├── faq.md ├── README.md ├── resources.md ├── LICENSE └── proposal.md /faq.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # FAQ 2 | Q: What about guns that I inherited from my grandpa, or that I found on the street, or that belong to my wife, etc.? 3 | 4 | A: Under this system, nobody cares where or how you got a particular gun. We only care that you’re licensed to hold a gun. That’s it. If you’re licensed, you can pick up any gun legally. If you’re not licensed, touching a gun is a felony. 5 | 6 | Q: How will this make potential victims of domestic violence safer? 7 | 8 | A: Let’s say that Joe is a member of a small, family shooter network. Word gets around that he’s beating his wife, Lynette, and the other network members, fearing for their licenses, convene and vote him out. 9 | 10 | At that point, Joe has just lost the ability to legally touch a firearm, even in the privacy of his own home. Lynette can remove his firearms from the house, and there’s no way he can legally bring them back. He can’t even legally stop her from carrying them out while he watches. 11 | 12 | Now, if he’s crazy and violent, the threat of a felony charge isn’t going to stop him from grabbing a gun and shooting Lynette. But the current gun control regime wouldn’t be any help in this case, either. What the shooter network scheme has done, though, is to notify the central licensing authority that Joe has just been voted out of the network, and that authority can report this fact to local law enforcement. 13 | 14 | Joe’s loss of membership is a massive red flag that law enforcement did not have under the old regime, and it gives them an indication that something isn’t right and that they may want to further investigate and possibly intervene. 15 | 16 | Again, shooter control doesn’t completely solve the problem of domestic gun violence, but it does add a powerful new tool — that of shared accountability and peer reporting — to the violence prevention toolbox. 17 | 18 | Q: How will this stop lone wolf mass shootings and terror attacks? 19 | 20 | A: It doesn’t necessarily prevent such things directly, but it gives the government and local law enforcement more opportunity to gather data. If you’re a member of a terrorist cell and you want to get access to firearms, you have two options: 1) find other terrorists to form a shooter network with you, or 2) go under the radar and join an existing shooter network of non-terrorists. 21 | 22 | For option 1, if we’re actually keeping decent tabs on suspected terrorists, then the moment one of them joins a shooter network with other terrorists then bingo, we have the rest of the connections for a terrorist cell visible to the feds!. 23 | 24 | For option 2, citizens have to understand that if you let someone into your shooter network and they turn out to be a terrorist, then you have a world of painful scrutiny coming your way…. it’s the last thing you’d ever want. So people are incentivized to do their very best ensure that this doesn’t happen at all costs. 25 | 26 | Q: Can’t gangs easily abuse this system? 27 | 28 | A: Initially, yeah they could, but as more gang members end up in jail that whole network starts to run out of people who can form a legit shooter network. Eventually, it’s going to be really hard for a gang member to find someone to join a shooter network with him or her. 29 | 30 | 31 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Shooter Control 2 | All sides of the American gun debate can agree on one thing: American gun control has failed us. Our gun control regime is disorganized, nonsensical, porous, and rife with loopholes and contradictions. 3 | 4 | Pro-gun partisans argue that gun control has failed because gun deaths in America have undergone a multi-decade decline despite an increase in the number of guns in civilian hands. Anti-gunners argue that the recent increase in mass shootings and the on-going litany of homicides, suicides, and accidents prove that more needs to be done. 5 | 6 | I think there’s some truth in both positions, but I’m less interested in debating the failings of gun control than I am in thinking about what comes after it. And what I hope comes after it is a shift in focus from defining the “what” to defining the “who”. 7 | 8 | ## Bringing back “the social” 9 | The older gun culture that I and many others came up in was primarily social, not individual. Gun ownership and use were connected to tradition, heritage, and shared rituals and spaces and institutions—the deer camp, the range, the Boy Scout troop, the family farm. 10 | 11 | Gun Culture 2.0 has lost much of this, and it has become an individual consumer/lifestyle type of thing. It’s now consumer-driven, and it’s about accessories and gear and acquisition. All of that stuff is fine, but what’s missing is the broader social context that formed gun-owning individuals’ character by passing on the norms, attitudes, and practices that made gun ownership sacred and, to a large extent, safe. 12 | 13 | We’ll never go back in time to the hunting-centered gun culture of yesteryear. But we can look back to that era as inspiration, and try to reconstruct some sort of collective approach to gun ownership that relies on gun owners to vet and qualify one another. And I think we can do that in a way that’s primarily local (not federal) and therefore retains a bit of the spirit of the militia that preceded the founding of this nation. 14 | 15 | ## What this repo is for 16 | If this repo ends up being a place for rational conversation about getting gun owners to work together to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people, I’ll consider that a win. 17 | 18 | Even better would be if it could ultimately contain a set of documents laying out some guiding principles that both sides of this debate can come together and agree on, and then some sort of system that implements those principles. 19 | 20 | I don’t imagine that any laws would be drafted here. Rather, I’m imagining that this repo could produce something like the “term sheet” that precedes an actual contract between two parties. We’d discuss the broad outlines and some specifics, and leave the language for later. 21 | 22 | ## Contents and Contributing 23 | 24 | Right now, there's just a barebones proposal and the start of a FAQ: 25 | 26 | - [Proposal](https://github.com/jonstokes/shootercontrol/blob/master/proposal.md) 27 | - [FAQ](https://github.com/jonstokes/shootercontrol/blob/master/faq.md) 28 | 29 | For general feedback on the above, please use the [issues queue](https://github.com/jonstokes/shootercontrol/issues). For edits and/or proposed changes, please submit a PR. 30 | 31 | Note that for major proposed changes, let's talk through it in the issues queue first, by creating an issue, and then move to an actual PR once we've fleshed out what we want to do. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /resources.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | #Links to resources 2 | A place to start researching. Research is key to developing a non bias, fair and educated opinion. This isn't part of the proposal but a place to share articles that may have an interesting perspective and could add value to the conversation. 3 | 4 | ```text 5 | KEY Catagories: 6 | Research | Reference | Possibly Some Opinion | Opinionated | Bias | Discussion 7 | 8 | Research: The systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. But not referencing something's or someone's intent, opinions or motives. 9 | 10 | Reference: Provide (a book or article) with citations of authorities. 11 | 12 | Possibly Some Opinion: Almost entirely research but up to 3 minor points the author may have used working concidered by some to be opinionated. 13 | 14 | Opinionated: Conceitedly assertive and dogmatic in one's opinions or clearly marked as "opinion" by the publisher, i.e. op-eds and editorials in major newspapers. 15 | 16 | Advocacy: Public support for or recommendation of a particular cause or policy. (Example NRA) 17 | 18 | Bias: Prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. 19 | 20 | Discussion: Conversation or debate in a forum of any media (forum threads, reddit threads, HN discussions, chat rooms, comment threads, etc.) 21 | 22 | Example Link Syntax: [ Title of Article ](http://linkToAwesomeArticle.com/information.html)(Research) 23 | 24 | Note: This is erred on the side of caution. If someone (mostly anyone) could categorize this as opinion but mostly fact, it should be marked as opinion; like wise with opinion to bias. You are not going to convince someone to read a bias article by labeling it opinionated. That will only depreciate this resource. 25 | ``` 26 | 27 | ## Gun rights history 28 | USA
29 | * 30 | ## Gun Laws (Federal) Link to only government run websites 31 | 32 | ## Gun Laws (by state) Link to only State run websites 33 | Alabama 34 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 35 | Alaska 36 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 37 | Arizona 38 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 39 | Arkansas 40 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 41 | California 42 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 43 | Colorado 44 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 45 | Connecticut 46 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 47 | Delaware 48 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 49 | Florida 50 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 51 | Georgia 52 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 53 | Hawaii 54 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 55 | Idaho 56 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 57 | Illinois Indiana 58 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 59 | Iowa 60 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 61 | Kansas 62 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 63 | Kentucky 64 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 65 | Louisiana 66 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 67 | Maine 68 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 69 | Maryland 70 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 71 | Massachusetts 72 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 73 | Michigan 74 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 75 | Minnesota 76 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 77 | Mississippi 78 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 79 | Missouri 80 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 81 | Montana Nebraska 82 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 83 | Nevada 84 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 85 | New Hampshire 86 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 87 | New Jersey 88 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 89 | New Mexico 90 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 91 | New York 92 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 93 | North Carolina 94 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 95 | North Dakota 96 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 97 | Ohio 98 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 99 | Oklahoma 100 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 101 | Oregon 102 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 103 | Pennsylvania Rhode Island 104 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 105 | South Carolina 106 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 107 | South Dakota 108 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 109 | Tennessee 110 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 111 | Texas 112 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 113 | Utah 114 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 115 | Vermont 116 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 117 | Virginia 118 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 119 | Washington 120 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 121 | West Virginia 122 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 123 | Wisconsin 124 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 125 | Wyoming 126 | * [Sample Link](#)(Research) 127 | 128 | ## Gun Rights opinion article 129 | * [Why I “Need” an AR-15](https://medium.com/@jonst0kes/why-i-need-an-ar-15-832e05ae801c#.fu7q9iadx)(Advocacy) 130 | ## Gun Control opinion article 131 | 132 | ## Research Tips 133 | * [9 types of research bias and how to avoid them](http://www.quirks.com/articles/2015/20150825-2.aspx)(Possibly Some Opinion) 134 | 135 | ## Gun History Videos 136 | * [The Henry rifle and its place in the history of guns.](http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/videos/the-beginnings-of-mass-produced-rifles/12674)(Research) 137 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /LICENSE: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | CC0 1.0 Universal 2 | 3 | Statement of Purpose 4 | 5 | The laws of most jurisdictions throughout the world automatically confer 6 | exclusive Copyright and Related Rights (defined below) upon the creator and 7 | subsequent owner(s) (each and all, an "owner") of an original work of 8 | authorship and/or a database (each, a "Work"). 9 | 10 | Certain owners wish to permanently relinquish those rights to a Work for the 11 | purpose of contributing to a commons of creative, cultural and scientific 12 | works ("Commons") that the public can reliably and without fear of later 13 | claims of infringement build upon, modify, incorporate in other works, reuse 14 | and redistribute as freely as possible in any form whatsoever and for any 15 | purposes, including without limitation commercial purposes. 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We can’t hope to solve every scenario and corner case, short of finding a way to eliminate firearms ownership completely. Rather, the ultimate criteria by which we should judge any proposal to reduce gun deaths is: “is this at least equal to or better than what we have now.” 11 | 12 | ## Starting points 13 | I want to begin with three generalizations about gun owners, and then use them as the basis of a compromise. 14 | 15 | Modern gun culture is a gear culture, and its members like hacking and tweaking and modding their firearms. Because they’re this way, they chafe against feature-based firearm restrictions, like the federal restrictions on short-barreled rifles or suppressors, or state-specific restrictions on things like barrels shrouds or vertical fore-grips. 16 | 17 | Gun owners also largely see themselves as law-abiders who are clearly never going to do anyone deliberate harm. “Why should I be burdened by these arbitrary feature-based restrictions that are easily circumvented by criminals,” they ask? 18 | 19 | Finally, it has been my experience that gun owners of all stripes tend to agree that certain people just shouldn’t have guns: people with violent pasts, people who are embedded in known criminal networks (i.e. gangs, terrorist cells), loners who have nothing to lose, and various other folks who are likely to misuse firearms. The problem is identifying these folks. 20 | 21 | I think we can use the first two items above to address the third, by making a basic deal with gun owners that looks something like this: we’ll relax and regularize restrictions on the “what” (which criminals weren’t really abiding by, anyway) in exchange for a more rigorous, peer-based approach to licensing shooters—an approach that no law-abiding gun owner should have any trouble complying with, but that will weed out loners and folks embedded in dysfunctional/violent social networks. 22 | 23 | The basic idea is to have gun owners vouch for other gun owners’ fitness to handle and use guns, and to incentivize those people to evaluate each other carefully by forcing them to have skin in the game. In this way, we can build up and maintain networks of licensed shooters whose experience of gun ownership is relatively frictionless—no arbitrary rules about barrel length or whether an item is a “stock” or an “arm brace”, and no extra paperwork or waiting periods—while denying access to firearms to individuals who can’t join such a network and remain a member in good standing. 24 | 25 | ## Licensing the “who” 26 | The basic shooter control framework is that the government licenses “shooter networks”, and shooter networks license individual shooters. (Yep, this is modeled on how the web handles SSL certificates.) I say “shooter” here, because I’m not talking about gun ownership—I’m talking about who can legally touch and handle a firearm. 27 | 28 | Under a shooter control regime, the government doesn’t know about or care what kinds of guns you own; it only cares about whether or not you’re a licensed shooter, i.e. you’re licensed to pick up a gun. And under shooter control, your fellow network members care very much that you’re not convicted of a gun crime, because that would put their gun rights at risk. 29 | 30 | Here are the basics of how it works: 31 | 32 | ### Forming a shooter network and getting licensed 33 | A shooter network can be any group of five people aged 18 or older who get together for the purpose of forming a network — geography and other factors are irrelevant. These individuals form a network and register that network with a central authority, which tracks who belongs to which network and in general oversees this entire regime. (Note: again, this central authority has no information on what guns you own; it’s solely concerned with shooters, not firearms.) 34 | 35 | In order to get a valid shooting license from a network, you must be a member of that network for not less than a year. (Individual networks can extend that time, if they like, in their own bylaws.) Your very first network membership has no waiting period for licensure. If your membership is approved, then licensure is immediate that one time. (This allows brand new shooters, or even folks who are trying to figure out if this is something they want to do, to pick up a gun and begin practicing with it.) 36 | 37 | ### Limitations and penalties 38 | There are two categories of people who can legally handle a firearm: 1) licensed shooters, 2) unlicensed shooters who are under the active, direct supervision of a licensed shooter. Regarding the second category, the minute your training session is over, or you’ve left the gun store counter, and you’re no longer actively being supervised by a licensed shooter, it’s illegal for you to touch a gun. 39 | 40 | If you’re caught touching a firearm without a license, it’s a felony. This means that if you lose your license, you don’t have to surrender your firearms — you just can’t touch them without committing a felony. Obviously, there’s no way to know what people are doing inside of their own home, but someone who loses their license effectively loses their right to use a gun in defense of their home or person, and to shoot socially. 41 | 42 | If a licensed shooter is convicted of a crime involving a gun, then the network that they were a member of at the time the crime was committed is automatically disbanded, and all of the licenses that network has issued are immediately invalidated. This means that all of the network’s members will need to join a new network and go through a one-year waiting period before they can handle a gun again. 43 | 44 | If at any point the number of members in the network drops below 5 for any reason, the network is disbanded and all the licenses it has issued are invalidated. 45 | 46 | An individual can belong to only one network at a time, and can belong to no more than four successive shooter networks over the course of his or her lifetime. If you’re on your fourth network and you lose your license (i.e. the network was dissolved, or it voted you out), then you’re done. You can never legally touch a firearm again. 47 | 48 | If a shooter is over the age of 18 and is either unlicensed or has a valid licensed that has lapsed more than three years ago (i.e. he or she has had plenty of time to join a new network and get re-licensed), then simple possession (the standard legal definition) of firearms is a felony for that person. (The point here is that if don’t stay on top of your license, then you eventually lose even the right to possess, along with the right to handle/touch a gun.) 49 | 50 | A gun can only be transferred to a licensed shooter. So if your license is lapsed, you can sell your guns, but you can’t legally buy a firearm at a gun shop, gun show, or in a private party transaction. 51 | 52 | ### Weapon registration 53 | Every licensed shooter is required to register all of his/her guns with the network, by serial number. 54 | 55 | There cannot ever be a centralized database (or network of distributed databases, because federated query essentially makes such a thing centralized) of gun registrations that can act as a de facto central gun registry. 56 | 57 | Rather, by having all weapons registered locally with a shooter network, if a gun is found at a crime scene and local law enforcement can get some indication of ownership (i.e. a fingerprint match or other indication), they can get a warrant to search a specific shooter network’s registry. So law enforcement can only access specific registries with a warrant. Otherwise, this shooter network registries are totally private and inaccessible to the feds. 58 | 59 | (This isn’t nearly as effective for law enforcement as a central registry would be, but it’s way better than nothing, and is markedly better than the status quo.) 60 | 61 | ### Network effects 62 | To sum up, this scheme means that shooter network members have skin in the game, and are incentivized to police each other. One member could cause the entire network to lose all legal access to firearms for a year and to use up one of their four possible shooter network memberships. 63 | 64 | Under the proposed shooter control regime, over time dysfunctional/criminal social networks will either reform themselves or see their access to firearms steadily dry up, as the pool of eligible shooter network members shrinks and more members of that network lose even the right of simple possession. Meanwhile, gun owners in high-functioning networks will be effectively freed from the burden of compliance with red tape and pointless restrictions that weren’t stopping criminals anyway. The network itself has some annual red tape, but the idea here is that if you can’t bother to pay your fees on time then your network isn’t the kind that we want handing out licenses. 65 | 66 | ## Forgetting about the “what” 67 | Gun owners may not like some of the above. But now we get to the part that they will like. Because shooter control is focused exclusively on the “who” and not at all on the “what”, it doesn’t matter what kind of gun you have, as long as you’re licensed. 68 | 69 | The parts of the NFA that apply to suppressors and short-barreled rifles are repealed. Like New Zealand, Germany, and some other European countries, there are no special rules for short-barreled rifles or suppressors. 70 | 71 | We’d also want federal pre-emption of all state assault weapon bans, and of any other gun bans that are based on features. 72 | 73 | There would be no need for waiting periods, because you wouldn’t be able to buy your first firearm without joining a network, anyway, which would effectively act as a waiting period. 74 | 75 | Finally, we can dismantle the broken background check system, because background checks are done at the time of membership application. And the shooter will lose their license for any offense that would get them flagged on a background check, anyway. Indeed, shooter control via shooter networks makes background checks at time of purchase obsolete. 76 | 77 | ## More Shooter Network Details 78 | In this section, I’ll cover some corner cases and other details. 79 | 80 | ### Children 81 | Anyone over the age of 18 can belong to a shooter network. Anyone younger can shoot under the supervision of a parent or guardian. Yes, gun control advocates are scandalized by the idea of children handling firearms, even under adult supervision. But under the current gun control regime, minors can shoot when supervised, so this amounts to keeping the status quo. 82 | 83 | ### Legal Structure 84 | “Shooter network” is a designation that can be applied to any one of a number of common, pre-existing legal entities, like an LLC, LLP, trust, corporation, or basically any entity with a tax id. To start a shooter network, you form some approved entity, then have that entity registered as a shooter network so that you could begin licensing members. 85 | 86 | Networks make their own rules governing all aspects of membership that aren’t otherwise mandated by law. If you want to be super lax about who gets into your network, you can do that if you’re ready to deal with the consequences. Or, you can get as elaborate and restrictive as you like, with regular meetings, qualification requirements, psychiatric evaluations, background checks, fingerprinting, and so on. It’s up to you to structure your network and then deal with the consequences. 87 | 88 | A shooter network could be a small family group, where everyone knows each other, can vouch for each other, and is willing to put a year of their gun rights on the line. 89 | 90 | A shooter network could even be structured as a for-profit entity, where membership involves fees and a thorough vetting process. network operators who want to run a large, profitable network are incentivized to be as strict as possible about membership standards. 91 | 92 | Each network pays an annual tax to the central authority, and that tax is calculated on a per-member basis. This tax goes to fund the government administration of this regime. If at any point you’re in arrears on taxes, your shooter network is dissolved. 93 | 94 | ### Police, Military, Government 95 | All police, active duty military, and other professionals have the same rules as everyone else. 96 | - Police can carry on-shift. But off-shift, the have to have a membership just like everyone else. No special treatment for them unless they’re on shift. 97 | - Active duty military are licensed 24/7, but will want a civilian membership for when they go off active duty, so they don’t have to wait a year. 98 | - Reservists and National Guard are automatically licensed during drill periods, otherwise they need a network membership. 99 | 100 | ### Concealed carry 101 | Concealed carry would still be handled on a state-by-state basis. It would be nice to get national reciprocity as part of this, though, if we can swing it. But ultimately I think concealed carry issues have to be orthogonal to the shooter network concept. 102 | 103 | ## Problems and obstacles 104 | The main obstacle to this is on the pro-gun side is that basic idea of licensing shooters is probably going to run afoul of 2A by many interpretations. After all, we don’t license people to speak or to exercise any of their other constitutional rights. (There may be some wiggle room, though, in that ownership of firearms isn’t prohibited to unlicensed shooters; just their use.) 105 | 106 | The obstacle on the anti-gun side is that they’re just not going to want to give up “gun control”. They’re going to want to still focus on feature/function-based bans, because it’s so ingrained. 107 | 108 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------