We Must Not Overcriminalize Gun Owners

The Compact aims to reduce the number of guns in circulation and ensure that individuals who do own them know how to use them safely. In working to achieve this goal, the United States must not overcriminalize gun owners, and we must not build a future with fewer guns on the backs of those who are harmed most by the gun crisis. The Compact must not contribute to or perpetuate inequalities and injustices in our mass-incarceration criminal justice system, in which the prison population has quintupled since the 1970s and 60 percent of prisoners are people of color.

That is why the very first provisions of the Compact, outlined in detail below, go after the big fish in the gun supply chain, the gunmakers and dealers who produce and sell these deadly products. In 2017, the gun industry claimed it produced $51 billion in economic activity. It has grown mightily as a result of the nation’s loose gun laws; any effort to build a future with fewer guns must start at the very top and provide significant oversight of the industry and its products.

Any such effort must also deal with the everyday gun violence that plagues our cities. As I have noted, most urban gun homicides occur in clusters of very densely populated and impoverished communities in which people have few economic opportunities and must rely on black markets, primarily created by the drug war, to survive. In such a milieu, guns mean personal protection and become a basic necessity. If we ask people to put down their guns, we have to give them something they can pick up—jobs, job training, scholarships, public works programs, addiction treatment instead of prison … there are many possibilities for helping people out of the mess that four centuries of institutionalized racism and exploitation have created.

We must intervene in the cycle of gun violence without arresting more people and sending them to prison, for that will dig low-income communities both rural and urban into a deeper financial hole, taking away the few economic opportunities they have and giving them nothing in return. Cities throughout the country have launched community-based crime intervention initiatives that have reduced gun homicide rates. We must pair investments in these programs with policies that will make guns scarce and make new firearms significantly harder to get.

To move toward a world with fewer guns, we need new rules. These rules must limit the possibility that existing firearms will be used in homicides or suicides and restrict the purchase of new firearms. Some current gun owners will face penalties for owning a weapon without a license, insurance, or registration. All of these penalties must be enforced equitably; they cannot be used by politicians and law enforcement as yet another excuse to overcriminalize communities of color. These penalties cannot be the harsh mandatory minimums that have ripped apart communities. We should not be putting people in jail for years for this. Illegal gun possession should be treated as a serious crime to help deter people from committing it, but we cannot continue to overcriminalize the poor or communities of color.

How can we accomplish these objectives fairly? One model to follow could be the successful Swift, Certain, and Fair program widely used for drug and alcohol offenses in Hawaii and elsewhere. SCF replaces long incarceration periods with swift, certain, and relatively small penalties. It is based on the theory that some offenders do not need to spend years in a prison to understand the consequences of their crimes.

Consider individuals on drug probation. Those who test positive for illegal drugs are immediately given a sentence of a couple of days in prison rather than languishing in the criminal justice system or awaiting a court date. It is no longer a question of whether you will end up in jail after you exhaust all of your appeals, but instead it is a certainty that you will go to jail tomorrow. The sentence must be seen as reasonable by the offender in order to change behavior. When it is, it appears that it can. According to a five-year study conducted by the Department of Justice, compared to people in regular probation, individuals in Hawaii’s program were 50 percent less likely to be arrested or have their probation revoked and were a whopping 72 percent less likely to use illegal drugs. Length of sentences for gun crimes still varies based on the individual and the community, but this kind of swift approach should be a starting point for designing the penalties for carrying a gun without a license or proper registration.

Another way to avoid contributing to the ills of our criminal justice system is to ensure that the reforms outlined in the Compact are implemented nationally and do not target certain regions or neighborhoods. National implementation will eliminate the problem of guns seeping into communities from less regulated states or jurisdictions. (Approximately 60 percent of guns used in crimes in Chicago come from outside the state.) It will also ensure that gun laws do not have a disparate impact on underserved communities.

The reforms in the Compact are absolutely essential to building safer communities. They have already succeeded in reducing gun deaths around the world—all without infringing on one’s right to own guns responsibly.