New measures in the US for firearms control

Washington y Nueva York. The Joe Biden administration yesterday announced new firearms control measures including background checks on buyers, but it could be too late, since there are more than 430 million firearms circulating in private hands in the United States, and a A significant segment of their owners will perceive these measures as yet another violation of their freedoms, since they firmly believe that it is possible that violence will be required to protect the “American way of life based on Western European traditions.

“Every year, thousands of unlicensed dealers sell tens of thousands of guns without a background check (on their customers), including the unfit – domestic abusers, violent criminals and even minors. “This failure in our federal background check system has caused unimaginable pain and suffering,” said Vice President Kamala Harris when announcing the new measures.

These protocols will now force any seller, even outside a store or business, to obtain a license to have official authorization to sell devices with fire capacity, as well as to carry out a background check on all buyers. The Department of Justice estimates that there are more than 20,000 unlicensed merchants in this country and that they are the source of more than half of the products illegally trafficked in the United States.

But it does not address the sea of ​​weapons already in the hands of the American civilian population, with estimates that there are more than 430 million in total. And the nine measures are announced the same week that the University of California, Davis Violence Prevention Program issued a new report Firearm ownership and support for political violence in the United Stateswhich after interviewing more than 13 thousand people in 2022 – 45 percent of them with weapons – concluded that owners of devices with firepower were more likely to consider that violence is usually or always justified to achieve specific political objectives.

Other Epidemic

The authors point out that purchases of rifles and pistols increased dramatically during the pandemic, and so did deaths from gunshots. The category of people who recently purchased a firearm and those who regularly carry firearms in public are the most focused on political violence. In this segment, the researchers report, They were more likely than their counterparts to believe that political violence is justified, more willing to participate in it, to kill to advance their political objectives, and even more likely to organize or join hostile groups..

The report warns that although most people in this segment oppose political violence, researchers offer a chilling warning: It is plausible, based on our results, that some recent buyers have been arming themselves in anticipation of civil conflict. Our results suggest that large numbers of armed individuals, potentially willing to engage in political violence, typically gather in public spaces across the United States every day..

As a group, 39 percent of gun owners surveyed in this research believe that violence is often or always justified to advance some political goal, compared to 30 percent of the general public who share that view.

The social scientists in the study add that the justification of political hostility was most common among owners of assault rifles (42.3 percent), recent buyers (43.9) and that more than half of those who say they always or almost always carry weapons (55.9) believe that in some cases political violence can be justified.

These results are another worrying indicator in a year where a presidential candidate threatens the possibility of aggressive responses during this electoral cycle, and where the shadow of the attempted coup d’état carried out by armed right-wing fanatics who stormed the Capitol in January 2021 still prevails. .

However, the experts who participated in the report try to offer something more optimistic. “Despite these results and their implications, the broader result here – that most gun owners and the unarmed also repeatedly reject political violence – is encouraging, in our view.

Our results suggest that a joint effort between gun owners and non-gun owners to publicly repudiate political violence and help identify, deter, and incapacitate likely perpetrators of this type of aggression could help curb this danger.