Kinder Gentler Gun Control

Writing again about the Duante Wright case, some his charges were firearm possession crimes. How do liberal-minded people square stricter gun control laws with the concern over mass incarceration? I have no fucking idea.

I asked this to my liberal pro-gun control friends. Literally nobody wanted to advocate for using criminal penalties to enforce gun control. When pressed, the most anyone would support was using fines and confiscation as enforcement mechanisms. Basically, decriminalizing gun control, which would be a significant liberalization of the current regime.

It's possible that I just haven't looked hard enough, but I don't think I've come across an earnest attempt to square this circle. Reason Magazine wrote about this issue a year ago under the headline "The Year Gun Control Died". In the course of these discussions, I love linking to one of my favorite Nathan J Robinson essays titled "People Literally Do Not Understand What Laws Are or How They Work":

Let’s remember what it means for something to be a crime. It means that there is a statute indicating the elements and penalties. It means that local, state and federal police will start seeking out people doing that crime for arrest. They will sweep broadly and ensnare many people doing nothing at all. It means that people will be jailed and fined for the crime, that some will be sitting in jail for quite a while because they cannot afford bail and that they might die awaiting trial. It means that their jobs, families, housing, and social service benefits will be put in jeopardy. If they are an immigrant it means they may be deported. It means that 95% of people will plead guilty to the crime regardless of whether they did it or not, and that whether or not they are able to defend themselves will depend heavily on whether they can access a lawyer.

The best explanation I can come up with is that liberal gun control advocates (and therefore the demographic that would be sensitive to accusation of racial bias) tend to have a platonic vision of who firearm offenders are, and it's basically dumb white hicks living in the mountains. They don't realize it's disproportionately black men who are prosecuted for weapons offenses. Radley Balko had an excellent article on this years years ago. Maybe people just don't realize how laws are enforced, and maybe they haven't fully thought through the coupled implications of simultaneously advocating for "cops are racist as fuck" and "only cops should have guns and they should arrest anyone else who does". I really don't know.