Guns & doomsday: How can we reduce mass shootings and deaths?

Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire. Brain takes a serious as well as entertaining look at a world of possibilities for Earth and the human race. He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats.”

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RALEIGH – Today let’s talk about a real doomsday scenario that is having a gigantic and frequent impact on us all. As I finish this article, it’s been two weeks since 19 children and two teachers died in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

It occurred on May 24, 2022.

And it has been four weeks since the mass shooting in Buffalo, NY happened on May 14, where 10 innocent people died in a grocery store.

These two shootings are preceded by a whole enormous and gruesome parade of shootings as documented here. Then there were at least 13 smaller mass shootings over the past weekend leaving 12 people dead and 70 people injured .

These are tragedies

These massacres are horrible, tragic and heartbreaking, especially when children are involved, so they get a lot of attention. They rip apart the fabric of society and make us feel like we are in danger in our own communities. And then there are so many other ways that guns shock America: homicides, suicides, armed robberies, gang violence, and so on– tens of thousands of gun deaths per year.

Meanwhile the U.S. Senate is this week trying to pull together some sort of compromise gun bill with the hope that 60 senators can agree on anything that might help in any small way to stem the river of blood that guns cause in America. Assuming they are able to pass anything, it is likely to amount to baby steps forward as opposed to something significant.

There is no question that many Americans want the nation’s government to do something significant to make this grotesque gun problem go away, or at least diminish it in a noticeable way. Therefore we ask: What might we do to stop the bloodshed?

Photo courtesy of Marshall Brain

The goal of this article is to take a set of laws that already exist – laws that people in America accept and follow and take for granted in other parts of our lives every day – and simply apply them in the same way to guns. What might this approach look like? We will be able to see what is possible, because we are already doing these kinds of things elsewhere in society without any problems.

The First Thing to Understand is that Grenade Laws Do Work

Today I went down to my local Bass Pro Shop in Cary, NC. This is an immense 100,000 square foot store right in the middle of my community. The point being that this is not some back-alley operation – this is a major retailer with 200+ stores found all across America serving 200 million American customers per year.

Bass Pro Shops sell a LOT of guns. My local store has 120 different handguns on display and 200 different rifles and shotguns along the wall. Tons of ammo too in every possible size.

Bass Pro Shops gun department in Cary. (Photo my Marshall Brain)

But you know what they don’t sell at Bass Pro Shops? Military-style hand grenades.

Think how much damage a school shooter could do with a dozen hand grenades. A shooter could walk down the hall and toss a grenade in each room – the carnage would be horrifying. Door locked? Shoot out a window and toss in a grenade. And think how much more damage the 2017 Las Vegas shooter could have done with a grenade launcher firing into the crowd.

We see hand grenades and grenade launchers in action movies, war movies, superhero movies, and streaming specials all the time, so we all know they exist. Grenades are being manufactured and stockpiled for the U.S. Army. Yet it is very rare to see hand grenades being used in the real world.

Why is that? It’s because we have strong laws against grenades, and these laws work.

A fundamental thing to understand is that there are a lot of people lying about gun laws. Even people at the highest levels of government are lying. When politicians and gun advocates say that gun laws don’t work, they are spreading misinformation. Here are two things to keep in mind:

California gun laws do not work 100%, but they do work. Your chance of being killed by a gun in California is 8.4 deaths per 100,000 people. Meanwhile your chance of gun death In Texas is 14.5 because of weaker gun laws. Just look at the real data. Gun deaths do happen in California, because California is the most populous state in the country with almost 40 million residents, but there are many fewer gun deaths per capita in California. In Mississippi, with some of the nation’s weakest gun laws, there are 28.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people. The reason for fewer gun deaths per capita in California and 3X more in Mississippi is the big difference in gun laws between the two states.
States with stronger gun laws like Hawaii have the lowest rates of gun deaths. The number is 3.4 gun deaths per 100,000 in Hawaii. It is 3.7 in Massachusetts. You will never hear gun advocates or politicians talking about Hawaii and Massachusetts for this reason. The stricter gun laws in these states do work and do make these states much safer on a per capita basis.

If we want to cut the number of gun deaths in America, stronger gun laws will definitely help, despite all of the misinformation that gun advocates are spreading in bad faith. Just look at the number of grenade deaths in the United States – close to zero – and you can see that laws can and do work.

What is the logic for treating guns in any special way?

Our society has created all sorts of special laws around automobiles: traffic laws, licensing laws, registration laws, title laws, insurance laws, etc. Why? Because a two-ton automobile can cause a lot of damage when operated improperly. All of this regulation around automobiles is an obvious thing to do. No one is having their fundamental freedoms infringed because they need to get a driver’s license. Hundreds of millions of Americans have driver’s licenses and they have registered 270 million private automobiles.

So we ask: Shouldn’t America, at a national level, put lots of special laws around guns too? Yes, of course we should. Why? It seems obvious, but we should state the obvious here. It’s because guns are a consumer product specifically designed to kill people and people-sized animals. For example:

Why do police officers carry guns? To kill people when necessary.
Why do soldiers carry guns? To kill people when necessary.
Why do hunters carry guns? To kill people-sized animals like deer for food or sport.

In addition, modern guns are extremely effective and efficient at killing people. The gunman in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017 killed 60 people and wounded another 411 in just a few minutes. He fired off 1,000 rounds of ammunition very efficiently. There is no other consumer product that can do something like this by design.

Are there other consumer products that can kill people? Yes, of course. A hammer is a tool to pound nails. It is possible to kill someone with a hammer, but that is not its intent. With guns, the specific intent is to kill people. In addition, no one can sit in a hotel room and kill 60 people who are hundreds of feet away with a hammer. Guns project death outward quite a distance from the shooter.

Given this unique situation with guns, it is prudent to take extra steps to lessen gun carnage with unique and ubiquitous gun laws. And in the same way that we have absolute bans on military-style hand grenades, it seems logical to ban military-style guns too.

Won’t criminals simply sidestep any laws we create?

Criminals can and do sidestep laws. This is the definition of a criminal. Therefore, a common counterargument against guns laws is that criminals will simply sidestep any gun law.

But then we note that hand grenades are illegal nationally and very few criminals sidestep these anti-grenade laws. After Timothy McVeigh used Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer to blow up a building in Oklahoma City, we put stringent laws around Ammonium Nitrate:

“Primarily used in fertilizer, when mixed with other substances the chemical (Ammonium Nitrate) becomes highly explosive, the new legislation will require anyone buying more than 25 pounds to register, be screened against a known terrorist list, and require any thefts to be reported within 24 hours.”

Are these new laws 100% effective? No. But do they help to significantly cut down on copycats buying 5,000 pounds of Ammonium Nitrate as McVeigh did? Yes. The fact that a law might not be 100% effective does not make the law a bad idea. We have plenty of evidence all around us that laws work.

Idea #1 – Raise the age limit on owning guns nationwide

Imagine walking into your local convenience store. If you try to buy alcohol or cigarettes, they will card you. Right now in the United States, a person needs to be 21 years old to buy cigarettes, and 21 years old to buy alcoholic beverages. These are federal mandates in effect nationwide. In addition, there are penalties for anyone side-stepping the law by selling or giving cigarettes and alcohol to minors. These laws are not “acts of an oppressive authoritarian government” nor are they “imposing tyranny” on anyone. They are common sense laws to prevent these substances from getting into the hands of young people.

Therefore, we can apply the same logic to guns and raise the age of gun ownership to 21 at the federal level.

There are people who argue that the age of gun ownership should be higher than 21 because guns are designed to kill people and gun use can be so dangerous. 25-years-old is an age that comes up frequently in this context. Why? Because people don’t reach full brain maturity until age 25. Given that guns are designed to kill people, it seems completely reasonable that gun owners should have reached the age of brain maturity.

Idea #2 – Require a gun license just like a driver’s license nationwide

When my four kids received their driver’s licenses, they did four things to get ready: 1) They obtained a learner’s permit, 2) they took a formal driver education class, 3) they always had an adult in the car while practicing, and 4) they kept a driving log. Then to get the actual license there was: 1) a vision test, 2) a sign test, 3) a written test, and 4) a driving test administered by the state. They also had to present multiple forms of ID to get the REAL I.D. star – a new federal law. This is standard operating procedure with cars in most jurisdictions. We are not “oppressing anyone” or “restricting their fundamental freedoms” by requiring a driver’s license. It is the completely normal and reasonable thing to do.

Therefore, it makes sense that we should follow this same logic and require gun owners to obtain a gun license to own and operate their guns. The state can administer the vision, written and shooting tests just as it does for drivers. Given the dangerous nature of guns, the nation’s failure to require an operating license seems incredibly irresponsible.

How would we make this happen? Change it from the DMV to the DMVG – The Division of Motor Vehicles and Guns. It would be an easy thing to do since all the licensing apparatus is already in place. The practical shooting tests can be administered at certified gun ranges found by the thousands all around the country.

The other things happening at the DMV include things like car registrations, title transfers, license plates, and taxes. Cars do not transfer ownership unless the title is transferred at the DMV. Therefore: Require everyone to register their guns by serial number at the DMVG (just like they register their cars by VIN) and then require people to go through a title transfer process to buy or sell any gun. When new guns get purchased, automatically register the serial numbers and require a gun license at the time of purchase. When we discover unlicensed people with unregistered guns, we severely punish them as criminals and take their guns away.

We should also make gun owners periodically renew their licenses, just as we do with driver’s licenses.

Will nationwide gun licenses be 100% effective? No. But 1) they will be a huge win for gun safety, and 2) we know that driver’s licenses and car registrations are very effective. With gun licenses in place, we will know that every legal gun owner has passed written and practical safety tests. Right now, we require zero training to own a gun in many jurisdictions, and this is incredibly irresponsible when compared to what we require for cars, given the inherent danger involved with guns.

There is another aspect to gun ownership that makes licensure and renewal important, and this involves crimes of passion and crimes of despair.

Many jurisdictions do have “cooling off periods” in order to put some time between an event and a new gun purchase.
Many jurisdictions do have “red flag laws” (aka “extreme risk prevention orders”) to keep guns away from violent people and known criminals.
We also have background checks, although there are significant loopholes right now in many jurisdictions.

If someone is beating his girlfriend or has a restraining order, he shouldn’t be allowed to own/operate guns. If someone has robbed a convenience store, ditto. These are logical things to do. Let the DMVGs in every state tighten and strengthen all of these existing gun laws nationwide.

Some people would argue that we should go further and require a psychological evaluation before receiving or renewing a gun license. Pilots must get periodic medical examinations to hold a pilot’s license, so there is precedent. Others would argue for far more extensive training before owning a gun, identical in function to driver’s ed classes. It seems logical that operating a gun, which is designed to kill people, should require extensive training and certification.

Idea #3 – Require gun owners to obtain gun insurance nationwide

Before obtaining a driver’s license, most jurisdictions require the driver to get car insurance from a licensed insurance company. The insurance covers the cost of any damage done to others by the driver.

Guns can and do cause an incredible amount of damage and death. Therefore, we should require gun owners to obtain gun insurance in exactly the same way that car owners do. If gun owners do not obtain and maintain insurance for their guns, we punish them as criminals and take away their guns.

This brings up a logical side effect. Because of insurance companies, we have the point system that applies when drivers violate traffic laws. We can do the same for guns – when people violate gun laws, they accrue points and can get their gun licenses revoked. Are you drunk while carrying a gun? You get a gun DUI and lose your gun license. Things like that.

Again, we are not “radically imposing draconian measures on gun owners” by mandating things like gun insurance. This is all common and mundane stuff that everyone already does with automobiles, and no one bats an eye at it.

Idea #4 – Limit the amount of ammunition people can buy nationwide

If I go to Walgreens to buy Sudafed or Wal-phed, I must give them my driver’s license and sign a form stating that I am using this drug legally for a therapeutic purpose. And I can only buy so much Sudafed per period of time. This is standard procedure mandated by the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005. Is it an “infringement of my fundamental freedoms” or “a violation of my liberties” when the pharmacy does this? Of course not – no one bats an eye at stuff like this, because it serves a worthwhile purpose.

Why do I need to present my driver’s license and sign a form to purchase Sudafed? Because criminals use Sudafed as a starting point when making Methamphetamine. We have this record-keeping process in place as a society to tamp down on the production of Meth. If I try to buy too much Sudafed in too short a period of time, someone will question me and make sure there isn’t criminal intent.

Why not have the same kind of process in place for ammunition? When the Uvalde shooter started his rampage, he had 1,600 rounds of ammo on hand. Why was that possible? The shooter in Las Vegas shot more than 1,000 rounds in 10 minutes and had many more rounds on hand. Certainly, this massive amount of ammo is unnecessary for any private citizen to have.

We can track ammo purchases just like we track Sudafed purchases.

Most gun owners purchase their guns for personal protection. How many rounds of ammo does a person need? Six rounds for a revolver? Ten for a Glock? And then these rounds will never be used in most cases, so their owner will never purchase ammo again.
If a hunter is going to go deer hunting for a day, how many rounds do they need? Five? Ten? Even if they miss half their shots, how many deer are they going to shoot?
If someone says, “I want to shoot 100 practice rounds of ammo at the gun range”, let them purchase the 100 rounds at the gun range and then return the unused ammo.

No one needs 1,600 rounds of ammo in their home. Especially an 18-year-old. The whole idea is ludicrous.

Idea #5 – Protect our schools like we protect airports

When terrorists used airports and airplanes during the attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States said, “we will not allow people with weapons to enter airports.” We hardened all our airports and created the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to screen passengers and luggage. The TSA system is identical (and identically stringent) at all airports. This effort has a cost, but it also has a big safety benefit. The cost of the TSA is paid for by fees added to plane tickets. There has not been another terrorist incident like 9/11 since installing the TSA and hardening airports.

Everyone coming into an airport gets screened for weapons by the TSA. Thousands of people are blacklisted on the no-fly list and cannot fly at all. Many other facilities have been hardened in this way to varying degrees, including:

Sports arenas and stadiums
Concert venues
Cruise ships
Amusement parks
Power plants
Conventions (even parts of the recent NRA convention in Houston were hardened)
Courthouses and other government buildings
Some office buildings

Now that terrorists are regularly attacking our schools, is it time to harden schools and create the School Safety Administration (SSA)? This seems completely logical.

Some will argue that this would be expensive. But schools are already expensive. The high school that my children attended (Athens Drive High School in Raleigh) has 2,000+ students and 100+ trained educators. Adding additional SSA members and comprehensive screening requirements to definitively harden the school is a small additional expense, relatively speaking. And we can pay for this additional expense by charging a fee to gun owners now that they all have gun licenses. There are estimated to be perhaps 70 million gun owners in the United States. If each one paid an annual $100 gun fee to fund the SSA, we could have billions of dollars to help offset the cost of the SSA.

Some might argue that this extra security could frighten children. It is difficult to imagine this, given that we are already holding active shooter drills in schools and seeing so many actual school shootings in the news. If anything, extra SSA security might be a relief to both students, teachers and parents. This video shows the nature of active shooter drills today:

We can help reduce mass shootings and gun deaths

What if we take laws that we already have in our lives and apply them to guns and ammo? In this article we have explored 5 different ideas that would help to reduce mass shootings and gun deaths:

Raise the age for gun ownership to 21 nationwide. We already have national age regulations on cigarettes and alcohol, so this law should be trivially easy to implement. Bonus points for raising the age of gun ownership to 25 because guns are so dangerous.
Require anyone owning or operating a gun to obtain a gun license. We already require hundreds of millions of drivers to have driver’s licenses, so gun licenses should be trivially easy to do. Convert the DMV to the DMVG and let the DMVG handle gun licenses. Add nationwide background checks and red flag laws and cooling off periods and no-gun lists to keep bad actors from getting licenses. Have all gun owners register their guns by serial number at the DMVG just like they register their cars by VIN. Do not allow any gun to transfer ownership without the gun’s title transferring via the DMVG. In other words, simply take everything we already do at the DMV for cars and apply it also to guns at the DMVG.
Require gun owners and gun license holders to obtain gun insurance, just like we require car insurance.
Put limits on the amount of ammunition that people can buy, in the same way we track purchases of Sudafed and Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer.
Harden our schools with a federal School Safety Administration (SSA) in the same way that we have hardened airports with the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA).

None of these proposed gun laws are new or different from the laws in other parts of our lives. We already have age limits, driver’s licenses, car insurance, car titles, limits on Sudafed purchases, and the TSA running smoothly. Simply apply all the same kinds of laws to guns, since guns are specifically designed to kill people. With these gun laws in place nationwide, gun deaths per 100,000 people will go down dramatically, and America will be a much safer place to live. We have plenty of evidence to prove this from grenade laws and from the strong gun laws in the states with the lowest rates of gun deaths.