Craig Mason: License people, not guns

Changes in gun rights are coming, due to chronic mass shootings, and due to an increasingly urban population, unfamiliar with guns except for those held in their faces by muggers, or about which they read. I understand the urban perspective, and I understand the experiences and beliefs of ardent Second Amendment defenders. This essay suggests a mutually respectful response to the excess of gun murders in America.

I appreciate guns as a tool, and I understand gun rights as an ideology. I grew up with a gun in my hand, surrounded by responsible people who never pointed a gun anywhere they did not want it to shoot, no matter how many times they confirmed it was unloaded.

I first shot a .22 at the age of 3, and I, starting at the age of 8, unaccompanied, traipsed the fields above Tum Tum laying waste to ground squirrels with my grandfather’s .25-.20. My father built a world-class gun range on his property northwest of Spokane, at which several regional target matches are held each year. Guns are now a small part of my current life.

I am familiar with the “gun rights” view that is committed to self-protection, and that is committed to a constitutional right to insurrection that gun rights defenders see enshrined in the Second Amendment. And I have lived in urban environments in which a gun is as foreign as a Martian. (Note: The repeal of the military draft has had many caste-isolating impacts, including narrowing the economic and social range of people who have experience with guns as tools.)

Those committed to gun rights must appreciate that more and more voters have no positive experiences with guns, while the increasing mass murders will animate these voters to limit gun rights. It is simply going to happen, and so the issue is how will increasing limitations on gun ownership occur. It is this reality that I intend to address.

Society has changed. From my viewpoint, the slow-rolling 20th century revolution in child-rearing and schooling away from cultivating self-discipline as a goal of creating adults has left a large minority of our population simply incompetent to own guns. They are emotionally and behaviorally unable to control violent impulses, and they self-indulgently turn megalomaniacal fantasies into reality. The fact is that, today, many people are temperamentally incompetent to possess guns.

My solution is to require that people be licensed as “gun competent,” in order to possess guns legally.

I am well aware that those who believe in a right of insurrection also believe that the government that “gives” gun rights can take them away, and hence they prefer to believe in “natural rights” that are superior to human laws. However, ultimately, we cannot avoid legal interpretation of, and political definition of, these “natural rights.” In short, constitutions must be construed and laws will be passed. We reasonably regulate other constitutional rights without losing them.

My proposal for that reasonable regulation is to privatize the licensing of “gun competence,” backed by liability insurance, as the privatized incentive to appraise risk, and for accountability for licensing a person as competent to own a gun.

In short, those who wished to be licensed as “gun competent” would need to join a private organization that would vouch for them by certifying them. That organization would also have the ability to summarily withdraw that certification, with a duty to notify law enforcement.

The incentive to prevent promiscuous licensing would be a requirement of liability insurance for anyone harmed by the misuse of a gun by their member. The liability insurance requirement should be high enough to provide (a) an incentive for the organization to license carefully and to revoke the certification of competence promptly, as appropriate, and (b) to give the insurance companies an incentive to appraise the risk accurately. The liability insurance requirement should not be so high as to put an undue-burden on getting a license, such that only the wealthy could afford it. (And a dedicated private organization could subsidize lower income members.)

The organization would be liable only to the limits of its policy, and so the incentives would need to be carefully calculated to provide incentives for careful licensing, and for prompt revocation, without posing an undue burden. There would be no need for a right to appeal a revocation of the “gun competent” license, because all the disappointed person need do is find another private organization willing to license them, and willing to be responsible for doing so.

There could also be a government option for those who found insurance on their own without joining an organization, as long as the insurer indicated their “competency monitoring” policy. (And all current laws allowing for disarming criminals, DV perpetrators, and the mentally ill or impaired would remain in place as well.)

This proposal is offered for discussion, and not as a dogmatic cure-all. However, as someone who tries to listen closely to everyone, and who looks for what is partially correct in even the craziest left-wing and right-wing views, this is the best I can currently think to propose.

The “gun competency” license would be private so that it would not be the government “taking away your guns.” It would be people who know you, and who see you are losing self-control, or that you are becoming erratic, and they would decertify you and notify law enforcement.

Yes, the police would enforce the judgment of your organization, and take your guns if you were no longer deemed competent to own them, but it would be a privatized determination. And certifying organizations, being committed to gun rights, would surely understand that a failure to perform their duty would mean that even more stringent legislation further limiting gun rights would follow from their failures.

Some limitations on gun rights will follow from all the murderous abuse of these tools. Gun rights activists must develop a responsible, not an absolutist, response. I welcome other approaches that address this reality.