US Politics: Democrats’ gun plans should be as ambitious as the Green New Deal - by German Lopez

The first Democratic debates crystallized how far Democrats have moved to the left on all sorts of issues over the past few years. Candidates for the presidency advocated for single-payer health care, a Green New Deal, free college, 70 percent taxes on the ultrawealthy, decriminalizing crossing the border without papers, and upholding “reproductive justice.”

But there’s one issue, even as it’s gotten more attention, where major Democratic politicians haven’t moved much: guns. When it came up in the debates, candidates raised the same ideas they’ve had for decades: universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and generally keeping guns away from dangerous people. Only Cory Booker, who brought up his gun licensing plan, and Eric Swalwell, who pointed to his assault weapons confiscation program, broke new ground on the issue — receiving little support from others on stage (although some candidates have backed licensing elsewhere).

If you want to make a serious dent in gun violence in the US, this should worry you. Just imagine a world where Democrats get everything leading candidates typically say they want on guns. Congress passes and President Elizabeth Warren signs a comprehensive bill that includes universal background checks, bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and a red-flag law that lets law enforcement take away guns from dangerous people.

It would be, to be sure, a massive political and policy victory — the culmination of decades of work by gun control advocates. The media would characterize it as a sea change in gun politics. The National Rifle Association and its Republican allies would be livid.

Yet it almost certainly would not be enough. We would still likely see mass shootings on a regular basis, in addition to the incidents of suicides, urban violence, and domestic abuse that are tragically even more common.

That’s because America would still have the weakest gun laws among developed nations, and it would still have the most firearms out of any country in the world — and the research has consistently found that places with more guns have more gun deaths.

The problem is dire: The US, with its enormous civilian-owned arsenal of guns, leads the developed world in gun violence. A 2018 study in JAMA found that the US’s civilian gun death rate is nearly four times that of Switzerland, five times that of Canada, 35 times that of the United Kingdom, and 53 times that of Japan. There are, on average, more than 100 gun deaths in the US per day.

You can't control gun violence by giving people more guns as the IRA and most Republicans propose. That is like believing in Santa Claus.

Read more: Democrats’ gun plans should be as ambitious as the Green New Deal - Vox

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