How to get meaningful gun reform passed

[Crackpot]

in philosophy since it's a "how to"

Vote out the Republicans that are in the pocket of the NRA.

It's just that simple.

Once that happens the (almost assuredly) Democratic majority will get right to drafting meaningful gun reform....

That will far overshoot the bounds of their mandate going so far that many of their own people won't even vote for it. Leaving it dead in the water as they wring hands and point fingers as to why it didn't pass.

Fuck.

We're screwed.

[Big RR]

And let's not forget that the NRA is an equal opportunity purchaser; plenty of dems get NRA funds.

[wesw]

uh, vote the bums out?

brilliant. I agree. vote out everyone who is in anyone s pocket

the voters vote for 2nd amendment supporters whether or not the NRA exists

[dales]

How to get meaningful gun reform passed

We have enough firearm prohibitions (at least in CALIFORNIA).

Doesn't the Windy City (aka:Chicago) have some of the strictest firearms legislation and the wholesale murder rate is unabated?

A .357 wheelgun is looking prettier and prettier!

eta: Mexico has total forearms prohibition, look how well that is working out!

[Econoline]

...total forearms prohibition...

[dales]

[Guinevere]

Overturn Citizens United and allow meaningful campaign finance reform!

[rubato]

Throw out the party who made it illegal for the CDC and NIH to research a health problem that kills > 30,000 people a year:


http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9465649/gu ... search-cdc

What forms of gun control work best? Congress bans federal agencies from finding out.

Updated by German Lopez on October 6, 2015, 3:45 p.m. ET @germanrlopez german.lopez@vox.com
Tweet (340) Share (1,549) +

The federal government is willfully ignorant about guns.

When you don't know enough about something, your reaction is probably to research it — on Google, on Wikipedia, at the library. The federal government is supposed to respond in a similar way when it has questions about certain laws and policies. So if there's a public health crisis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is usually charged with looking into the matter by funding studies and research that look into the best policies to deal with the issue.

But there's one thing the federal government won't study, even though it presents a clear public health threat: guns. That's because, starting in 1996, Congress imposed major restrictions on what kind of gun violence research the CDC can do. And the agency has interpreted the restrictions to stop almost all gun-related research.

Now former Rep. Jay Dickey, the Republican congressman who spearheaded the ban, is apologetic about its effects. Following the Umpqua Community College shooting, Dickey told the Huffington Post, "I wish we had started the proper research and kept it going all this time. I have regrets. … If we had somehow gotten the research going, we could have somehow found a solution to the gun violence without there being any restrictions on the Second Amendment."

But stopping this kind of research is exactly what pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) wanted when they supported it. For decades, the NRA and other gun rights advocates have done everything they can to stop the treatment of firearms as a public health issue — even as these weapons kill tens of thousands of Americans each year.
Congress's restrictions stifled gun violence research
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
... "

[oldr_n_wsr]

This is an interesting take and proposed bill.
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/guns-con ... 49362.html

Guns, Congress and Murphy’s Law
Matt Bai
National Political Columnist

‎October‎ ‎08‎, ‎2015
Chances are you’d never heard of Tim Murphy before last week, even if you follow politics pretty closely. Or maybe you just couldn’t keep him straight among the other Murphys in Congress. (There are three at the moment, including a senator from Connecticut.)

Suddenly, though, this Murphy, a Republican congressman from the Pittsburgh area, is on virtually every network. Reporters are lighting up the switchboard at his cramped office in the Rayburn Building, while presidential candidates line up to invoke his name — all because Tim Murphy has devoted the past few years of his life to writing an arcane, 153-page bill that’s gone exactly nowhere in Congress and may well die there.

It’s a story that says a lot about what’s wrong with our politics right now. You might call it Washington’s version of Murphy’s Law: Anytime politicians can choose a simple worldview over a complex solution, they will.

The issue here is gun violence. After another twisted, horrific mass shooting last week, this time in Oregon, Democratic leaders — led by President Obama and the party’s most likely nominee, Hillary Clinton — immediately reached for their dusty policy shelves and pulled down a bunch of longstanding proposals aimed at gun traffickers and criminals. These include cracking down on dealers at gun shows, banning high-capacity ammunition clips and revoking the protection of gun makers from liability suits.

I could make a persuasive case for most of these ideas (particularly the limit on ammunition), except that, taken together, they wouldn’t do very much to prevent the kind of shooting we saw in Roseburg — or in Newtown, or Tucson, or in name-your-blood-soaked-town. This Chris Harper-Mercer didn’t buy his guns at unregulated gun shows, nor did he spray large quantities of bullets indiscriminately.

The Democratic response brings to mind the memorable words of Rahm Emanuel, who, as White House chief of staff during the worst of the financial crisis, remarked that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. The underlying issue, as most urban Democrats see it, is the American gun culture itself, and shootings like the one in Oregon present an opening to press the larger case.

Then you have these Republican leaders — you know, in the Lord of the Flies sense of the word — whose responses mostly range somewhere between philosophical and callous. Jeb Bush despairs, clumsily, that people do crazy stuff and you can’t always stop them, while Ben Carson says it actually couldn’t happen to him because he’d swat the gun away and do some kind of ninja thing. Imagine being the grieving parent who had to hear that.

Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail uniformly reject any problem with the guns themselves and point, instead, to some vague and ethereal concept of “mental illness” in the society. The implication being that even if you could wave a magic wand and disappear all of the 300 million-odd guns in the country tomorrow, tormented 20-somethings would still be bursting into classrooms armed with Ginsu knives or cat-o’-nine-tails.

I kind of doubt it.

The truth, of course, is that these kinds of shootings have nothing to do with the firearms enthusiasts you find at gun shows, or the millions of Americans who get treatment for some form of mental illness and pose a danger to no one. What’s at issue in these isolated cases is how to keep guns away from a very small number of profoundly sick individuals (and in some cases from the parents who, for reasons I find impossible to fathom, actually encourage their disturbed kids to use firearms, as happened in Newtown and Roseburg).

This is where Murphy, a seventh-term congressman and clinical psychologist of 40 years, comes in. As a commander in the Navy Reserve, he still treats traumatized soldiers at Bethesda Naval Hospital.,

After the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Murphy, who leads a subcommittee on government oversight and investigations, asked the Republican leadership if he could look into government programs that are supposed to address the most severe and violent kinds of mental illness. His investigation led him to write the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, known familiarly in the Capitol by its bill number, 2646.

Murphy’s sprawling bill would amend the existing federal privacy laws, so that in cases of serious mental illness (and only in those cases), a consulting doctor would have the ability to call the patient’s parent or caregiver and share information about medications and follow-up treatment. Not incidentally, that’s when a doctor might also learn something about guns in the home.

That same loosening of the privacy laws would apply to universities and other institutions, so that administrators could let parents know if a student had been treated for an acute bout of mental illness.

Under 2646, Medicaid would no longer deny reimbursement for hospitals with more than 16 psychiatric beds — a decades-old rule meant to shut down hospitals of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest variety. Nor would the program prohibit urgent-care doctors from immediately handing off a patient to a psychiatrist without having to wait a day, as it does now.

If you try to buy a gun tomorrow, the federal database for background checks will flag you as a threat only if you’ve been given involuntary treatment for mental illness — that is, if you’ve been forcibly brought to a hospital or committed against your will. Murphy wants to increase the number of therapists and available beds in rural communities, to make involuntary commitment a more practical option for judges.

The bill would modestly fund a series of pilot projects for programs that have succeeded in the states, like a telepsychiatry hotline for primary care doctors, while steering money away from federal priorities like the one advising stressed kids to drink fruit smoothies. (Seriously. Read the General Accounting Office’s full report.) And 2646 would create a new assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services to oversee all federal programs dedicated to mental health.

No one is suggesting that Murphy’s proposals, many of which I’ve elided here, would magically transform the culture or prevent more heartbreaking mass shootings. But it’s fair to say that it would give doctors, judges, families and schools more tools to work with when they come in contact with a severely disturbed kid who might be armed.

And it’s worth noting that 2646 could have a real impact on suicidal patients, too, who account for the vast majority of gun-related tragedies in America.

“The federal policies toward serious mental illness are abusive and neglectful and make it even worse for people who are minorities or low income, plain and simple,” Murphy told me when we sat down in his office earlier this week. He is brisk and businesslike, in the manner of a psychologist, although he looks a bit like Steve Carell.

Murphy is a loyal Republican, with the standard-issue bust of Ronald Reagan sitting on an end table. But he steadfastly refused to get into a dead-end conversation about the Second Amendment or gun ownership generally.

“I’m focused on what’s in their head, not in their hand,” he said. “I want to prevent the problems, and when they emerge, I want to ensure that we do the proper risk assessment, and that persons who have a tendency toward violence, if they are seriously mentally ill, should not be able to attain weapons. That’s what I’m focused on cleaning up. That’s what I can do.”

Only he can’t — or not without some support from his own party’s leadership, anyway. At a minimum, you’d think Murphy’s bill would spark a long overdue conversation about the balance between civil liberties, on one hand, and public safety from gun violence on the other.

That’s a debate we’ve been having when it comes to Islamic terrorism for years now. It’s a good bet that most parents worry more about some psychotic shooter in their kids’ school then they do about the Islamic State, and yet there’s virtually no discussion in the country about when we sacrifice medical confidentiality to get guns away from those who are clearly dangerous.

But while more than a dozen lawmakers have signed on to Murphy’s bill since last week (he has, at last count, 97 Republican co-sponsors and 40 Democrats), 2646 may well remain stuck in the purgatory of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has been focused on other worthy initiatives, like investing in cures for rare diseases.

When I asked Murphy why he thought his bill hadn’t come up for a vote, he shrugged and said he didn’t know.

What we do know is that Republicans are generally wary of anything that runs afoul of libertarians or gun-loving conspiracy theorists, or any bill that expands the reach of government. Just as the White House — which could be jumping on this bill as a consensus measure to address the shootings — doesn’t want to do anything that might be seen as blaming mental illness, rather than blaming the gun.

And so the sad fact is that a sensible bill that actually might begin to do something about this sickening entanglement of guns and delusion has about as much chance of reaching the president’s desk as we do of getting through the next six months without another classroom slaughter.

Washington already has its Murphy’s Law, and it’s not the one that could save some lives.

[BoSoxGal]

It isn't the lack of beds or providers that limits the involuntary commitments in this country - it's the very strong laws in favor of the mentally ill person which set a very, very high bar for involuntary commitment.

Beyond which, looking at just the Oregon shooter and the Sandy Hook shooter (but my recollection is this applies to many other recent spree shooters, family annihilators, etc.), the bar against firearm ownership for persons previously involuntarily treated or hospitalized wouldn't have made a difference. The majority of people committing these crimes have never before exhibited homicidal or suicidal ideation/action sufficient to meet the bar for the involuntary commitment process in many states.

What we really need is far more abundant mental health resources in every community, with special attention to resources in schools, so that persons with MH issues can get the counseling that will save their lives (40k+ suicides/year) and in rarer cases, the lives of others, too.

[Sue U]

The focus on "mentally ill" shooters is a total red herring. Yes, it's the mentally unbalanced who engage in the most media-sensational mass shootings (a school! a movie theater! a shopping mall!), but the day-in day-out mass shootings around the country -- not to mention the routine homicides -- are much more mundane affairs by much more "ordinary" people, who happen to have access to guns at times of particular anger or stress. Then add to that the gun murders committed during basic criming. The issue of gun violence isn't so much a mental health issue, it is a gun issue. There are too many guns, and too many people have access to them. Fewer guns = fewer gun crimes. For the "responsible gun owners" out there, too bad so sad the rotten apples are spoiling your shooty fun. But when "sport" comes with a body count this big, it must give way to our country's greater needs.

[rubato]

The focus on "mentally ill" shooters is a total red herring. Yes, it's the mentally unbalanced who engage in the most media-sensational mass shootings (a school! a movie theater! a shopping mall!), but the day-in day-out mass shootings around the country -- not to mention the routine homicides -- are much more mundane affairs by much more "ordinary" people, who happen to have access to guns at times of particular anger or stress. Then add to that the gun murders committed during basic criming. The issue of gun violence isn't so much a mental health issue, it is a gun issue. There are too many guns, and too many people have access to them. Fewer guns = fewer gun crimes. For the "responsible gun owners" out there, too bad so sad the rotten apples are spoiling your shooty fun. But when "sport" comes with a body count this big, it must give way to our country's greater needs.

It isn't a complete red herring but I agree that it is only a partial explanation.

And it isn't that we have people who are mentally ill or that we have undiagnosed people who are mentally ill it is that we are so awash in guns so it is more surprising if some don't have guns.


yrs,
rubato

[Big RR]

Sue--what are "day-in-day-out" mass shootings. I recall reading a while back a Harvard study that said there are about 6 mass shootings a year (1 around every 60-65 days). I imagine it might depend on how the term is defined, but these are shootings which do not involve families and in which a certain number of people are shot or killed. I agree most homicides are not due to mentally ill people (but some are), but somehow I imagine these 6 or so incidents are.

[Sue U]

Thanks to the magic of the interwebz, the tracking of mass shootings has become a lot better; we are actually averaging more than one a day:

Wonkblog
We’re now averaging more than one mass shooting per day in 2015

By Christopher Ingraham August 26

Aug. 26 is the 238th day of the year. And with the fatal shooting in Virginia today — in which a gunman shot himself after killing two reporters and wounding one more person — plus the shooting of four during a Minneapolis home invasion, the number of mass shooting incidents has risen to 247 for the year.

These numbers are compiled by the moderators of the GunsAreCool subreddit, a sarcastically named community that tracks gun violence in America. They define "mass shooting" as any single incident in which at least four people are shot, including the gunman. The tracker comes in for some criticism because its definition is broader than the FBI's definition, which requires three or more people to be killed by gunfire. But the broader definition is nonetheless a useful one, because it captures many high-profile instances of violence — like the recent Lafayette theater shootings — that don't meet the FBI's criteria.



Some gun rights advocates — like John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center — object that the broader definition includes a lot of gang killings and domestic disputes that the average person wouldn't necessarily consider a "mass shooting." But there's an uncomfortable assumption here that some crime victims' lives should be valued differently — or are less worthy of attention — than others.

A more expansive definition of "mass shooting" underscores the extent to which firearms make it relatively easy to hurt large numbers of people in a very short time. With a gun, you're able to inflict bodily harm on a person once they're in your line of sight. With something like a knife or your hands, you need to get right up close to a person.

There's no easy fix to gun violence in this country. As gun rights proponents are quick to point out, municipalities with strict gun laws, like Chicago and D.C., see more than their fair share of gun crime. But it's nevertheless a fact that the level of gun violence we see in the U.S. is like nothing seen in other wealthy Western nations.

Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.

Source: WaPo

[Big RR]

Well, if we are referring to all shootings with multiple victims as mass shootings, then I understand the difference in statistics. Thanks.

[Sue U]

Four or more shot. Up to three victims, that's just your run-of-the-mill shooting event, not even worth the time to track, apparently.

Also, these are people shot, but not necessarily (all) killed, which I think gives a truer picture of the scope of gun violence. It's not just "isolated incidents" by "mentally unstable" gunmen. This has become obscenely routine.

[Gob]

Four people being shot in one month, in the UK or Aus, would be a nationally notes outrage.

[Gob]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34487997

[dales]

Four people being shot in one month, in the UK or Aus, would be a nationally notes outrage.

Not really, with all the crap those living in Aus. or the UK must suffer through.

[rubato]

Four people being shot in one month, in the UK or Aus, would be a nationally notes outrage.

Not really, with all the crap those living in Aus. or the UK must suffer through.

Where they have no freedom and cry all day long.


yrs,
rubato