Guns aren’t a particularly dangerous sport at all.  Sure, guns themselves are dangerous—but when you’re pointing them at a paper target, guns are about as dangerous to you as a paper-cut.  Maybe a slight burn of the hand if you handle it wrong.  No, the dangerous thing about guns is not the sports that people participate in.  It’s the gun itself—before or after the sport.  

Thirty nine percent of gun-owners own their guns for sport or hunting. But most gun-related deaths take place outside of a sports setting.  Most gun deaths are suicides—and hardly any of those take place during sport or hunting.  Nor is there an epidemic of gun homicides taking place during sports or hunting.  What does that tell us?  The problem with gun violence isn’t gun sports—it’s the gun outside of those sports.  Which gives me a bit of an idea.  

I know in the last piece we talked about making guns safer for sport-owners by making guns a service.  So that every owner had access to great training, social support, and mental health services.  But I think we could take things one step further—to what might be an even more effective way to reduce gun violence:  

Make guns homeless.  

Suicide is the number one kind of gun violence.  Even in the military.  More soldiers in America die by their own hand than by the hand of the enemy—more in suicide than in combat.  That’s true not only in America, but in other countries as well—like the United Kingdom.  Take the case of Israel.  A few years back, the Israeli military was having too many suicides.  Well—any number of suicides is too many—but the problem became acute.  So military leadership looked at the numbers and found that most of the suicides were committed with guns—and most of the guns used for suicide were military-issued guns.  What could they do?  Well, they didn’t take the weapons away from soldiers—it was literally their job to have them.  But what they did do was find out when most of these suicides were taking place. The answer?  Most of the suicides were committed during off-duty hours.  When soldiers were at home.  

So they made a simple change: from that day forwards, soldiers would no longer be able to take military-issued guns home with them.  Instead, soldiers were ordered to keep them locked in storage.  The result?  Suicides dropped by 50 percent. 

So what if we did this—what if we followed this proven model; what if we found every way possible to discourage people from taking their guns home with them?  Because when you look at guns—when you examine every type of gun and gun violence, there’s one factor that stands out—that remains the same no matter the gun or the circumstance: guns always become dangerous when they’re mixed with this one element: the home.  So, rather than cutting guns out of people’s lives, let’s cut the home out of the life of guns.  Let’s make guns homeless.  

Now it’s important to make the point here—when I say guns at home, I mean guns that live at your home, but also guns that drive around with you in your car.  Guns that have been taken from the shooting range or the hunting reserve and that you carry with you.  Because while many suicides do in fact take place in the home, they can also be committed in remote locations. We want to prevent these acts of violence, too—and the best way to do that is to discourage people from taking their guns with them when they leave the shooting range or the hunting reserve. 

How do we do it?  

Well, I think there are two types of people when it comes to keeping guns at home:  

1. There are people who enjoy their guns primarily outside of the home but keep them in the home because that’s the easiest place to store and care for it. They don’t have any particular attachment to keeping it at home—that’s just the simplest place for it.

2. There are people who actually enjoy keeping their sports guns at home. They enjoy the maintenance and care of this object that is at the center of their sporting life.

Let’s think of some ideas for each:  

First—those who keep guns at home for convenience.     

At the bare minimum, let’s make it more convenient for them to keep them outside of the home.  We can encourage gun ranges and hunting lodges to offer storage and service of their members’ guns.  After all, it’s in the best financial interest of these facilities to get their customers to return.  What better way to do that than to store the customers’ guns right there on the premises?  Storage could be completely free.  Maybe the facility could even offer routine maintenance for free as well—to keep customers coming back.  Just as some car dealerships offer free oil changes to keep customers in the service department—and to build relationships for their next car purchase.  To build loyalty. 

And even if a gun facility couldn’t offer service for free, at the least they could provide a space for gun owners to service their guns on-site, with conveniences like cleaning and maintenance tools ready and handy.  If we can make it more convenient to keep your gun somewhere other than home—we could keep guns out of the home and detach them from violent impulses and activities.  

A good example in all of this is food.  Why go out to eat for food when you can just as easily eat at home?  Two reasons: 

The first being—when it’s more convenient to eat out.  Fast and fast-casual food restaurants have capitalized on this, making it easier to grab a bite to eat than to make one.  

The second reason to eat out when you can just as easily eat at home?  Well—because what you’re eating out is better than what you could make at home.  Five-star restaurants, exotic cuisine, exotic spices, complicated preparation, or impossibly expensive cooking equipment. 

In short: We eat out when it’s more convenient.  And we eat out when it’s better than what we can eat at home.  And we do it a lot: Americans spend more on eating out than they do on groceries.

So, we can make gun storage outside of the home more convenient—as we did.  Or…we can make gun sports outside of the home better.  

Here’s the “better” idea:  

Gun sports currently involve everything from handguns to rifles to automatic weapons.  But what they don’t involve are bigger and more powerful guns—or explosives, or cannons. Ammunition that fires louder—further—bigger and more intensely in every measure.  That’s for good reason—you can’t own explosives or cannons. But what if they could be made available in a safe, sporting environment?  Legal to fire on a bomb range, but illegal to take home?  

Could sports at an explosive scale flourish?  Could it attract sports owners to such a degree that they might lose interest in sports at the handheld scale?

It’s a possibility that if your sporting game is bigger—you might have little interest in keeping something smaller at home.  How many tennis players keep a table-tennis table at home?  How many pilots keep remote control planes?  How many football players keep a foosball table?  Some—some—some, I’m sure.  But not all—not even most, I’d bet.  

But how might it work?  Simple.  Allow firing ranges to possess and fire weapons in a safe, supervised environment.  Just as bomb ranges today allow safe and supervised firing.  By offering people who enjoy the power of guns more powerful weapons that they can’t take home—we could cut down home-based deaths from sports guns.  And enable sports enthusiasts to access more complex and engaging sport than they can access today.  Large guns. Fully-automatic weapons. Rocket launchers. Explosives.  

As long as the weapons are securely stored and safely discharged in a supervised environment—why not?  If this can divert 29 million sports gun owners to become sports-weapon enthusiasts who don’t keep guns at home—we could stop 8,000 suicides a year. 

But—but—I hear you thinking—but what if people enjoy taking their guns home?  

Well—that takes us to our second kind of sports owner who keeps their gun at home.  The one who enjoys it.  Who enjoys the maintenance and the care and the—just the idea of having it and looking at it and knowing it’s there.  

How can we reduce the danger of these guns?  

Well—in this instance—since the "keeping" of the gun used in the sport is why it's kept.  We can't change where the gun lives.  We have to change the sport itself.  We have to change it to a sport that—if you kept the gun at home—it couldn’t kill you.  

Luckily—there’s all sorts of competing sports that fit the bill.  And they’re crazy-popular.  And they're all like gun sports and often include guns—just non-lethal ones. These alternatives to sports shooting and hunting could serve the wants and needs of gun owners who want to keep their guns at home. 

Enjoy keeping your gun at home—practicing and firing at home or outdoors?  Paintball could be your sport.  There are as many paintball guns as there are personalities—they're ripe for collecting, target practice, and skill-building.  They can even simulate combat situations—putting you in the center of the action.  

Enjoy the social side of gun sports?  Laser tag has exploded far beyond "tag"—it's more like urban warfare.  A team-building sport that calls on skill-sets in strategy and leadership.  You could even collect an assortment of guns for the purpose—guns that match the size, weight, and carrying characteristics of real-world firearms.

Enjoy what it means to keep a gun at home—to have the sport accessible at any moment?  Video games practically got their start with guns.  "First-person shooter" isn't a title—it's an entire genre.  With an entire arsenal of activities to choose from—whether it's executing a special forces mission, fighting crime, or surviving the zombie apocalypse.  It's estimated that 135 million Americans play video games for at least 3 hours a week.  In fact, Twitch—a platform for watching others play video games—was sold to Amazon in 2014 for $970 million dollars.  More people watch others play video games on Twitch than watch the Super Bowl.  

This isn't just the sport of the future—it's the sport of today.  Millions who might otherwise have been sporting with guns are now sporting with video games.  Why not encourage more if more can save lives?  What might more look like?  Imagine a program that set up gun owners with video game consoles.  A program that enabled them to trade in their guns for gun controllers that mimicked the dimensions, the weight and feel—the action of the guns they originally had?  To play the top-rated games with top-of-the-line firepower?  Available to play at any time, with infinite ammunition, forever accessible—and always non-lethal.    

The future could attract even more converts.  Virtual reality and the “Metaverse” is just around the corner—Microsoft, Facebook, and others are investing billions in the technology—with the aim of owning the future of entertainment, activity, sport, and media.  Imagine the ability to literally step into any sport or shooting activity in the world.  To step out of this world and into another—to hold in your hand unlimited firepower. Virtual reality could—in the span of just the next 10 years—redefine how we spend our time.  And make everything from traditional sports to sporting hobbies like guns seem…obsolete.  

The ultimate goal is to reduce violence.  To save lives.  And we can do that without taking away guns or disparaging gun sports.  Sports are not the problem.  The problem—in almost every instance—is when guns are taken home.  So if we can keep guns out of the home—either by keeping them where the sports are played, or by encouraging sports that don’t involve lethal weapons—we can save lives.  It’s as simple as that.  

So let’s make it happen:  

1. Make the business case that sporting facilities have a business interest in keeping and servicing the guns of sport owners.

2. Let’s think outside of the box about ways that we can up the firepower of the weapons at gun ranges, pulling gun owners into a more powerful side of the sport that doesn’t allow for home ownership. But allows for far more than they could have expected from existing guns.

3. And let’s make it easy for gun owners to trade in their guns for non-lethal alternatives—in non-lethal sports. This, too, could be done by making a positive business case for video game, paintball, and other businesses. Gun owners are a whole new market of customers—avid sport enthusiasts, hobbyists with time on their hands and money to spare on activities that matter to them. Let’s make it easy for them to get involved.

Let’s make it easy for sport enthusiasts to enjoy their sport—and to stay safe. Without compromising either.