twiti

In the months that followed the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, I thought about something concrete I could do for gun control. Local politicans here in DC have passed about as much legislation as we can manage post-Heller. Some local pols have worried aloud about the menace of 3D-printed guns. I worried that this fear will manifest itself not in bans on gun possession independent of provenance but in restrictions on hobby fabrication equipment.

On 10 July 2019 -- less than a month before Connor Betts murdered 9 and injured dozens in Dayton with his rifle and drum magazine, a litter activist found this retail packaging for a cheap Glock-compatible drum magazine in a DC street can.

Please, people, do not put your household trash in public cans pic.twitter.com/kITBTD58Qs

— Julie Lawson (@srfrjulie) July 10, 2019

Whatever the specter of homemade 3D-printed guns was going to be, FedEx seems prepared to deliver something wilder.

I woke up thinking that the answer is ban self-loading firearms. A year ago, I would have packaged that up into one or two-hundred-odd characters and said so on twitter. Today, after the President of the United States blamed mental illness, video games, and online hate for the massacres in Toledo and El Paso, I thought the better first step was to quit twitter.

I have lots of other ideas that could have been packaged into little twitter message confections but it's all obvious. The concrete thing you can do is vote and you can't do that on twitter.