In the wake of Newtown, new gun legislation has popped up all over the country. Local, state, and federal lawmakers have jumped on the opportunity to try to move forward with firearm restrictions that will introduce a measure of safety to the "wild west" attitude held by the gun industry and its sticky-chinned fluffers, the National Rifle Association.
However, there isn't one piece of legislation I've seen yet that is going to do one damn bit of good in solving the problem of gun violence in America. Banning assault rifles or magazines over a certain capacity will merely push determined assailants to using multiple weapons and multiple magazines. Restricting access to firearms for the mentally ill, who account for less than 2% of gun-related deaths, will do little if anything to stop a rising tide of gun violence in this country.
What is needed is a law that can target the people who are the most likely to commit one of these heinous acts of violence, and prevent them from getting weapons --- while allowing the remainder of the population to continue to purchase and use their firearms.
I have devised such a plan.
There is a simple way to segregate the population accurately, easily, and without undue prejudice that, for some bizarre reason, nobody has come up with to date. This can be implemented immediately, and with one simple piece of federal legislation, we will obliterate any chance of another mass murder caused by projectile weapons.
This is the product of exhaustive research into shootings dating back over a century. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr., Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, right up to Seung-Hui Cho and Adam Lanza: every one of these assassins falls into this category. When the data is laid out end to end, it really is stunning -- both that the connections are so plain, and that nobody has considered this before.
All assassins, all mass murderers, all of the perpetrators of firearm killings ever committed in the United States -- every last one of them --- has at least one functional index finger.
Finally, we have found the key. The idea came to me while considering legislation being forwarded in many jurisdictions to limit access to firearms for the mentally ill. What idiocy, I thought to myself, obviously conceived by some panicky imbecile looking to place blame on an easily-maligned and widely-feared segment of the population. But they are barking up the wrong tree. In order to properly identify those who are actually responsible for these despicable crimes, we need to target the precise demographic, and prevent them from having access to firearms.
This is it. I will be forwarding draft legislation to Congress through my elected representatives, and putting my financial weight behind it through the various advocacy groups supporting common sense gun laws at the federal level. This is, by far, the most common sense gun law written to date.
With luck, this is the one we will eventually see passed through Congress and signed into law. In the mean time, be on the lookout for anyone you know with a functional index finger. They're as likely as not to be the next D.C. sniper.
