Voluntary Gun Buybacks Are the Best This Country Is Going to Get

Photo credit: RHONA WISE - Getty Images
Photo credit: RHONA WISE - Getty Images

After another week where the violence at the heart of the American experiment came to the fore, culminating in yet another American mass murder where one citizen killed eight others and then himself in the space of a couple of minutes, it may be time to address the fact that, according to the 2018 Small Arms Survey, the United States has more than 390 million guns in circulation. That's more civilian-owned firearms than people who live here. That's 45 percent of the world's civilian-owned firearms, all in one country. And we've got the mass death—murders and suicides and accidental tragedies—to prove it.

This is the gun country, and it simply is not feasible to suggest the government—particularly the federal government—can solve this problem. It would be nice if we stopped allowing the gun manufacturers who ran the NRA until it ran itself into the ground from selling weapons of war to citizens who are almost never required to pass any kind of examination or competency test. That's the kind of requirement we apply to driving automobiles—which, while dangerous, have some purpose beyond just maiming and killing other living beings—but not to tools with only that function. We should, of course, reinstate the assault weapons ban. It would be nice, also, to have universal background checks. But none of this gets 390 million guns out of circulation. The toothpaste ain't going back in.

Perhaps it never will. But we should put VOLUNTARY gun buyback programs at the center of our collective response to this incessant violence. These programs exist already, but they should be more prominent. It is clear now that a big chunk of the nation is too steeped in anti-government paranoia—and hopeless fantasies around using a gun to resist tyranny imposed by a government that has tanks and Predator drones at its disposal—for anything mandatory to work. In fact, it would probably set off a particularly catastrophic national meltdown, even by the standards of this country. Hence the emphasis on VOLUNTARY. Australia's mandatory program, put in place after it banned some guns following a 1996 mass shooting, was highly successful, but it ain't gonna happen here. It's also better for these programs to be run by more local authorities, which they usually are, because the anti-government paranoia is at fever pitch when it comes to the federal government taking action on guns.

But we simply must offer gun owners who feel the situation in the United States is out of control a way to rescind their participation in this pathological phenomenon, and make it a more prominent feature of our response. Maybe some people are actually tired of having an AR-15 in the house, or could be swayed towards thinking it's not worth it if the opportunity to get rid of it—for a fair price—were made readily apparent to them. In the process, the hope would be that we can build a consensus, through thousands or millions of free individual choices, that American gun culture is unhealthy and destructive, and that we should decide collectively to do something else.

Maybe it's impossible, a pipe dream. Maybe we are condemned to living under the tyranny of the gun for the rest of our lives, looking for the nearest exits while walking in the mall while our kids do active-shooter drills at elementary school. This is the world as built by the NRA and gun manufacturers, who are interested in there being so many guns out there, and the threat posed by them so constant, that the only solution is to buy more guns to protect ourselves. It's a self-perpetuating cycle, a short squeeze capitalizing on chaos and fear. We need to offer individual citizens a new path, front and center, that they can choose to take themselves, and hope that this will change our relationship to guns, gun culture, and the gun debate. Because again, the government is not going to go door-to-door corralling 300 million guns by force. It's not happening. Let's emphasize that people have the freedom to choose a different way.

Photo credit: Esquire
Photo credit: Esquire

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