is no tangible movement to accomplish these aims, no true "anti-gun" lobby, no PAC money pouring into districts around the country with the goal of abolishing an American's right to own a firearm for self-defense, hunting, or even organized militia participation.

Nobody is trying to take your guns away.

Gun control is not the same as mass gun confiscation - it is an attempt at instituting common-sense regulations, the way we do with any other right or legal privilege.

Gun control is the centrist position.

According to recent polling conducted by Politico/Morning Consult, sweeping majorities of Americans support a range of gun control measures including:

80% or more favor preventing sales of all firearms to people who have been reported as dangerous to law enforcement by a mental-health provider; requiring background checks on all gun sales; expanding screening and treatment for the mentally ill; preventing sales of all firearms to people who have been convicted of violent misdemeanors; closing the "gun show loophole"; barring gun purchases by people on the federal no-fly or watch lists; and requiring a person to be 21 in order to purchase a gun.

70% or more favor the creation of a national database with information about each gun sale; requiring a mandatory waiting period of three days after a gun is purchased before it can be taken home; banning the use of "bump stocks"; requiring gun owners to keep their firearms in a safe storage unit; and banning high-capacity magazines.

60% or more favor banning assault-style weapons; limiting the amount of ammunition that can be purchased within a given period of time, as well as the number of guns that can be purchased in a single month; and banning firearms from schools and college campuses nationally.

The only policy proposals that sit at 50% or close, i.e. those which have "debatable" levels of support, are the "Banning firearms from all workplace settings nationally" (50% In Favor, 37% Opposed), and "Requiring that all gun buyers demonstrate a "genuine need" for a gun, such as a law enforcement job or hunting" (47% In Favor, 44% Opposed).

CBS, Gallup, and Marist polling data is in line with these findings, as well as Quinnipiac polling that found support for gun control at an all-time high.

It is true that levels of support for gun control measures have fluctuated over time, sometimes sharply, and tend to rise after mass shooting events. The same Politico report demonstrates this in a tracking chart from 1992-2018. You can see quite clearly that gun control favorables have been higher in the wake of the Sandy Hook Massacre, the Las Vegas Shooting, and the recent Parkland Shooting.

But gun control support is almost always higher than opposition, and has been high in recent years, precisely because America has experienced an incredible surge in mass shooting events for over a decade now.

Mother Jones has tracked all mass shootings in the U.S. from 1982-2018, with full information about the number of deaths, injuries, type of weapon used, profile of the shooter, mental health history (if any), and whether the weapon used was obtained legally (in almost all cases, the answer is Yes). This chart is fully sourced, and comprehensive.

What's interesting, is comparing the timeline of mass shootings to the expiration of the 1994 Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act (otherwise known as the "assault weapons ban"), which outlawed the ability to “manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon,” unless it was “lawfully possessed under Federal law on the date of the enactment of this subsection.”

Assault-style weapons (not true assault rifles, but weapons designed to imitate military-grade assault weapons) —including AR-15s, TEC-9s, and MAC-10s — were prohibited from being sold or manufactured. Some high-capacity ammunition magazines of more than ten rounds were also banned.

This "assault weapons ban" was in effect from September 1994 until September 2004. Prior to the ban's passage, there had been 19 mass shooting events in the U.S. dating back to 1982. During the 10 year period when the ban was in place, there were an additional 15 shootings (5 included Columbine and subsequent copycat shootings).

Since the assault weapons ban expired in September 2004, there have been 64 mass shootings.

Not guns being fired in a parking lot, not somebody shooting themselves in the foot in front of bystanders. Mass shootings, all of which resulted in fatalities no less than three, mostly between three and nine killed, with 12 shootings that left more than 10 dead.

People see what's going on, they're fed up, ready for common sense gun control, and public polling reflects that.

Now that we've established the difference between what a far-left and centrist gun control stance looks like, let's talk about gun politics on the conservative far-right.

Last year, Pew Research conducted a survey of Republican gun owners, and compared members of the National Rifle Association to non-members. What they found was startling. Have a look at the table below.

Only 28% of Republican-aligned NRA members would support an assault-style weapons ban, compared to 41% of non-NRA gun owners and over 60% of all Americans.

More than 80% of all NRA/non-NRA Republican members support the arming of teachers and other K-12 officials, and almost 90% want concealed carry reciprocity.

That last part is critical to our Congressional District here in NY-1, because Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, who accepted more than $9,000 dollars in NRA donations last election cycle alone, and has received an 'A' rating from the NRA itself, voted in favor of the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which passed the House of Representatives and is currently awaiting a Senate vote. The Act would allow gun owners with concealed carry permits to "transport their guns into any other state regardless of that state's laws".

Zeldin was the lone member of the Long Island Congressional Delegation to vote in favor of concealed carry reciprocity.

How did this happen?

Look beyond money and lobbyist influence. Pew Research shows that gun owners are far more likely to contact public officials about gun policy than non-gun owners, and are more likely to contribute money to organizations like the NRA that support far-right anti-gun control measures.

The recent wave of student-led protests in the wake of the Parkland shooting have inspired another counter-insurgency of hyper-vocal, and sometimes violent, right-wing zealots. I say "another", because this behavior has become the norm following mass shooting events.

Sometimes it's threats. Cameron Kasky, one of the Parkland shooting survivors from Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School, reported that he left Facebook due to a number of threats from gun enthusiasts.

Other times it's conspiracy theorists, like the people who disseminate fake news on social media that claims mass shootings are staged events, and accuses survivors of being "trauma actors".

These hurdles have become commonplace enough that regular folks who support gun control fear speaking out, because it means having to deal with people who are radical and inappropriately aggressive.

In my own experience, after publishing a column on Lee Zeldin's links to right-wing extremist groups, which includes the radical conspiracy-pushing militia the Oath Keepers, I received harassment and threats from a person who was beyond the capacity of reason.

Not everyone enjoys these threats, like I do. For people such as the brave high school students who erupted in protest this week, such encounters can be frightening.

One prime example was the local resident who pulled a knife on a student at a Rocky Point Board of Education meeting, not to directly threaten the student, but to intimidate and "demonstrate" to him that gun control was senseless.

"WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? I'M ASKING YOU A QUESTION! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO IF I PULLED THIS KNIFE ON YOU! I CAN DO A LOT OF DAMAGE WITH THIS KNIFE!", the man said in a booming voice while onlookers sat there in shock.

For one thing, I would have told the man that, as someone who has participated in and helped run weapons-defense seminars, there really isn't much that a knife-attacker is going to do against a large group of people, not compared to what an AR-15 could accomplish. I don't have to explain to a rational person their chances of surviving a knife attack versus a mass shooting.

I don't know what's more sickening: the fact that a few residents clapped for this man, or that the Rocky Point School District largely did nothing in response, while threatening to suspend students who participated in the walk out.

This man was an example of a gun rights zealot who couldn't accomplish his point through rational discourse, or even public protest, but opted for psychological intimidation with a switchblade as his prop.

I write this, not to appeal to people like him, or those of us who have thrown their lot in with his type, but to the silent majority who stays silent because of extremist individuals who imitate their talking points from the NRA, and receive the bulk of their information from Fox & Friends.

They cannot be reasoned with, they do not have the numbers behind them, so they must be ignored.

And those of us who want to see sensible gun control laws enacted, must be louder.

We cannot engage with troll arguments like "Walk Up, Not Out!", i.e. the faux-movement that seeks to link bullying with gun violence (a notion that has been thoroughly debunked, and is victim-blaming). Or give time to the idea that somehow we just need to "enforce the federal laws on the books", ignoring that the states have considerable legal flexibility to avoid having to enforce these laws, which are not strong enough to begin with.

We can't let every debate about gun control get bogged down in weaponry minutiae pop-quizzing from firearm enthusiasts who find that the easiest escape route from addressing the deluge of mass shootings, is to repeatedly ask, "SIR, have you ever fired a weapon? SIR, do you understand the difference between a semi-automatic rifle and a military grade assault weapon? DO YOU?!".

I understand that the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, and people who blind themselves to the failures of American gun culture do not argue for solutions in good faith.

There can be no time spent debating the merits of whether movies, video games, or rock bands are to blame for school shootings. Heck, mainstream rock and roll has been dying for the last 12 years while mass shootings have skyrocketed. Study that phenomenon, Pew Research Center.

We also cannot afford to overlook the link between domestic violence and gun violence.

Students across the country have shown us the way. Where some of us have given up trying to fight back against the NRA and its sycophants, they have stepped forward to renew our energy through #March4OurLives.

These civically engaged individuals won't back down from the social media mob of firearm fetishists who advocated for nothing less than the unrestrained access to exotic weapons, designed not for self-defense or hunting, but with the specific purpose of ending human lives in quick succession.

Teenagers, concerned parents, and the responsible majority will step forward to affect change, throw gun lobby puppets like Lee Zeldin out of office, and support local Congressional candidates who have advocated for much stricter gun control laws, like David Pechefsky, Liuba Grechen-Shirley, and others.

The next time you find yourself wondering if you're the only one in your neighborhood who isn't a a wild-eyed gun advocate, stop that thought and remember that you are the majority, and it's time to get louder.