Republicans Keep Comparing Owning a Gun to a Car. OK, Let’s Do That.
- Mar 25, 2021
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 11, 2021
Hey all, the weather is getting nicer, people are getting vaccinated, shops and businesses are opening back up. America is getting back to work. And you know what we’re way over due for? A mass shooting or two. About as trivial as your morning coffee now in this country, we now have had two mass shootings that are from a lone gunman opening fire in a public setting. It’s only March, guys, I guess we got a lot of ground to make up since 2020.
After the most recent shooting, the normal political motions that we’ve done after every shooting for the past decade (and there’s been quite a few) begin. Democrats cry for more regulation and gun bans, Republicans say “Now is not the time to politicize it”, people in the media cry about it, Dems bring forward some moderate gun control legislation that dies in Congress, gun companies love every second of it as they see sales spike like crazy because Fox convinces everyone that “The libs are gonna take yer guns.” Everyone shrugs and we move on to the next mass shooting a month later.
One of the arguments from the right that always pops up during this cycle is always “Cars kill so many people every year. Do you want to ban them, now too?” Much like the cancel culture argument, everything from the right is a slippery slope. If we ban one thing we’ll suddenly go on a banning spree, drunk with power to ban anything remotely harmful. Not like there’s nuance in any argument. It’s either ban everything or nothing. Earlier this week it came on up from a GOP senator:
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana on Tuesday suggested that the issue of gun violence is overblown and should be put "in perspective," hours after the United States suffered its second mass shooting in a week.
"We have a lot of drunk drivers in America that kill a lot of people," Kennedy said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence. "We ought to try to combat that too."
"The answer is not to get rid of all sober drivers," Kennedy continued. "The answer is to concentrate on the problem."
Sure, John. I agree. Let’s actually focus on the problem. Let’s start with the comparison of owning and operating a car vs owning a firearm in this country. Let’s ignore the fact that a car is a useful and mostly necessary tool in our country to get around and to get ahead in life. A firearm, on the other hand, is solely designed to kill and serves no other function.
Cars are a tool used to get us to different locations, but yes, they are inherently dangerous;
For 2016 specifically, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data shows 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes, an average of 102 per day.[1]
Which is why, unlike guns for some reason, WE HEAVILY REGULATE THEM. In any state, if you want to operate a motor vehicle, you need to pass a driving test which involves many hours of practice, fees, exams, and a test with an instructor.
Guns, on the other hand, in many states across the nation, require no such stringent training. You turn 18, in most states you can go to buy a firearm at any store. Quick background check later, it’s yours. In my state of Maryland, considered to be one of the most restrictive states as far as gun laws go, the largest requirement is a 4 hour class if you want to buy a handgun. Rifles and shotguns are fair game, no training or waiting period required.
To drive a car on the other hand, you need to take a written exam, get a learners permit, hold that permit for anywhere from 45 days to 9 months before a provisional license is issued (age depending), have 14-60 hours of practice (depending on your age) with an experienced rider, with certain hours devoted to night driving, have 30 classroom hours and 6 hours behind the wheel with an instructor, and then take a driving test with an instructor to pass and finally receive your license.
Again, this is all the requirements for someone to operate a car in Maryland. Most other states are similarly restrictive. And yes, we acknowledge as a society how dangerous operating motor vehicles are and thus we have such stringent training procedures attached to them. But, the most ludicrous part about all of this is that firearms are a tool made for one single purpose: to kill. And yet, across every state in the country, we have barely a fraction of the requirements and zero training required to own and operate one when compared to a car.
Delving further into the insane comparison, Cars, unlike guns, have received many technological advancements over the decades, all because of increased safety regulations from, gasp, our big scary government. Airbags, seatbelts, crumple zones, monitoring systems, you think the car companies just put that in because they wanted to? It was because we, as a society, did not accept the status quo of how deadly driving a car was. Regulations were passed to car manufacturers to develop safer technologies to save lives in car accidents. And these increased safety regulations have worked.
From 1979 to 2005, the number of deaths per year decreased 14.97% while the number of deaths per capita decreased by 35.46%. The 32,479 traffic fatalities in 2011 were the lowest in 62 years, since 1949.
Guns, on the other hand, have had zero push for safety technological advancements by regulations of nearly any kind. Guns have mechanical safeties...and have had them for about a century. That’s about it as far as the technology has advanced. Smart guns with biometric codes to your fingerprint are mostly a novelty and haven’t been fully developed as a technology because there’s zero push for the industry to change and advance their safety standards since 1900.
And of course, the final nail in the coffin on the comparison of cars to guns is that every car in this country is tied to the owner and easily searchable through a national database. VIN numbers are etched into every car in multiple locations, and to operate a car, you need an up to date license plate attached to someones’ name and address. If a cop pulls you over anywhere in America, they can type the license plate or VIN into a database and instantly get the information of who is the owner of that vehicle and where they live and any prior incidents on their driving record sent back to them.
But wait, you think. Guns have serial numbers on them too. Yes, they do. And technically, when someone purchases a gun, that serial number gets registered with that person. Except it’s nowhere near as organized and convenient as a car registration. Contrary to popular belief, there is no national database of registered gun owners and their gun’s serial numbers for police to look up. If cops want to find the owner of a gun with a serial number, they have to track down the shop that sold that gun and search through their paper records, if that shop is even holding all their records in good order. Don’t take my word on it, here it is from an ATF agent:
“ I get e-mails even from police saying, ‘Can you type in the serial number and tell me who the gun is registered to?’ Every week. They think it's like a VIN number on a car. Even police. Police from everywhere. ‘Hey, can you guys hurry up and type that number in?’ ”
So here's a news flash, from Charlie: “We ain't got a registration system. Ain't nobody registering no damn guns.”
The article goes into further hamperings that the ATF frequently deals with with regards to firearms tracing, limited funding, limited employees, and very limited technology:
“...illustrating some of the finer points of gun tracing, of which there are many, in large part due to the limitations imposed upon this place. For example, no computer. The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data.
“That's the big no-no,” says Charlie.
That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.”
Yep, you read that right. This incompetence is all done by design in the USA. The ATF isn’t LEGALLY allowed to have a national computer database of gun owners because the right has convinced everyone that any step taken towards gun reform will immediately careen our country down that ol’ slippery slope and before you know it, the big bad liberal government will be clawing everyone’s gun away.
That’s the end game of arguing for more gun control in this country. Republicans will hem and haw and say, sure they want more mental health requirements for violent people before they can own guns, but if they don’t support the database and logistics required to make that happen, then that doesn’t mean anything.
And look, I get the idea of the 2nd amendment in our country and the problem with a government having too much control over us. At the end of the day, I believe in the 2nd amendment and am a proponent of responsible gun ownership in this country. I have shot firearms responsibly my entire adult life. But we need to stop being scared of the big bad boogeyman librul gov’ment coming to take our guns and accept SOME level of regulation over it. So, I agree with Senator Kennedy. We need to not ban everyone, but to concentrate on the problem. A good start to treating that problem would be to treat gun ownership at least as seriously as we treat motor vehicle ownership in this country.
I would agree, as soon as we enact voter ID cards. Also you must consider that if the government can ID any gun owner doesn't that make it easier to confiscate them?