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1. No private gun sales to people who haven't passed a background check. Criminal penalties and civil liability to the seller when the gun is used in a crime.
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Yes on the first part, no on the second. If a seller legally sells a weapon, after background checks have been completed, his reasonable duties are concluded. You're making him warrant it won't be used in a crime. Nobody's going to get behind that.
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2. Civil liability for gun owners if a weapon they own is used in a crime. Try getting insurance for that one.
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Non-starter. You basically make it impossible to manufacture and sell guns. That would violate the most narrow reading of the Second Amendment.
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3. A broad based assault weapon ban, a 10 round maximum clip for bullets. Listen up: That includes currently owned assault weapons. If you can ban M-60 machine guns, you can ban M-16s. If we have to pry 'em from their cold dead hands, do it. Alternatively, allow these weapons only on private property, and require transport of those weapons to be in a disassembled state. Criminal penalties for violation. Defend your castle, but don't bring that weapon out in public. To the assertion that this would require the ban on thousands of different types of weapons, I respond: So what?
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Agreed. I see it as I do drug prohibition. Alcohol and now marijuana are legal. But heroin will never be legal. Nor should it be. Lines can be drawn by reasonable people. An automatic weapon with no use than mass casualty creation is way over that line.
ETA: Dynamite also works. You can buy all sorts of fireworks. But do we let you buy dynamite? No. That's a pretty reasonable line. Some legislator thought to himself, long ago, "I'm not sure letting laymen buy something that could kill their entire family and perhaps many of their neighbors is a good idea. I think maybe I'll pass a bill to ban the sale of things like that." And that was kind of smart. So now, today, we don't read about kids dynamiting schools. And there's no National Association of Dynamite Enthusiasts arguing for the right to keep cases of dynamite in their basement. Which is a pretty good thing.
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4. What happened to Rubio has to happen to every spineless political gasbag. People have to point at Rubio, in public, and tell him and others like him that half measures won't work because they are doomed to failure. Tell them that if they don't commit to a broad solution, every high school student who thinks they are wrong will make them pay politically, and drive them out of office.
5. Target politicians who are the worst NRA flag waivers. Use their own words against them. Run the mothers and siblings of victims against them. Expose them for the accomplices of murder that they are. Pick a Congressman who supports some of the idiotic positions recently taken by the NRA and force them to run on that record.
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I'd go for the easy win against these people. Make the argument you make in Point 3. Everybody but the serious nuts (5% of society, maybe?) agrees that people shouldn't be running around with assault weapons. That argument is a dead lock winner. Instead of a vague shame campaign the NRA can twist into an argument of absolutes (which it will win), the argument needs to be one about automatic weapons. Leave Lapierre to argue against that narrow point and he's got a problem.
There are endless defenses for people owning handguns and hunting rifles. None exist for assault weapons. For too long, the NRA has been able to make this a Big Debate, where it should be a set of smaller ones. Nobody's going to effect meaningful gun control if the gun control crowd keeps trying to eat the elephant in one bite. You have to chip away:
"Look. Nobody needs a fucking AR-15. Nobody shoots targets or clay pigeons with fifty rounds a minute. Nobody makes any venison or elk burgers from an animal that's been riddled with 100 rounds. Nobody needs these fucking things except serious weirdos. Frankly, that you want an automatic rifle capable of spraying bullets is the best argument for why you shouldn't have one! Let these freaks play
Call of Duty, or watch the
Deer Hunter for the 40th time. But for fuck's sake... Let's get the fucking combat weapons out of their hands."
