Opinion of Obama's gun speech today

[anvi]

Regarding gun violence in the U.S., here is my three-quarters of a cent.

It's good that violent crimes are decreasing in the U.S., but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to take steps to improve the situation, particularly since our homicide rates are still comparatively high and gun injury rates also appear to be up.

While suicides are not murders, I don't think we should discount them.  If committing suicide with a gun is easier than other means of killing oneself, then that's a relevant factor in the discussion.  The people who commit or try to commit suicide matter too. 

It's very difficult to make sound causal arguments one way or the other about whether stricter or more permissive gun regulations directly result in an increase or decrease of gun violence in any given area.  Gun violence has declined in a lot of areas where there are right-to-carry laws, but this often happens  long after the legislation takes effect, and this indicates that many other variables are at play.  Plus, the more areas where such laws exist are counted, what the data actually indicates about violent crime rates becomes less clear--though a comparison of similar areas, such as large urban areas, might yield a more consistent picture  By the same token, it's pretty difficult to establish in any causally meaningful way that a higher prevalence of gun ownership in a certain area is the sole or main causal factor in a rise in violent crime.  Since the data doesn't give a very clear picture either way, it's pretty hard to know what's the better overall policy.

But it still seems to me at least intuitively plausible that expanding the prevalence of background checks is is a good idea.  Allowing people with established histories of violent crime or established cases of psychological disorder to own weapons seems to me to be asking for trouble, because the initial risk factors in those cases are already higher.  If background checks can help detect such risk factors, then I think they make sense.  And I don't see why a few extra days of waiting to purchase guns constitutes anything like a constitutional infringement on anyone's rights.  Nonetheless, we shouldn't pretend that expanded background checks are going to be a dramatic panacea either, because lots of perpetrators of violent crimes have no such established histories, and children of gun owners or young people who have friends with guns, who have no such histories, can get their hands on their parents' or friends' weapons fairly easily too.  That doesn't mean expanded background checks are not worth doing, it just means the reductions in gun crime that result from enforcing them may not be very dramatic.  But as above, every life matters.  It's important to care about one's own rights, but it's also important to care about one's fellow citizens.