Part of the Culture
Just like the Smartphone, the Ford Pickup, and the Porkpie Hat
When we say something is part of the culture, we mean it’s hard to imagine life without it.
Most of us feel half-dressed and uneasy if we find we’ve left the house without our smartphone. It’s a necessity. Can’t do without it. It’s hard to imagine, but Apple unveiled the iPhone 1.0 on Jan 9, 2007, hardly more than a decade ago. It was a transformative innovation then, but it’s part of the culture, now.
Who among you, Dear Readers, remembers when a man, even if he boasted a full head of hair, never left home without a hat on? If he did run out of the house bareheaded, rushing to meet a forgotten appointment or due to some emergency, he felt half-dressed and uneasy. Wearing a hat was just part of the culture. Except that somewhere around 1960, it just suddenly wasn’t anymore. Fashion is fickle.
America and the Automobile
The automobile, surely, is a more lasting part of the American way of life. We owe its cultural dominance to old Henry Ford, who for all intents and purposes invented mass production, and figured out that he needed the men who built his cars to be able to afford to buy them. By 1927, when he ceased production on the Model T, he had sold 15,000,000 of them. As a nation, we have never looked back. Today, well over 6 million cars are sold every year.
Automobiles as an essential component of our culture, are different than smartphones and men’s hats in at least one important way: they can kill us. And because cars are both essential and dangerous, we do the rational thing. We work to make them safer. We approach this problem in a variety of ways.
First, we license both the vehicles and the drivers. Extensive training is required for drivers, and you have to pass a test to get a license to drive. We track accidents and traffic violations, and if that number is too high, another test is required to renew the license.
Second, we engineer the vehicles for safety. Model T’s did not have seatbelts or air bags. They didn’t have audible backing alerts or rear-facing cameras.
We know that these safety measures are effective. In 1972–73, the years of maximum traffic fatalities, more than 55,000 people died in traffic accidents each year. Last year it was fewer than 40,000, despite the fact that the population has increased by 50% since then, and the annual number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) has almost tripled. Fatalities per 100 million VMT, perhaps the best measure of auto safety, peaked at about 45 per year. Today, that number is just over 1.
So even though cars and driving are a cherished and essential aspect of American culture, we have been able to modify both our driving habits and our vehicles in the interest of safety. What stops us from doing the same with our guns?
We regulate cars: Why not firearms?
There have been 101 mass shootings in 2018 so far, in only 140 days. 16 of those shootings were school shootings. 10 of them have happened since Parkland. More young Americans have died in school shootings this year than in military deployments.
It’s been 19 years since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold thrust school shooting (and Columbine, Colorado) into the American collective conscience. During that time we have failed to implement all sorts of ideas that might have reduced the carnage without infringing on anyone’s second-amendment rights. We have rejected individualized trigger locks, mandatory insurance for gun owners, and outlawing bump stocks. We have botched the legislation on background checks, and then botched the implementation of the data reporting that would make them work. The NRA is executing a slippery-slope strategy on gun policy: any law that restricts firearm ownership and use in any way must be opposed. At the same time it wages a full-on propaganda war to make sure that America’s love affair with guns doesn’t cool. And far from cooling, our passion for guns has become a symbol of our passion for America, even, a symbol of freedom.
How many lives have been saved because the auto industry didn’t take that attitude (much)? It could have, you know. Who remembers this one? “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA!” At the beginning of the Great Recession, we hated bailing automobile industry out, but we never gave up on our cars. And it proved to be true: the bailout of General Motors was, ultimately, good for the USA. Henry Ford and the General could have turned us all into motoring chauvinists, but they didn’t.
All the Libertarian arguments against gun regulation could be applied to cars. How can I be free if the Government knows who I am by my License Plate Number? It’s an invasion of my privacy if I have to prove I am solvent in order to avoid paying an insurance premium! It’s none of your business, Officer, if I am wearing my seat belt or whether I have properly strapped my child into a car seat. Freedom!
But the fact remains that we accept safety regulations on cars quite calmly. Oh, we groused a little, when mandatory seat belt laws became the order of the day. It’s safer to be thrown from the car in a wreck, some said. But when the carnage on the highways began to lessen, so did the grumbling. By the time we got to airbags, the only scandal was over a manufacturing defect that meant some lives were not saved.
Making it Happen
It is clear that brave Cowboys like Ken Buck, Scott Tipton, and Cory Gardner, with their NRA A grades and their NRA-fattened campaign war chests, are not going to fix this for us. Certainly we must vote them out. But there’s a lower-profile way to save lives from gun deaths, and it involves who we vote in.
Most of the power to regulate firearms usage devolves onto the states. In Colorado, progressives now hold a pretty comfortable margin in the State House, and are only one seat short of a Senate majority. Taking back the Senate is the first step in changing firearms culture in Colorado. We don’t want to outlaw guns; we just want to make gun ownership and use a safer proposition.
The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gives Colorado a grade of C when it comes to gun laws. More importantly, it provides a summary of state law on firearms and related concerns: a roadmap for how we can move forward with changing our gun culture to a safer culture. And most importantly, it provides data that correlates better gun laws with fewer deaths! Here are a few of the changes the Colorado Legislature can make to move us in a more responsible direction:
- Require firearms dealers to obtain a State License
- Regulate ammunition sales
- Require firearm owners to obtain a license
- Require at least some classes of firearms to be registered
- Report lost or stolen firearms
- Allow municipalities to strengthen local regulations beyond the state level.
This last point is an especially interesting one. Colorado law preempts firearm regulation to the State. But Denver fought and won a court case to gain local control, based on the argument that its population density made gun abuse more dangerous than in other parts of the state. Now Boulder has challenged the status quo by passing its own assault-weapons ban. Some cities could pass stricter gun care laws and their improving safety records would set an example for other locales and even recommend upgraded state laws.
Drivers and Shooters
What if we don’t make a big fanfare about firearm regulation? Just pass one or two of Gaby’s recommendations each year. Don’t popularize it as a revolution. We never did it with cars. What we did do was report frequently on auto fatalities. And when new safety regs were passed, they were promoted positively by the State Patrol and with PSAs on AM radio. Auto safety got to be part of our culture. Firearm safety can too.
But if deaths due to firearms fall, let’s make a big deal out of that! Let’s report items about gun safety at the end of each news segment, right after the Dow and the S&P 500? After all, what accounting is more important: dollars and cents or human lives?
This is America. This is Colorado. We don’t have to be Europe or Australia to get this right. Let’s do it our own way — but let’s get it done. Let’s make incidents of gun violence as scarce as Porkpie Hats!
