THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 17
COMMENT
GUNSAND 2020
O
n September 12th, a little more
than a month after the weekend
that a shooter killed twenty-two peo-
ple and wounded twenty-four more at
a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and a man
killed nine people and wounded sev-
enteen outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio,
there was a moment of thrilling moral
clarity during the Democratic Presi-
dential debate. The former Texas con-
gressman Beto O’Rourke, speaking
about the kind of semi-automatic weap-
ons used in the massacres, made it clear
that he stood by his proposal not only
to ban such weapons but to institute a
mandatory buyback of them as well.
As he put it, memorably, “Hell yes,
we’re going to take your AR-15!”
Now O’Rourke is out of the race and
the mandatory-buyback idea seems to
have exited the stage with him. (Former
Vice-President Joe Biden and Mayor
Pete Buttigieg have endorsed voluntary
buybacks; all the Democrats currently
running support an assault-weapons ban
and universal background checks.) With
Michael Bloomberg, the former New
York mayor, who founded Everytown
for Gun Safety, now a candidate, there
will be at least one Democrat making
gun violence a central campaign issue.
But all the Democrats seeking the Pres-
idency would do well to channel some
of the passion it provokes.
Public support for stricter gun laws
is substantial, and growing. This isn’t
surprising in a country as haunted as
ours is by gun violence. As of Decem-
ber 6th, there have been more mass
shootings in the United States in 2019—
three hundred and ninety-one—than
there have been days in the year, accord-
ing to the Gun Violence Archive, a re-
search organization that tracks these in-
cidents. (The G.V.A. defines a mass
shooting as one involving a minimum
of four victims.) At the beginning of
this school year, TuffyPacks, a company
that makes “bullet-resistant” backpacks
for schoolchildren, reported that its sales
were up three hundred per cent. The
C.E.O. told USA Today, “A lot of par-
ents go, ‘This is a great product and a
great idea’ and the other half go, ‘What
a sad world that we have to think about
this for our children.’” And, after de-
cades of increasing longevity, Americans
are dying at younger ages, a phenome-
non in which the rising number of sui-
cides—made possible, in many cases, by
easy access to guns—plays a key role.
Despite the relentless efforts of spe-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
cial-interest groups such as the National
Rifle Association to defeat virtually any
gun regulation, many Americans will
no longer accept a brittle and suspect
interpretation of the Second Amend-
ment at the expense of human lives. A
Fox News poll taken in August, after
the killings in El Paso and Dayton,
showed that two-thirds of Americans
favor a ban on assault rifles and semi-au-
tomatic weapons. In a survey of likely
2020 voters, conducted earlier in the
summer by the polling group GQR,
more than one in four said that their
views on guns had changed during the
past five years, and, of those, seventy-
eight per cent said that they had shifted
toward stronger laws curbing guns.
Asked if they would support a volun-
tary-buyback program of the kind that
Australia instituted in 1996, encourag-
ing people to give up their assault-style
weapons, forty-two per cent of the likely
voters said that they “definitely” would,
and twenty-nine per cent said they
“probably” would. Other polls have
shown overwhelming support for uni-
versal background checks and gun-
owner licensing.
The movement for stricter gun leg-
islation has been revitalized in recent
years by new organizations and younger
voices. For a Presidential candidate,
supporting such measures need no lon-
ger entail the kind of political risk-tak-
ing, or solicitude for the gun lobby, that
it might have even five years ago. Yes,
some gun owners will go to defiant ex-
tremes—in Virginia, for instance, doz-
ens of rural counties have declared
themselves “Second Amendment sanc-
tuaries,” following the election of a
