Enough Already
We've had enough candlelight vigils. It's time to burn our gun culture to the ground.
A common definition of a mass shooting is four or more people, not including the perpetrator, injured or killed by the use of a firearm in a single incident. By that metric, 169 people have been killed and over 140 have been injured in 14 separate school shooting incidents, from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999 to the most recent deaths at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 27, 2022. In eight of those 14 incidents, the perpetrators were less than 21 years old. The victims have been as young as six years old.
Since 2018, Education Week journalists have been tracking shootings that occurred on K-12 school property or school buses that resulted in a firearm-related injury or death to anyone other than the perpetrator. Each incident occurred while classes or school-sponsored events were in session an involved shots fired by someone other than police or school resource officers. Here’s what they found:
2018: 24
2019: 24
2020: 10
2021: 34
In just the first five months of 2022, 27 people have been killed in school shootings, 24 of whom were children. 56 people have been injured.
Those numbers don’t include the number of mass shooting incidents at churches, synagogues, concerts, restaurants, clubs, shopping malls, grocery stores, post offices, movie theaters, sidewalks, cemeteries, or private property. Those figures have increased more than 250% in the past seven years.
Guns are now the leading cause of death in children: more than automobile crashes, more than drugs, more than cancer, more than heart disease or congenital anomalies. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members combined. 61% of those gun-related child deaths are assaults, but nearly a third are the result of suicide, especially among 15- to 18-year-olds.
Our schools are not meant to be war zones. Yearbooks are not meant to have obituary sections. Our thoughts, prayers, scapegoating, and deflections are not working.
It’s time to do something about the damn guns.
What can we do? For starters, we can fix a discrepancy in federal law that sets the minimum age to purchase or transfer a gun from a licensed dealer at 21, but allows an 18-year-old to legally possess a firearm or buy one from a private seller. That loophole means that in states like Wisconsin, people who are too young to buy a beer, reserve a hotel room, or rent a car can legally own and buy guns without a background check, and that private sellers can bypass federal record-keeping requirements.
Speaking of Wisconsin, there is no waiting period, license, or permit required to purchase a gun or carry it openly and loaded in public. Money is the only limit to how many guns or how much ammunition a person can buy at one time. There is no law requiring gun owners to register their firearms or report lost or stolen guns, no recordkeeping of ammunition sales, and very few restrictions on ammunition type. There is also no requirement for gun owners to store their weapons in child-safe containers or locations.
Large-capacity magazines are legal here, as are assault-style weapons and “ghost” guns. Bump stocks and most fully automatic firearms are banned, but if a person wants to be the coolest kid at the gun range by showing up with a .50 caliber sniper rifle capable of disabling a light armored vehicle or shooting down a helicopter, they surely (and legally) can.
People with felony convictions or injunctions against them for child abuse or domestic violence cannot own or possess firearms in Wisconsin. However, a disorderly conduct conviction related to domestic violence (say, for breaking down your ex-wife’s door and threatening to kill her) will not disqualify a person from legally carrying a concealed weapon.
Extreme Risk Protective Orders (ERPO) or “Red Flag” laws allow families and law enforcement to petition a judge to temporarily restrict access to guns for individuals at an elevated risk of harming themselves or others. Thirteen states currently have ERPO laws. Wisconsin is not one of them. Two legislators introduced a bill in 2021 to create an ERPO statute, but our Assembly Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety refused to grant it a public hearing.
Unless the property owner has posted the appropriate signage, Wisconsin has no laws prohibiting firearms in hospitals, places of worship, sports arenas, gambling facilities, or polling places. Gun-free zones extend 1,000 feet from school campuses, but the private properties located within that radius are exempt. Even where guns are prohibited inside buildings or facilities by the property owner, this generally does not include parking areas. Employees with concealed carry licenses may not be prohibited from carrying or storing ammunition or concealed firearms in their own vehicles, even if said vehicle is used in the course of employment or is being driven or parked on the employer’s property.
Wisconsin’s concealed carry law is the closest thing the state currently has to mandated firearm responsibility. Applicants must be state residents of at least 21 years of age, must undergo initial firearm safety training, and must submit to a federal background check. That background check is repeated every time the five-year permit is renewed, but no additional training is required.
This is going to sound like a rip-off of a toothpaste commercial, but three out of four Republican gubernatorial candidates have promised to overturn Wisconsin’s concealed carry statute and replace it with “constitutional carry.” Constitutional carry means that any eligible person 18 years of age or older would legally be allowed to carry a concealed, loaded firearm without a permit, license, registration, or training. None of the four candidates have expressed support for additional gun safety measures.
Earlier, I mentioned the Assembly Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety. In 2021, that was the legislative wasteland where attempts at statewide gun control reform went to die. Whether the proposal was to reinstate a 48-hour waiting period, require safe gun storage in households with children, ban ghost guns, prohibit accessories that accelerate the rate of semiautomatic weapon fire, require reporting of lost or stolen firearms, or establish background check requirements for private gun sales, all those bills were allowed to expire at the end of the session, many without ever getting a public hearing. If Governor Evers is reelected, his veto pen may help keep Wisconsin’s gun laws from becoming even more lax, but our gerrymander-protected supermajority of legislators is not likely to strengthen them.
Even accounting for partisan political differences, the overall majority of Americans want stricter gun control laws. Pew Research Center polling shows that background checks, red flag laws, high-capacity magazine bans, and even bans on assault-style weapons are all supported by at least 60% of those surveyed.
We’re not going to increase school safety with active shooter drills that teach our kids how to be hunted, or worse, how to do the hunting. We’re not going to get effective, common sense, nationwide gun safety measures from an inconsistent patchwork of state laws that provide neither freedom nor safety. We need strong, federal-level legislation, and the only way we’re going to get it is by divorcing ourselves from the NRA and ending our dysfunctional love affair with the myth of the gunslinger.
Several other countries are way ahead of us on that.
It only took Australia one mass school shooting in 1996 to ban the importation, ownership, sale, resale, transfer, possession, manufacture, or use of self-loading rifles and self-loading or pump action shotguns. As part of the National Firearms Agreement adopted the same year, the Australian government set up a 12-month amnesty buyback period during which owners of prohibited firearms would be paid market value for surrendered weapons.
The minimum legal age to own a firearm in Australia is 18. All purchases must be made through licensed dealers after a 28-day waiting period. Firearm licenses are category-specific, and each gun purchase requires a separate permit and registration. Firearm license applicants must provide proof of completion for a multi-day firearm safety course, a declaration of compliance with safe storage requirements, and a “genuine reason” for wanting a gun. Multiple categories of prior criminal convictions will disqualify a gun license applicant, including violent crimes, sexual or drug-related offenses, prior firearm offenses, robbery, theft, and fraud. Ammunition may only be sold for the specific guns the purchaser is licensed to own, and in limited quantities.
New Zealand had gone more than twenty years without a mass shooting incident before 51 people were killed and 40 people were wounded at two mosques on March 15, 2019. Within a month, New Zealand’s government banned full- and semi-automatic weapons and their components and instituted a buy-back period. Further reforms were passed in July and September 2019, creating licensing, registry, and permitting laws largely similar to Australia’s. Both countries also prohibit gun purchases by non-residents.
After 16 people were killed by semi-automatic pistol and rifle fire in Hungerford, England, the United Kingdom Parliament passed a 1988 amendment to its Firearms Act to ban all semi-automatic, pump action, and self-loading rifles and shotguns above .22 calibre, as well as short-barreled or modified shotguns. Shotgun permitting, certification, and secure storage requirements were also strengthened, as well as restrictions placed on types and quantities of shotgun and rifle ammunition.
In March 1996, a man armed with four handguns and 743 rounds of ammunition killed 16 elementary school students and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland. Dunblane residents created the Snowdrop Campaign, which collected over 750,000 signatures on a petition seeking changes to UK handgun laws. In response, Parliament amended the Firearms Act twice in 1997, first in February to ban private ownership of handguns above .22 calibre, and again in December to extend the ban to all handguns (exceptions exist in Northern Ireland as part of the Good Friday Agreement) and tighten security requirements for gun clubs. As Jaclyn Schildkraut, a mass shootings expert at the State University of New York at Oswego said, “They did more than offer thoughts and prayers.”
The rate of all gun deaths per 100,000 people in the U.S. is roughly 12 times higher that the UK, Australia, and New Zealand combined.
Any gun zealot you ask (and many who don’t wait to be asked) will tell you that the Second Amendment says “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The U.S. Supreme Court also ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) that private individuals have the right to possess and use functional firearms for lawful purposes, including self-defense within the home.
That does not mean that certain types or amounts of firearms and ammunition cannot be restricted or banned. It does not have to include publicly carrying loaded guns, either concealed or openly. It does not mean that design safety standards or responsible gun storage cannot be required. It does not mean that licensing, permitting, registration, and even insurance requirements for firearm purchase, possession, or use would be outright unconstitutional. All of those things can be part of ensuring our State remains free and secure and our militia is well-regulated.
As we have seen throughout our legal history in cases like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Mapp v. Ohio, Gideon v. Wainwright, Miranda v. Arizona, Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges, even landmark judicial precedents can be overturned or nullified by future decisions when circumstances warrant and the amount of political will is sufficient.
What circumstances are more dire than a decades-long, escalating epidemic of mass murder carried out through gunfire? Columbine should have been enough. Sandy Hook and Las Vegas and Parkland and Pulse Nightclub and Brooklyn and Uvalde are lightyears beyond enough.
Perhaps we’ve been looking at gun control reforms from the wrong perspective. The argument so far has been that meaningful gun law reform won’t happen without a significant cultural shift. I agree, but I also think the egg comes before the chicken. Instead of waiting for a societal change to happen first, I say we create that cultural shift through significantly reforming our federal gun laws.
The precedent exists. The social will is building, if the 43% drop in annual NRA membership revenues since 2018 is any indication. We don’t need good guys with guns to stop mass shootings. We don’t need to turn our schools into “hard targets.” We need elected leaders with political character and the courage to use it. Yes, I know those are rarer that needles in haystacks. I also know that the quickest way to finding said haystack needle isn’t sifting through it with a magnet. It’s setting the haystack on fire.
We’ve had enough death at the hands of the selfish, craven, and feckless. We’ve had enough candlelight vigils. It's time to burn our gun culture to the ground.
