All sides of the American gun debate can agree on one thing: American gun control has failed us. Our gun control regime is disorganized, nonsensical, porous, and rife with loopholes and contradictions.
Pro-gun partisans argue that gun control has failed because gun deaths in America have undergone a multi-decade decline despite an increase in the number of guns in civilian hands. Anti-gunners argue that the recent increase in mass shootings and the on-going litany of homicides, suicides, and accidents prove that more needs to be done.
I think there’s some truth in both positions, but I’m less interested in debating the failings of gun control than I am in thinking about what comes after it. And what I hope comes after it is a shift in focus from defining the “what” to defining the “who”.
The older gun culture that I and many others came up in was primarily social, not individual. Gun ownership and use were connected to tradition, heritage, and shared rituals and spaces and institutions—the deer camp, the range, the Boy Scout troop, the family farm.
Gun Culture 2.0 has lost much of this, and it has become an individual consumer/lifestyle type of thing. It’s now consumer-driven, and it’s about accessories and gear and acquisition. All of that stuff is fine, but what’s missing is the broader social context that formed gun-owning individuals’ character by passing on the norms, attitudes, and practices that made gun ownership sacred and, to a large extent, safe.
We’ll never go back in time to the hunting-centered gun culture of yesteryear. But we can look back to that era as inspiration, and try to reconstruct some sort of collective approach to gun ownership that relies on gun owners to vet and qualify one another. And I think we can do that in a way that’s primarily local (not federal) and therefore retains a bit of the spirit of the militia that preceded the founding of this nation.
If this repo ends up being a place for rational conversation about getting gun owners to work together to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people, I’ll consider that a win.
Even better would be if it could ultimately contain a set of documents laying out some guiding principles that both sides of this debate can come together and agree on, and then some sort of system that implements those principles.
I don’t imagine that any laws would be drafted here. Rather, I’m imagining that this repo could produce something like the “term sheet” that precedes an actual contract between two parties. We’d discuss the broad outlines and some specifics, and leave the language for later.
Right now, there's just a barebones proposal and the start of a FAQ:
For general feedback on the above, please use the issues queue. For edits and/or proposed changes, please submit a PR.
Note that for major proposed changes, let's talk through it in the issues queue first, by creating an issue, and then move to an actual PR once we've fleshed out what we want to do.