Thank you for the response, and I will try to answer in good faith, on the premise that you’re doing the same.
Well, besides that the suicidal can always drop their guns off at the local police station for permanent disposal
“I’m having a rough patch therefore destroy all my firearms” is not a position many firearms owners are going to take.
or could separate the magazine/cylinder/barrel/firing pin and hand that over to a loved one without criminal impact,
Speaking to loved ones specifically, you can in fact transfer a firearm to a close blood relative in California without running afoul of their transfer law, but for someone suicidal, that very often isn’t an option logistically or socially. But disassembling the gun to reassemble it after transfer does not, in my read, bypass the law. If you can point me to that passage, please do so.
during an actual transfer, the shop holds onto the firearm.
And then doesn’t give it back if the person is admitted on an in-patient basis for their ailment.
If you cared about how to prevent suicide by firearm, wouldn’t you be focused on how to get the gun out of the hands of the suicidal than make a specious point?
I’m focused on the suicidal person not killing themselves. Numbers wise, instilling a culture where suicidal gun owners feel safe to hand their gun to a buddy in an unrestricted manner, even if it’s just for a day, will do more to abet overall suicide in this country than any other change. And it’s basically free. We just have to make that cultural shift, and not intentionally obstruct it.
The rest of your piece is a funny position which is that this ACP is anti-handgun and anti-assault weapons like it is some big reveal. One problem with gun control laws is the reality that there are hundreds of millions of guns out there, almost all of them in the hands of legal, responsible gun owners.
There are problems on both side of the dialog, but one of the worst ones going now on the blue side is advocating laws (magically evaporating all semi-auto weapons) which are literally impossible, mathematically, and then using any opposition to a mathematically impossible idea as a culture war bludgeon.
On the other hand, there is gun violence in America, as is there is every country, but we have the highest numbers in the Western world. I won’t get into every nuance of why, but the crux of yours and many pro gun advocates is that isn’t that high and we shouldn’t change the gun laws except to get rid of them.
Given how suicides are always included in our “gun violence” definition in the US dialog, our overall rates of violence are actually quite low. Most pacific rim countries have more suicide than our entire homicide and suicide rate combined, by all tools, not just guns.
Our homicides are higher than Europe, but we aren’t Europe, and never have been, and the comparisons aren’t fair. I have gotten into the nuances of why, quite often, and gun proliferation shows no bivariate link with gun homicide. The multivariate correlations that do exist are far less impactful, statistically speaking, than GINI coefficient, or the plight of the modern black community.
What would be interesting is if you could prove that unfettered gun ownership would prevent violence, but I know you can’t, nor will you because the 2nd Amendment makes you mentally lazy in this regard.
This will be my seventh or eighth article on gun policy, depending on how you want to count them, and I haven’t mentioned the Second Amendment once. You won’t find many gun policy authors who can make that claim.
If suicide is included in the “violence” definition, then suicide is correlated with gun ownership, but you can’t treat that symptom with gun seizure. If we look purely at homicides, then no bivariate correlation exists one direction or the other with proliferation. (link above) This is not to say there aren’t things we can do, given the situation we’re in. I think there are definitely things we can do once we bail on the intellectual dishonesty rampant in this intellectual space and start looking at numbers.
