In Response To Uvalde, We Get Gun Control That Wouldn’t Have Prevented Uvalde
Yesterday, Senator Chris Murphy — who does nothing but advocate for gun control, it seems — announced that he had come to a bipartisan compromise with ten Republican Senators on future gun control legislation. The idea of getting ten Republicans to sign onto a new gun control bill seems impossible, but it starts to make sense once you realize that almost nothing in this bill would have stopped the recent shooting in Uvalde, Texas which inspired the new push for gun control in the first place.
This is not to say that I am even opposed to every provision Murphy outlined — I do support closing the “boyfriend loophole” as well as increasing funding to mental health services — but very little in the legislation can be called gun control. For example, Murphy specifically makes reference to the efforts against gun trafficking this bill would create, writing in a Twitter thread promoting the bill:
What would laws against gun trafficking do to stop a shooting that occurred in Texas, a state with some of the laxest gun laws in the country, where the gun was bought locally?
Straw purchases, or using someone using their ID to buy a gun for someone else, is already illegal under federal law. The ATF even wrote an article about their indictment of various people for exactly that in 2021, where they note:
Another proposal of this bill falls apart for a similar reason, with Murphy writing he wants:
Once again, going back to the recent shooting in Uvalde, the shooter already bought his gun from a licensed dealer who was required to perform a background check. If Murphy’s expanded background checks for people under twenty one would have stopped the shooting, I cannot be sure, but it should be noted that the killer had no previous criminal record before he engaged in his massacre. This is also why Murphy’s push for red flag laws and expanded mental health funding — in response to a shooter who did not have a mental illness, by the way — fails to make sense. What “red flags” was Salvador Rolando Ramos showing that would lead one to conclude that he should not own a gun? What mental illness did Ramos show that would have prevented him from gun ownership?
Mind you, the focus on mental illness in response to mass shootings is, at best, misguided. There is no evidence that people with mental illnesses are more likely to commit gun violence than those without a mental illness, but there is evidence that they are ten times more likely to be victims of gun violence than those who don’t. Preventing someone from owning a gun because of a mental illness is also almost certainly a violation of both HIPPA (mental patients still have a right to medical privacy) and the Americans with Disabilities Act — and it’s already the case under federal law.
If the point of gun control is to stop the latest mass shooting, than this legislation is a failure. For that matter, if the point of gun control is to stop dangerous people from getting guns, then this legislation is also a failure. Although red flag laws have proven that they can be effective, this primarily depends on how they’re enforced. Would Republican states properly enforce them, even with the extra money that Murphy’s bill gives them? Florida already had red flag laws when the school shooting in Parkland happened in 2018, and most agree that it was the failure of both the local police and the FBI for not properly alerting the system of Nikolas Cruz’s behavior that caused his massacre.
Of course, the point of this bill is not to actually stop mass shooting, because it is nothing more than Chris Murphy’s personal wish list. And if anybody thinks this is anything else, they are going to be in for a rude awakening.
