#283 Gun Violence in America

If you are an entirely responsible, sane, and well-trained person who understands almost to the level of a religious principle how important it is to store your guns safely, then it is true that the swimming pool in your yard is a greater risk to friends and family than the gun that is safely locked in your house.

Having someone gain access to a classroom, and the ability to kill people at point-blank range, that is not a context where the unique advantages of an AR-15 are the problem. It's very easy to believe that Uvalde or Sandy Hook would have been, essentially, the same catastrophe had the shooter been armed only with handguns.

I think a mass shooting is defined as anything over 4 people getting shot in a single incident, but nevertheless, that is a rounding error on the problem of gun homicide in this country ... If we solved all the mass shootings magically, we would still have something like 99% of our gun homicide problem in this country.

I have very little affinity for the religious cult that is organized around the 2nd amendment in the US. And I share every liberal's outrage at the outsized influence that the NRA has had politically over the years and just how obscene it looks from the outside—and even from the inside—that America is such an outlier with respect to gun violence.

A world without guns is a world in which the strongest, most aggressive, most violent, most well-trained, and most numerous men always win.

I think getting a gun should be the equivalent of getting a pilot's license.

I've been a gun owner for many years. I've trained a lot with firearms of various types. I've gone down the rabbit hole there and discovered how fun it is to do that. I mean, once you admit that you have a reason to own a gun and you need to get well-trained to use it and to use it safely, then it becomes just incredibly fun to shoot. It's a guilty pleasure, honestly.

The overwhelming problem in our society with homicide and suicide based on firearms is a problem of handguns. So, all the talk about assault rifles, AR-15s, is not acknowledging that fact. But the other problem is handguns are never on the table for banning. I mean, it's a political non-starter.

If you've managed to lock yourself in a room with a dozen kids and you have some dozens of rounds of ammunition, you're going to be able to kill all those kids with whatever gun you have. And so that's just the problem of guns period; it's not a problem of assault weapons, and it's not a problem of high-capacity magazines.

I expected that Connecticut, which 10 years ago had the Sandy Hook disaster, to be one of the harder states to get a concealed carry permit; it's not.