Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.
“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.
Can we not do both? Metaphorically - and literally - stem the bleeding? Sure, people will switch to knives, trucks, whatever else. However, as countries who have heavily regulated firearm ownership recently, like Australia, have shown, violent crime goes down significantly once it becomes much harder to access firearms. Some of this does actually boil down to psychology - there’s a heavily-studied mental disconnect between pulling a trigger to shoot at a human being, vs physically assaulting a human being with a knife or blunt object with intent to kill. This says nothing of the fact that knife wounds, blunt force trauma, whatever, are all MUCH easier to deal with on a medical level, and the fact that you can’t stab or beat 30+ people to death in a short span of time the way you can shoot people with a semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle.
Taking guns affects gun crimes.
Addressing the societal/cultural/economic issues affects guns, knives, bombs, cars, bludgeons, and barehanded crimes.
Knives are used to kill three times more often than rifles. For ever 100 rifle killings, there are another 300 knife killings. Consider these 400 crimes, and take all the rifles. All of them. Assume 100% effectiveness: all rifle crimes are eliminated, and none of the rifle-criminals switch to knives. Best case scenario, 25% effectiveness; 300 of those 400 are dead.
Now, focus on the socioeconomic conditions that lead people to kill. Focus on the murderous intent. Your social/cultural approach only needs to have 25% effectiveness to achieve the same result. When we target the whole of the problem, we don’t even have to be very good at it to achieve phenomenal results.
To answer your question, yes, we can do something useless and pointless, and address the societal issues, and work the actual problem.
What we can’t do is just the useless, pointless something, without addressing the social issues, and expect anything to actually improve.
We must enact universal healthcare. We must fundamentally address economic disparity with a punitively high top-tier tax rate like we had until the 1970’s and 80’s. We must address food insecurity, housing insecurity.
We must soften or eliminate criminal sanctions for non-violent offenses, and we must throw away the key for habitual violent offenders, a