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The Three Pillars of Gun Violence
By Kent R. Kroeger (June 14, 2022)
[Data used in this essay can be downloaded from GITHUB.]
Last month’s Buffalo supermarket and Uvalde (Texas) Elementary School massacres that killed 31 people in total has rekindled what is now a recurring ritual in our country: Democrats lamenting that substantive gun control legislation is sorely needed, and Republicans expressing their sympathy for the victims and their families while simultaneously lamenting that Democrat-supported gun control legislation will not significantly reduce gun violence.
Sadly, the public dialogue in the aftermath of these human atrocities has more in common with performance art than it does with legitimate policy debate.
Yet, there is a reason to be optimistic that actual gun control legislation will be passed by the U.S. Congress this year.
This week a group of U.S. Senators, including ten Republicans, announced it had arrived at a tentative proposal to pass the most substantive gun control measures since the Bill Clinton administration. The U.S. House has already approved gun regulation measures — though it is unlikely that bill in its current form will ever pass the U.S. Senate.
While the legislative details on the Senate bill have not been finalized, the general agreement is that it will…
