By MICHAEL COOPER, MICHAEL LUO and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
A new federal assault weapons ban and background checks of all gun buyers, which President Obama is expected to propose on Wednesday, might have done little to prevent the massacre in Newtown, Conn., last month. The semiautomatic rifle that Adam Lanza used to shoot 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults complied with Connecticut’s assault weapons ban, the police said, and he did not buy the gun himself.
But another proposal that Mr. Obama is expected to make could well have slowed Mr. Lanza’s rampage: banning high-capacity magazines, like the 30-round magazines that the police said Mr. Lanza used, which have been factors in several other recent mass shootings.
Those shootings, whose victims have included a member of Congress in Arizona, moviegoers in Colorado and first graders in Connecticut, have horrified the country and inspired Washington to embark on the most extensive re-examination of the nation’s gun laws in a generation. But some of the proposals that Mr. Obama is expected to make at the White House on Wednesday, which are likely to include a call for expanded background checks, a ban on assault weapons and limits on high-capacity clips, will be intended not only to prevent high-profile mass shootings, but also to curb the more commonplace gun violence that claims many thousands more lives every year.
“The president has made clear that he intends to take a comprehensive approach,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday. Mr. Carney said the proposals were aimed, broadly, at what he called “the scourge of gun violence in this country.”
While semiautomatic rifles were used in several recent mass shootings, including those in Newtown and in Aurora, Colo., where 12 people were killed at a movie theater in July, a vast majority of gun murders in the United States are committed with handguns.
In 2011, 6,220 people were killed by handguns, and 323 by rifles, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So while the administration is expected to try to restrict some types of assault weapons, it is also focusing on ways to keep more commonly used firearms out of the hands of dangerous criminals and people with mental illness.
Of course, the administration must keep political realities in mind as it drafts its proposals: getting any new gun regulations through Congress, particularly through the Republican-controlled House, is seen as difficult. So the White House must not only weigh the effectiveness of its proposals, but also their political feasibility.
The top priority of many gun control groups is to expand the background checks so that they apply to all buyers. All federally licensed firearms dealers are required to run background checks through the computerized databases that comprise the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. But the requirement does not cover guns that are sold at gun shows and in other private sales, which account for about 40 percent of gun purchases in the country.
Better background checks would have had little effect on several recent mass shootings — both Mr. Lanza, in Connecticut, and Jacob T. Roberts, who opened fire on a mall full of Christmas shoppers a few days earlier in Clackamas, Ore., were using weapons that they did not buy. But gun control groups say that expanded background checks would help keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals and people with mental illness, and would go a long way toward increasing public safety and could help prevent mass shootings.
Gun control groups have encouraged the administration to look beyond mass shootings. When the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a leading gun control group, issued its recommendations to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has been developing the administration’s proposals, it urged him to develop ideas that could help curb everyday gun violence as well.
“Every death is a tragedy, whether in a mass shooting that horrifies our entire nation, or one of the 32 gun murders or 90 gun deaths in our communities and homes every day,” it wrote.
With many of the proposals in Washington expected to be somewhat limited in scope, some public health researchers and gun control advocates said it was difficult to know what impact the recommendations might have.
“To have a huge, huge effect, we’re going to need a sea change in not just the laws but social norms,” David Hemenway, the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
American civilians have 250 million to 300 million firearms, said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. “Those firearms are not going to go away anytime soon,” he said.
More serious steps — like those taken by Australia, which reacted to a 1996 mass shooting by banning the sale, importation and possession of semiautomatic rifles and by removing 700,000 guns from circulation — are seen as politically untenable. In the 18 years before the new gun laws, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and in the decade afterward, there were none, according to a 2006 article in Injury Prevention, a journal.
But expanding background checks in the United States would help disrupt criminal gun markets, a crucial driver of urban gun violence, Dr. Wintemute said. While there has been a debate over how effective background checks have been, Dr. Wintemute pointed to studies of prisoners incarcerated for crimes involving firearms that have found that at least 80 percent of them obtained their guns through private transfers.
“If we eliminate those, I think it’s completely reasonable to expect a substantial drop in crimes related to firearms,” he said.
When a two-day meeting on reducing gun violence wrapped up at Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday afternoon, researchers made some suggestions that have been the subject of relatively little public discussion in Washington.
They called, for example, for expanding the categories of people who are prohibited from buying firearms to include those who have committed violent misdemeanors. And they called for banning not just the sale of high-capacity magazines, but their possession as well.
Other measures being discussed in Washington include strengthening federal laws to combat gun trafficking. Gun control advocates argued that other steps were needed as well, like limiting the number of guns that can be bought by an individual every month.
“If you want to dam the river, you have to address all the channels,” said Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “You’re not going to stop it until you dam the whole river.”
Some people who met with Mr. Biden as he developed his recommendations said that they hoped the final proposals would address gun violence in its many forms.
“I think there was a recognition that we’re not going to stop every mass shooting or gun homicide,” said Hildy Saizow, the president of Arizonans for Gun Safety, who met with Mr. Biden last week.
“But we can go a long way to take action that would result in fewer gun deaths, fewer gun injuries. This is not just a narrow perspective that the task force is addressing, not just mass shootings or school shootings.”
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário