Well, here we are again with another mass shooting in AmericaA, this time in Orlando, Florida. This is the first such catastrophe since my last post on the subjectA six months ago, which followed a string of almost one mass shooting a month over the six month period before that. And still no solution. I saw a clever suggestion on Facebook, where some gentleman invoked the same rhetoric that Donald Trump used in his plan to ban all Muslims to call for a ban on all assault weapons and weapons of mass destruction only until the United States was able to get a handle on dealing with crazy people and began educating our children again (which were cited in that Facebook discussion as reasons for the rampage). Strangely enough, this idea didn’t seem to be as popular as Trump’s. We’ve also seen the difficulty in passing a law preventing people on the “No Fly” list from getting a gunA – something that most people consider sensible.
Plan B
Since we will apparently never agree to restrict the ownership of firearms in any way (even though we have no problem regulating less dangerous products), we need to institute some sort of bag limits. I am in favor of lifetime limits rather than seasonal limits. There is still some debate on whether the limit on family members should be higher or lower than the limit on innocent strangers (the definition of “innocent” can be worked out later if it is even relevant to this discussion). To get the ball rolling, I’ll throw out a few numbers that we can iron out in the comment section. I propose a lifetime limit of one adult white male per person (some restrictions may apply) regardless of the number of guns owned. Since up to now, damages for such offenses typically considered the earning power of the victim (which never seemed right to me), the bag limit for females should be about 1.5 (I’m not quite sure how to deal with round-off error; maybe we could start at two, but drop the limit to one if you’ve already met your male limit). The limit on Muslims would, of course, be three (we need to keep the limit for any one incident below four so we don’t trigger the commonly used definition of a mass shooting, and can therefore look better than the French). Since Jews are still the most persecuted religious group in AmericaA, we’ll set their limit at two. As usual, there will be no limit on black males, except for overzealous law enforcement agencies.
If we follow this plan, the mass-shooting statistics are guaranteed to go down. But if the overall gun violence statistics increase intolerably we could either go to a lottery system or increase the permit fees. (As the fees for especially popular groups start to increase, we may need to find a way to control poaching. We can worry about that later.) Both of these solutions have been successful with other game. If the fees are high enough, we could lower other taxes. I would start with the taxes devoted to education, since I suspect that those most likely to object to this plan may have some level of intelligence. We could export the catch to China and convince them it’s more humane than the dog meat they are now using. If we corner the market for this resource, that too would increase tax revenue.
Did I forget anything? I realize that this solution may not pass the test for political correctness, but based on some of the feedback I saw in the Facebook discussion, that alone could make the plan more attractive to some people.
What do you think? If you have a more workable plan, let’s hear it. If, on the other hand, your plan depends on Hell freezing over, you might as well keep it to yourself.
