Gun Violence Prevention Isn’t Just About Mass Shootings
2020 contenders are finally starting to catch on
When politicians talk about preventing American gun violence, rarely are they talking about everyday violence. The focus is, in most cases, on mass shootings.
But these shootings that make global headlines — like those in Parkland or Las Vegas or Sutherland Springs — account for a tiny fraction of American gun deaths. Handguns, not assault-style rifles, are responsible for the vast majority of deadly shootings. Roughly two-thirds of all gun deaths are suicides. And the victims of gun homicides are disproportionately young black men.
Even mass shooting survivors understand this. When Parkland students turned into activists in the weeks after their classmates were killed, they didn’t just rally against school shootings: Many also partnered with students whose urban neighborhoods were all too frequently interrupted by the crack of gunfire.
This reality hasn’t quite broken through for most the 2020 Democratic field. Thus far, few candidates have gone further than promising to combat mass shootings and fight the National Rifle Association. At least one presidential hopeful, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), is seeking to stand out from the ever-growing pack by looking beyond our fear of mass shootings and treating gun violence as a multifaceted epidemic. While his platform is the most sweeping, a handful of other presidential contenders have followed suit.
The New Jersey senator is the former mayor of Newark, a city where shootings are an everyday occurrence. And Booker has put his personal proximity to gun violence front and center while rolling out his platform. The day before he released the details of his sweeping plan, he took CNN’s Jake Tapper to the place, just blocks away from Booker’s home, where a young man had been gunned down a year earlier.
“This isn’t new to me,” Booker told Tapper. “People in this community know that this is not just a horrific mass shooting after horrific mass shooting. We have mass shootings in our country in the aggregate every single day.”
Democratic voters have ranked gun violence as one of the issues they’re most concerned about going into 2020. This is especially true for the millennial and Gen Z voters who will make up more than a third of the electorate next year. Both generations came of age in the post-Columbine era, as active-shooter and lockdown drills became regular features in schools across the country. According to one March poll, both generations included mass shootings in the top three issues they are most concerned about.
Few candidates have gotten into the nitty-gritty of what policies can solve the gun violence epidemic.
Most 2020 contenders are still in the early stages of fleshing out their platforms, but given how much voters care about the issue, it is notable that few candidates have gotten into the nitty-gritty of what policies can solve the gun violence epidemic, or how to put those measures into place.
That’s what makes Booker’s new plan stand out so much: It combines multiple policies that would provide only incremental progress as standalone measures. The main proposal, a federal gun licensing system, would require all gun owners to submit fingerprints and participate in a gun safety course in order to possess a firearm. (Former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper and 2020 presidential hopeful has also proposed a licensing program). Booker also wants to limit handgun purchases to one per month, a policy designed to prevent the bulk gun purchases that fuel interstate gun trafficking.
Another piece of Booker’s plan addresses an issue that gun control advocates have long called for: an end to the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” a gap in federal law that currently does not prohibit those convicted of committing a domestic violence offense against their non-married partner from gun possession. Most recently, he’s come out with a gun-suicide prevention plan that would require safe gun storage and provide grants to states to help with the implementation of so-called red flag laws, which allow certain people — usually family members and law enforcement — to petition judges to temporarily confiscate firearms from those deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.
Booker, like many other 2020 candidates, has other, more familiar policies that focus on preventing high-profile mass shootings: bans on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and bump stocks (the latter have already been banned by the Trump administration); and eliminating a loophole in federal gun laws that allow gun sales to proceed automatically if a background check takes longer than 72 hours, which is how the Charleston gunman was able to purchase the weapon he used to kill black parishioners in 2015.
While less far-reaching than Booker’s, Senator Kamala Harris’s plan also comes at the issue from multiple angles. It seeks to classify anyone who sells at least five guns per year as a dealer, meaning they must register with the federal government and run background checks on all buyers — a proposal Harris’s campaign calls “near universal background checks.” The plan would also hold gun manufacturers liable when they break the law.
These plans reckon with just how complex the gun violence epidemic really is, and how different demographics bear its effects in different ways. On average, more than 33,000 people are killed by guns annually in the United States, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2017, that number rose to nearly 40,000.
But getting these measures implemented, or even passed through Congress, is another question entirely. Both Booker and Harris instead plan to push their proposals through using executive orders, if necessary. The promise to at least try to use the power of the executive office for such specific and sweeping gun reforms is a testament to how much Democrats — at least those seeking to act on gun issues — have learned from the recent past: In January 2016, President Obama issued a vague executive action intended to crack down on gun retailers who sold firearms without a federal license. An analysis by The Trace revealed the policy had no discernible effect.
Other 2020 candidates have had to issue mea culpas for their previous support for gun-rights ideas: In the 2016 primary, Bernie Sanders was dinged voting in favor of a 2005 law that shields gun manufacturers and sellers from legal liability when their products are used to kill people. Tim Ryan, an Ohio representative running for president, also voted for that same law. And in 2008, Kirsten Gillibrand, then a member of the House, signed a brief in support of the man who challenged Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban all the way to the Supreme Court.
Still it’s somewhat remarkable that gun-friendly policies, which were once an easy win for Democrats in more conservative districts, have disappeared entirely from the party’s platform. The NRA has, in many ways, become synonymous with the GOP and, for their part, Sanders, Ryan, and Gillibrand — like the rest of the Democratic field — have all spoken aggressively against the NRA in more recent years.
It’s hard to guess whether a strong gun-reform platform will make a difference for a candidate like Booker, who is consistently polling in the low single digits. But the importance of this plan lies beyond his individual candidacy; it sets a new standard for future Democratic gun platforms. At the very least, it provides a tangible blueprint for effective and meaningful gun reform.
