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Hot (lukewarm?) take: The first step in fixing the US’s problem with firearm-related violence should not be banning firearms (background checks etc already exist), but should instead be taking measures to prevent people getting into situations where randomly shooting people is seen as a logical choice, such as some form of universal income/healthcare (not gonna argue specifics here because literally anything would be better than our current state of affairs), and a better framework for both understanding and assisting with mental health. Firearm training should definitely also be a requirement.

Unfortunately, if I did somehow become president, I’d bet “President 0x30507DE was found dead in a barrel with 3 gunshot wounds to the back of the head. His death was ruled a suicide.” would be the headlines within about 2 weeks.

Medicare for all. Do away with the private healthcare system.

Free mental health services.

Student debt forgiveness.

Create programs to lift people out of poverty.

Work to abolish systemic issues that impact the low income, minorities, lgbtq, and other traditionally marginalized communities.

Create an amendment codifying the right to abortions.

Protect women’s healthcare.

Remove protections for social media and tech companies that amplify hate speech. Even if I don’t like it, the Nazis get free speech protections, but that doesn’t mean companies get to facilitate and amplify it’s reach.

Create gun training programs that hopefully can teach people that guns are not a solution to your problems; guns are a last resort to protect human life. Not property, only life.

Comprehensive police reform. Reallocate funds and responsibility away from officers so that they can focus on dealing with actual crime.

Remove civil asset fortfiture.

Prevent the sale of military equipment to police departments.

And so much more. I figure if we can get rid of a lot of the underlying causes that make people feel like they don’t have a choice but commit violent crimes then gun violence should decrease.

What I want to do will require 2/3 of Congress and 2/3 of the State legislatures.

That’s not enough support to be able to handle the gun control question. The supreme court is the real key. In theory it should be possible to pass sane gun control laws but over the years the supreme court has bent itself into pretzels trying to interpret any random yahoo with an AR-15 as being a “well-regulated militia.”

Without revamping the US to the extent that others are suggesting (like education, free mental & physical healthcare, better benefits even UBI… which tackle the root causes and issues), and more of a “4 years, gotta get it done, gotta make it stick” style legislation…
Require insurance and licencing for firearms, same as cars.
Different levels and uses of firearms require different licnences and insurances.
Licences gives the government some check.
Insurance will essentially enforce it.
No sale/transfer/ownership without valid insurance&licence.

I’d appoint a person to publicly talk about gun control and advocate Congress.

Someone who loves firearms so much that they are personally offended by a lack of respect for gun safety. If you have ever been to a gun range and been chewed out by the range safety officer, you know what I mean.

Gun control means keeping weapons out of the hands of those who intend to do harm. Which is why my first step would be to cancel all military aid to Isreal.

There’s a whole lot of gun laws and regulations that fall on the states, the courts, and the ATF, so even with the president and Congress on the same page, a lot of stuff can’t really get done easily, so I’m going to assume that the question is more “you can wave a magic wand and set the gun laws however you want them”

1. We’re pretty much going back to square one with basic definitions about what even is a firearm. No more “muzzle loaders aren’t firearms,” type bullshit. If there’s combustion propelling a projectile it’s a firearm. Depending on how technology advances, we also need to consider how we’re going to regulate things like rail/coil guns should those ever become widespread, and it may be worth lumping certain types of air gun into the category as well.

2. No private sales or transfers. Everything gets the full background check, no excuses. We’re also making those transfers free, available in more places (instead of going to a gun shop you can do them at a police station, with a notary, the DMV, post offices, etc.)

3. We’re tightening up that background check, getting all states on the same page about what sort of offenses disqualify someone from owning a firearm, how those offenses are reported, etc. officers, clerks, judges, whatever who drop the ball on making sure those offenses are reported correctly face big-time criminal liability if someone uses a gun in a crime that they purchased legally but shouldn’t.

4. More uniformity between different state laws, we need all of our systems working together seamlessly, a firearm that would make someone a felon in one state shouldn’t be legal to walk around with the next state over. We need to expand a whole lot of circumstances that would prevent someone from owning a gun (I work in 911 dispatch, we have some regulars in my area that police are at their home every week or even every night that we have caution notes attached to their addresses that someone there owns a gun or multiple guns despite the fact that they’re constantly getting into fights with their family, neighbors, seem to be constantly drunk out of their minds or are suffering from significant mental health problems. We need some way of separating those kinds people from their guns.)

5. We’re overhauling healthcare, and including mental healthcare along with regular physical healthcare. It’s going to be totally funded by the government, no out of pocket costs. It’s going to become as normal to go in to see a shrink once a year or so for a mental health check-up whether you’re having problems or not as it is to go in for your annual physical. You need a clean psych screen within the last year before any gun purchase, transfer, ammo purchase, or to renew a carry permit (which under point 4, enjoys complete reciprocity among all US states and territories) and under certain circumstances your doctor can advise the police that you’re a danger and they should remove any weapons you own.

6. Training, again free. No purchases or incoming transfers without a gun safety course. No carry permits without a more advanced course that also covers a whole lot legal, liability , moral, and ethical issues and a stringent marksmanship test.

7. You can get rimfire weapons, or manually-operated center-fire rifles and shotguns at 18. 21 for semi auto. We’re keeping the general NFA framework for machine guns intact but we’re raising the cost of the tax stamp drastically, legal NFA items are used in a vanishingly small percentage of crime, they’re not a major public safety issue, they’re more of a luxury good and a collectors item, so people can pay a big premium if they want one. We’re also moving all of the non-machine gun NFA items into the regular 21+ category, there’s too much hazy bullshit about short barreled rifles/shotguns and handguns that are functionally exactly the same but legally different because reasons. They’re all the same thing now. Silencers/suppressors are already pretty damn available under the NFA in most states to anyone who wants them and doesn’t mind jumping through a couple hoops, and again don’t get used in many crimes, and there’s some good arguments to be made for them being used to help protect hearing for recreational shooting. Things like binary triggers and bump stocks are getting regulated as machine gun parts, along with obvious examples like auto sears and lightning links because that’s what they’re trying to do while skirting the law.

8. Regarding “ghost guns” we’re going to call 80% receivers/frame guns now, they need to be serialized and those making and selling them needgo through all of the other hoops a regular gun manufacturer would need to go through. If you want to mill your own gun from a block of metal, or 3d print one, or cobble one together from plumbing parts, you also need to serialize it and submit records that that gun now exists. We can’t really do anything to enforce that at the point of manufacture, but if it turns up used in a crime we want to have some hope of tracing it and holding people responsible who allowed it to end up there. Really all gun parts except for basic screws, pins, etc. should be serialized and recorded the same way.

9. Storage- locks are mandatory when the gun is not under your direct supervision, and at home you must have a proper gun safe to store them. No leaving firearms in your vehicle regardless of how well you’ve hidden it, or what kind of safe you’ve bolted into your center console or glove box. Again, we can’t really enforce that until that gun ends up stolen or some kid gets ahold of it and shoots themselves or their friend, but it gives us an avenue to hold people responsible when that does happen. If you don’t store it properly and something happens, you’re facing jail time.

10. We’re doing some major lobbying reforms so that gun manufacturers and organizations like the NRA can’t basically just buy politicians anymore. Really, the NRA probably needs to be disbanded after the maria butina thing.

11. Cops have to jump through the same hoops as everyone else when they’re not on duty. No carrying around your duty weapon if you’re not on the clock. No exceptions that they can carry a firearm without a regular carry permit, no “no firearms allowed except for LEOs” type policies. If they’re not working, they’re not a cop.

EDIT: 12. We’re also gonna throw a ton of money at education, social welfare, decriminalize drug use, vocational training, affordable housing, etc. to keep people out of poverty and decrease crime overall.

Muzzle-loading, bayoneted smoothbore rifles are okay.

Heavy restrictions on anything else.

I imagine that you’re looking for an increase in restrictions. You’d probably need three-quarters of states onboard to do Constitutional amendments for much there.

I’d probably favor a decrease in restrictions in most respects. Historically, one criteria the Supreme Court used when discussing whether things like shortened shotguns should be legal is whether a firearm is a standard infantry weapon. I think that makes a fair amount of sense, given the rationale behind the Second Amendment, which was aimed at shooting people.

From a more-restrictive standpoint. Hmm. As things stand, there are some weapons that are generally not accepted for military use, which are generally legal for US citizens.

It seems a little odd for citizens to be running around with weapons that militaries have generally rejected as objectionable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-point_bullet

The Hague Convention of 1899, Declaration III, prohibited the use in international warfare of bullets that easily expand or flatten in the body.[4] It is a common misapprehension that hollow-point ammunition is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, as the prohibition significantly predates those conventions. The Saint Petersburg Declaration of 1868 banned exploding projectiles of less than 400 grams, along with weapons designed to aggravate injured soldiers or make their death inevitable.

Despite the widespread ban on military use, hollow-point bullets are one of the most common types of bullets used by civilians and police,[5] which is due largely to the reduced risk of bystanders being hit by over-penetrating or ricocheted bullets, and the increased speed of incapacitation.[6]

The United States is one of few major powers that did not agree to IV-3 of the Hague Convention of 1899, and thus is able to use this kind of ammunition in warfare, but the United States ratified the second (1907) Hague Convention IV-23, which says “To employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering”, similar to IV-3 of the first Convention. For years the United States military respected this Convention and refrained from the use of expanding ammunition, and even made special FMJ .22LR ammunition for use in High Standard pistols that were issued to the OSS agents and the Savage Model 24 .22/.410 combination guns issued in the E series of air crew survival kits. After announcing consideration of using hollow point ammunition for side arms, with a possible start date of 2018, the United States Army began production of M1153 special purpose ammunition for the 9×19mm Parabellum with a 147-grain (9.5 g) jacketed hollow point bullet at 962 feet (293 m) per second for use in situations where limited over-penetration of targets is necessary to reduce collateral damage.

Flamethrowers are generally legal for civilian ownership in the US and generally don’t require licensing. Militaries have tended to move away from them; they’re a pretty bad way to go. While they haven’t really caused problems in civilian hands and I tend to favor a “don’t regulate unless there’d an actual, demonstrated problem” approach, I have to admit that I’m not necessarily enthusiastic about people running around with them. I think that they’ve limited military application, and they’re a pretty awful weapon to be killed with. They aren’t considered protected by the Second Amendment today.

On the reduce restrictions side, I don’t believe that the 1986 federal license requirement for automatic weapons is in-line with the Second Amendment; I’d remove that, have the Second Amendment protect them. The standard infantry weapon today in militaries is automatic.

And states are permitted to ban suppressors. Militaries definitely do make use of suppressors. I’d like to see SCOTUS see the Second Amendment as covering that.

Airguns are not considered protected at all, from a Second Amendment standpoint. While airguns haven’t really been very successful from a military standpoint – the world tended to head down the explosive cartridge route – and US states haven’t really restricted them much, they have been used in militaries, and even today, there are large-caliber airguns that are used for hunting. I think that there’s probably a fair argument for protecting them as functionally equivalent; I don’t think that there’s a strong argument to not do so. Not aware of what case law here is; not sure if it’s hit SCOTUS.

With a Constitutional amendment, like you’re supposed to.

Licenses, taxes, storage requirements & any other scheme you come up with is & will be ruled Unconstitutional until you can amend the 2nd.

I swear, some of you have never even walked past a US civics class.

Don’t touch it. Anything you do will ensure that you and a signification percent of congress will be voted out.

I just want to note here for those about to journey into this conversation, there’s a major hiccup that didn’t exist before. The Supreme Court placed an new expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment in the 2008 Heller case. This has significantly altered how the second amendment is read in the United States. So what may seem like “brain dead easy” things to do, likely cannot be done as they would be unconstitutional.

I say this because the question posed simply indicates “Present + Congress” which seems to imply, “which laws would you pass to fix gun control issues” and post-2008 that is no longer a thing. Any discussion needs to include at this point a conversation about the Supreme Court, the new understanding of the 2nd Amendment, and that the Justices currently on the bench will likely enforce their new expansive interpretation for their term on the court (which is a lifetime appointment).

We are now at a point that we cannot fix this issue without a Constitutional Amendment, a reorganization of the Supreme Court (packing, impeachment, etc), an incredibly careful tip-toe around this new understanding of the second amendment, and/or talking about the underlying issues that surround gun reform (economic and societal issues).

And we are seeing the consequences of Heller in things like 2022 Bruen which SCOTUS indicated that a “historic standard” should be applied to new gun regulation. This has lead to US v Rahimi where the Court of Appeals for 5th Circuit has removed the Federal protection that folks charged with domestic violence can still obtain a gun as “domestic violence” had no historical standard on which to base on. Which is an absolute astonishing level of logic there.

We are no longer at a phase where legislation alone along the strict lines of “just gun reform”, this new understanding of the second amendment has forever (or at least as long as those Justices sit the bench) altered how we can approach this issue. We cannot just simply say, “let us figure out ways to regulate gun ownership in itself” that is no longer allowed. We can approach the issue indirectly: how do we increase the cost of Interstate gun ownership, how do we regulate the the dissemination of ammunition, how do we address the various issues that draw people into violent crime, how do we address the issue of school shootings at an societal level. But we have been cut off from direct approaches that regulate guns themselves except in the most extreme cases and even then, advocates are continually being handed new tools by the Supreme Court to bring about new challenges for those.

Any meaningful debate about gun control needs to include the Supreme Court. Because given the current Court’s propensity to expand gun rights and the understanding of the second amendment, any law that might get introduced to fix the issue today, could and very likely would be overturned by the court. This has become a new chess piece in this game to be considered since 2008, prior yes this could have been a Congress and President issue alone, but post-2008, the Courts must be considered in the discussion. The Supreme Court too strongly embraces the new understanding of the second amendment to let any direct law be allowed to go unchallenged.

I wouldn’t address it, honestly I think a better way to handle the issue is to fix our education & healthcare systems and stiffen up penalties for unsecured firearms some.

I think that would solve the vast majority of the problem, and there would no longer be sufficient reason to bother.