The section about transferable machine guns leaves out the most important reason these weapons aren't used in more crimes: they cost at least $10k to acquire. The much maligned AR-15 can be had for $500. A shitty Hi-Point 9mm can be had for a third of that.

It seems like the author can't help but include a red herring about hollow-point bullets, magazine capacities, and the much-maligned AR-15 (the most popular modern sporting rifle sold in the US). He does later admit that Liberals overemphasize banning 'assault weapons' instead of more effective interventions, but undercuts this point by admitting that he still has it out for the AR-15.

Notably missing from this mish-mash of good and bad proposals is any sort of economic analysis of the causes of (white, rural) suicide or (black, urban) homicide. However, that might engender accusations of racism, classism, and other forms of Liberal intolerance, and distract from the

All in all, his central thesis that we need to come to terms with the reality that there will continue to be 400m privately-owned firearms in the US is key to having a more productive national conversation about reducing gun violence.

Lol Nick Kristof with the "what about regulation argument"

What can be done to break the political stalemate on gun policy so that we can save lives?

Fucking put Wayne LaPierre in prison.

Once upon a time the NRA was a hunters' organization. They were running out of money and needed to do some outreach. So they went with the Republican Crazies. Amusingly enough, the exact same year the Republican Crazies were trying other things to stay relevant in the culture war:

Fundamentally? Republicans wouldn't care about abortion or guns if they hadn't manufactured a phony culture war to take sides on, but with guns at least there's an obvious criminal enterprise led by one man who has been the direct and proximate cause of every dumb thing that's happened since 1991.

Raise your hands if you remember 1991. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Okay, I do. That was the year we got sick enough of politicized gun deaths to fucking talk about fixing things. it took three years and what we ended up with was legislation so pusillanimous that Aaron Sorkin made it the center of his whole fucking movie about the presidency the next year but it also gave the NRA something to run on for the next gajillion years to the point where when it sundowned? Nobody even really talked about it.

It isn't Republicans that want guns. Republicans want votes. And since 1977, the NRA has been telling them to vote guns or get murdered. You want guns to go away? go after the NRA. Full stop. The entire posturing "I'm not a man unless I have seven AR-15s" attitude is entirely manufactured entirely to provide a wedge issue to entirely define conservatives as different from normal humans. But that'll never happen, right Nick?

Harm reduction for guns would start by acknowledging the blunt reality that we’re not going to eliminate guns any more than we have eliminated vehicles or tobacco, not in a country that already has more guns than people.

You feckless, mewling mutherfucker. THERE WAS A CIGARETTE MACHINE ACROSS THE STREET FROM MY HIGH SCHOOL. Out the front door, over the overpass, 50 feet across the parking lot, buck fifty a pack, quarters only. HALF my class smoked. A quarter of them dipped. Fast forward 25 years and I'm at two different community colleges - one full of running-start grunt grunt gun-types and one full of sensitive ponytail safe spaces art students. Of the 30 kids in the machining class? 5 vaped, zero smoked. Of the 40 kids in the art class? zero vaped, zero smoked.

Sure, do go on about NFA weapons but let's recognize the problem for what it is: A leading NYTimes columnist wrote an article about gun violence that includes the sentence

Consider that American women age 50 or older commit fewer than 100 gun homicides in a typical year. In contrast, men 49 or younger typically kill more than 500 people each year just with their fists and feet; with guns, they kill more than 7,000 each year.

...and yet doesn't mention the NRA even once.

A meaningful gun buyback program in America will be $1.5 trillion.

We're not doing that.

Anything else is just blahblahblah.