The gun-control delusion

There may be room for prudent changes to time-and-place restrictions, but these are not going to have much effect on either ordinary violent crime or homicidal spectaculars such as the ones recently carried out in Buffalo and Uvalde. We have lots of ordinary gun crime, much of it related to gangs and the drug trade, because we do a poor job of isolating the serious violent criminals in our penal system — the average murderer in the United States has at least five prior arrests and one conviction before he gets brought in for homicide — and because we routinely refuse to enforce the gun laws we already have on the books. If you get arrested carrying a gun illegally in one of the crime-ridden neighborhoods of Philadelphia or Baltimore, you have an excellent chance of walking away from the case scot-free, and a pretty good chance of avoiding jail in the statistically unlikely event that you are convicted.

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Horrifying events such as the massacre in Uvalde are much rarer, and much more difficult to police and prevent. One thing that is important to understand about these killings is that they are expressive violence; because that is the case, in almost every one of these situations there are indicators that the perpetrator might carry out mass violence before he actually does, including in many instances an open declaration of intent to do so. Unlike the more common kinds of murderers, these killers often have no criminal records, and we never have the chance to use the tools of the criminal-justice system to keep them off the streets or to keep guns out of their hands. We have instead the much less robust tools of the mental-health-care and public-education systems.

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