Something Has to Change

It's a temperate Thursday in February and there was yet another mass shooting yesterday. This time, it was in a high school in Florida. 17 people dead at the hands of a 19-year-old former student. As heartbreaking as it is, it's becoming all too routine. While I don't have much hope that things will change and don't have the delusions of grandeur to think that a blog post from me will significantly shift the narrative, I feel compelled to at least put my thoughts and the changes I've been advocating down on digital paper. Some may consider me a hypocrite because I work for a company that sells guns, but I'm not anti-gun at all. Rather, I'm for increased gun safety. I believe these changes would create a safer environment for both those who own guns and those who do not. Here are the legal steps I believe we should take:

1) Create a federal database cataloging all new gun purchases.
2) Enact both carrot and stick laws that would compel owners of previously purchased guns to register them in the database.
3) Close the "gun show loophole" and require all gun purchases, even those between friends or family, to go through an FFL (Federal Firearms License) dealer with a full background check.
4) Stiffen penalties on legal gun owners who have their guns stolen due to failure to properly secure them or fail to report thefts immediately.
5) Create a federal (or state-run with reciprocity) licensing system, modeled after driver's licensing, for all firearms ownership that includes comprehensive training and requires regular renewals.
6) Shift some of the resources currently being used to enforce immigration towards catching and convicting straw purchasers and other purveyors of illegal weapons.
7) Remove the restrictions that keep the CDC from studying gun violence and, after the previously created systems have been in place for five years together, assess their effectiveness to see if more changes are needed.

Would these changes instantly reduce homicide rates to zero and make mass shootings a thing of the past? Of course not. 100% effectiveness is an impossible goal for any law to achieve. But that's the ridiculous standard that gun advocates hold potential gun laws to. Because they're staunchly afraid of any change. But I'm fearful too. I'm afraid of another day like yesterday. And I have a lot more evidence that more mass shootings are on the horizon than they have for their imagined draconian dystopia. So many people try to make these conversations about "freedom," but what's a more fundamental freedom than the freedom to go to school or work or to a night on the town without being shot and killed by some madman? Life comes before Liberty for a reason. Right now, we're sacrificing too many lives so the 25% of Americans who own firearms can avoid a relatively small inconvenience to their liberty and continue to have unfettered access. That's just not logical. None of the proposals I've put forth would lead to the fabled world where only "bad guys" have guns. So really, what is there to fear? What reason is there not to act? How can we call ourselves humane and claim to care about other Americans if we continue to do nothing?