| Gun law fiasco |
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Widely flouted gun restrictions show that laws work only when people want to abide by them
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What do you do when you pass a hard-fought gun law and people just refuse to obey?
Civil disobedience
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Dateline: 1/29/01
What if they passed a law and nobody obeyed? That's a question that never occurs to advocates of whatever utopian restriction is supposed to save the world this week. They seem to think that a draconian bill rammed through a legislature has the same force as the laws of physics; if you can muster enough votes and wish really, really hard, gravity will suck up instead of down. Inevitably, when it comes time to enforce the new statute, they're astonished that sizable chunks of the population happily defy the law and that utopia fails to arrive. Which brings us to the matter of gun laws in Canada and California. In both jurisdictions, January 1st deadlines came and went without gravity sucking up. The great defiant northCanada's law, which has been hotly debated for several years and has helped to drive a wedge between Ottawa and the western provinces, requires a new system of licensing for firearm owners and full registration of all guns. The licensing provision took effect January 1, 2001, with all gun owners to be licensed as of that date. The Canadian Firearms Registry claims that roughly 87% of the country's 2.46 million gun owners have complied. That compliance rate comes courtesy of a last-minute rush of license applications that was partially orchestrated by gun rights groups to swamp the system — and did so in spades. But, as Garry Breitkreuz, a member of Parliament for the conservative Canadian Alliance points out, that 87% compliance estimate also comes courtesy of a downward nudge to the official guess of the number of Canadians who own guns. Just a year ago, the same officials now claiming widespread compliance by the country's 2.46 million shooters were predicting cooperation by the country's 3.2 million shooters. Prof. Gary Mauser of Simon Fraser University says that officials are missing at least 400,000 gun owners. These folks feel inclined to fib when poll takers ring them up at dinnertime to ask about the potentially felonious ownership of strictly regulated devices. Actually, in a study published just a few years ago, Mauser estimated that "at least 28.5% of the households in Canada have firearms. This is a minimal estimate ..." With over ten million households in Canada, and certainly more than one person on average per household, the number of folks spurning a new relationship with government bureaucracy is likely a bit higher than the bureaucrats are claiming. Back alley dealNot surprisingly, the press is reporting that the firearms market has gone the same way as the modern market for cocaine or the Prohibition-era trade in scotch and bourbon. One gun shop owner told the Vancouver Courier that: Business is way down but it has nothing to do with the fact fewer people are owning guns," said Traver, the city's only female gun shop owner. "The reality is more and more people are owning firearms. It's just they are owning them illegally.
In the same article, a Vancouver-based Mountie admitted that, "If people find the regulation component of gun ownership too stringent, they may seek other methods of owning a weapon." That's no surprise to authorities south of the border. According to the Dallas Morning News, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms complains that "criminals are finding ways to thwart federal laws that were designed to keep modern firearms out of their hands." Contrary to popular misconceptions, says the BATF: [Criminals] are not attracted to older weapons legally offered for sale at collectors' shows, flea markets and on the Internet. Instead, many of the youths committing crimes use the latest models of 9mm semiautomatic handguns, shotguns and Chinese-made 7.62 mm assault rifles. And they're willing to pay black-market prices for them ...
Duh. You'd think that an agency with responsibility over booze, smokes and guns, regulation of which has been actively defied by Americans for many decades, would have picked up on the difficulties of the job by now. California schemin'The most recent Americans to actively defy the law are the inhabitants of that geographical embodiment of national dreams and picturesque weirdness: California. Under a law that, like the Canadian measure, took effect January 1, 2001, Californians are supposed to register their "assault weapons." "Assault weapon" being a term unknown to gun makers or users, state legislators wrote the law to ban rifles with such cosmetic features as pistol grips, thumbhole stocks, folding stocks, flash suppressors and magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds. Of course, one of the problems with banning cosmetic feature is that they're ... well ... cosmetic — you can change them relatively easily by accessorizing like a particularly well-armed teenage girl. This aggravates a problem state authorities have had from the beginning: nobody knows how many guns or gun owners are subject to the law. But everybody knows that a lot of gun owners are ignoring the law. According to the Washington Times, "California gun owners are taking their assault-style weapons out of state or putting them in hiding to avoid a registration deadline that took effect Jan 1." How many? "No one knows exactly how many of these types of guns are in private hands, but we estimate the number is far higher than what has been registered," state Attorney General Bill Lockyer told the Times. Roughly 10,000 gun owners had complied with the law by the end of the year, which is a rather anemic number of people to abide by restrictions that effect an enormous number of popular hunting, sporting and defensive weapons in the most populous state in the United States. True, at least some owners of affected firearms shipped their weapons out of state to friends, relatives and storage facilities, or else modified the guns so that they fell outside the legal definition of "assault weapon." But that's a relatively costly alternative to the cheap option: stick the rifle in the closet and keep your mouth shut. Those nasty scofflawsBut why ever would hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, of Canadians and Californians defy the law and risk the unpleasant consequences? The Californian measure threatens jail time, plus a $500 fine. Canadian officials threaten violators with fines beginning at $2,000 and jail terms of up to five years — even in Canadian dollars and years that's a stiff penalty. The Canadians went a step further to make their gun law a little piece of a police state in a nominally free society. Says the National Post, "The Firearms Act allows firearms officials to enter any private property that is not specifically a home to search for guns. They may also search computers they come across. Furthermore, property owners are compelled to assist the officers in turning their own private property inside out." But threatening people with penalties and extraordinary enforcement powers unless they abide by laws that really piss them off has never been terribly effective. Back when tobacco first made its way to the Ottoman Empire, the then-sultan proclaimed the death penalty for fanciers of the naughty new vice. Even so, the smoke-free facilities movement just didn't catch on. So a few dollars and a little jail time isn't likely to deter gun owners who feel at least as attached to their rifles and shotguns as Turks were to their hookahs. But we're not talking about bans here. California is requiring registration, and Canada is mandating licensing. What's with the grassroots revolt? Well, as Prof. Mauser, that Canadian gun control expert, wrote in a study for the Fraser Institute: Many firearms owners believe that registration will lead to confiscation and cite many historical examples, both in Canada and internationally, where this has occurred. For example, in 1991, Bill C-17, introduced by the Mulroney government, confiscated (without compensation) previously-registered firearms. Bill C-68 will, if implemented, confiscate most currently registered handguns. The experience in Australia is that more than 40 percent of firearms have not been registered even after decades of requirements that they be so.
Basically, gun owners around the world see politicians as a bunch of bullies, liars and thieves, and since politicians have done their best to live up to the reputation, trust is in short supply. Rather than risk a massive grab of their property, gun owners are more inclined to keep things out of sight and out of mind. Also, the United States isn't the only place in the world where weapons ownership is intertwined with notions of political liberty. History is full of variants of Aristotle's observation that "[a]s of oligarchy so of tyranny ... Both mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms." Enough Canadians and Californians share the old Greek philosopher's sentiments to render gun restrictions harder to enforce than the Ottoman sultan's anti-smoking campaign. Simple pragmatism
You'll notice that I haven't mentioned the Second Amendment or natural rights or revolution against governments gone rotten even once. Well, not until now, anyway. That's because law and philosophy are separate worries. Harbor all the pacifist sentiment you wish, insist that the Second Amendment applies only to the National Guard and sincerely believe that today's democratic governments will remain healthy and refrain from stomping on their citizens' rights from now until the sun sputters down to a cinder. You can still recognize that some laws are completely unenforceable because too many people refuse to be bound. Hell, we've already seen the results around the world of restrictions on religion, alcohol, drugs, speech and Turkish tobacco — all bred widespread defiance and resulted in chaos. The hard, cold truth is that regulations and statutes are meaningful only when almost everybody wants to abide by them to begin with. Pass all the laws you want, you can't make gravity suck up. |