35. REDUCE VIDEO GAME VIOLENCE
THE MESSY Proposals where the potential benefits come coupled with downsides and risks:
38. REPEAL THE SECOND AMENDMENT
37. INSTALL GUNSHOT TRACKING TECHNOLOGY IN CITIES
39. PLACE ARMED POLICE OFFICERS IN SCHOOLS
A series of microphones placed throughout about 90 major metropolitan cities detect gunshots in real time and immediately alert police.
In a vacuum, the idea of having more armed police officers in schools to prevent school shootings seems like a no-brainer. It avoids the complications of arming
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It’s a simple enough idea: If guns on the streets are dangerous, why not pay people to turn in their guns, no questions asked? It’s been tried by plenty of police departments across the country. But most studies have suggested the impact on homicide rates has been insignificant. In 2013, three researchers at State University of New York College at Buffalo looked at five years of gun-buyback programs in Buffalo, N.Y. The conclusion was scathing. “Gun-buyback programs appear to satisfy a local administrator’s need for instant solutions to a problem, despite a lack of evidence demonstrating effectiveness as a violence-reduction strategy,” researchers concluded.
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36. HOLD VOLUNTARY GUN BUYBACKS
So why not simply ban all guns? Or why not require all guns be kept at an armory, instead of the home? Why not imitate Britain or Australia or Japan? Because the Constitution, that’s why. An Antonin Scalia-penned Supreme Court decision in 2008 left plenty of room for gun regulation, but invalidated sweeping gun-control measures like an outright ban on handguns. That’s led an increasing number of commentators—including former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens—to note there’s a simple way to fix that: Repeal the Second Amendment. The road to an amendment is ridiculously steep, requiring either the vote of twothirds of both houses of Congress or two-thirds of the state legislatures. But even if it can’t be done, it could at least shift the terms of the debate, supporters argue. “Why can’t the NRA’s extremism be countered with equal extremism?” writes Vox’s German Lopez. “That seems like a potential way to get to the middle that the great majority of Americans agree with.” Go for it, far-right conservatives say: Embed repealing one of the bedrock principles of the country into the Democratic Party platform. Watch what happens to your swing states and rural elected representatives. Watch as the donations to the NRA skyrocket and gun purchases soar as the fear that the government’s coming for your guns seems more real than ever. Ultimately, it might be far easier to put more liberal-leaning Stevens-style justices on the court, to sweep away Scalia’s precedent, than taking on the Constitution directly.
President Trump summoned video game developers to the White House in March for a meeting that opened with a video of grisly kill shots from games like Fallout 4 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It was almost a throwback to the let’s-blameColumbine-on-Marilyn-Manson days—condemning games for, in the words of a 2012 Trump tweet, “creating monsters.” Both the law and the science are stacked against Trump: In 2011, the Supreme Court struck down violent video game restrictions on First Amendment grounds, noting that there wasn’t any clear link between violent games and violent kids. Yes, some kids play more aggressively after playing violent games, a New York Times review of the research concluded, but actual violent offenders typically have consumed less media than average. Juvenile violence overall has plummeted even as the number of kids playing video games has soared. And as The NYT pointed out, Japan, a country by any measure more obsessed with games than the United States, had a grand total of six gun deaths in 2014. The United States? More than 33,000. Yes, something’s different between those two countries—and it isn’t violent video games.
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The technology, known as ShotSpotter, lets officers respond quickly and accurately to gunfire, which could lead to more cases of gun violence getting solved. Yet, some reports indicate the expensive technology plays only a minor role in reducing gun violence. The Center for Investigative Reporting found that over a two-year period in San Francisco, only two arrests were made out of 3,000 ShotSpotter alerts.
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as it has threatened to, the tax will raise even less than that. The trouble is, guns aren’t like cigarettes, the Los Angeles Times editorial board points out: “A criminal who needs a gun as a primary tool of his trade would hardly be put off by a slightly higher price.”
ACTIVISION
With more than 250 million units sold, Call of Duty is the most successful first-person shooter video game.