Posted on 01/13/2003 10:19:00 AM PST by HumanaeVitae
What is the problem for which gun control is the solution? Not the total number of gun deaths in America. Most deaths from guns occur in suicides, rather than accidents or homicides. In 1999, for example, there were 17,400 firearm suicides but only 9,000 firearm homicides. Year after year, firearm suicides outnumber firearm homicides and fatal accidents combined. But while most gun suicides are tragic, they aren't obviously a failure of gun control. If access to guns were behind the suicide rate, we would expect the United States to be among the leaders in suicide. In fact, the American suicide rate is in the middle of the pack for industrialized nations, lower than the rates for, among others, Canada, Germany, and France.
So if suicide isn't part of the problem, what is? Perhaps fatal accidents are, but the numbers for gun accidents are modest. In 1997, guns accounted for less than 2 percent of accidental deaths in this country. (Cars, by contrast, were responsible for roughly 50 percent.) Only 40 children under age 5 died in firearm accidents that year, compared with 600 who died in drownings. What's more, accidental deaths by firearms have been decreasing for decades, despite a steady increase in the number of firearms in private hands.
All this suggests that the case for gun control should center on the use of guns in violent crimes, particularly homicides. In 1999, for example, over 9,000 of the 14,000 homicides in the United States were committed with a gun. That's a big number, though not as big or dramatic as the figure cited by gun control proponents, which combines annual homicides, suicides, and accidents.
Even when we turn our attention to violent crime, however, it's clear that there is more going on than unchecked access to guns. The United States has much more violent crime, with and without firearms, than other Western democracies. America, it seems, has a disproportionate penchant for violence. (But not lawlessness: Our property-crime rates, for example, are no higher than Britain's or Australia's.) And those who see homicide chiefly as a gun problem gloss over the distinctly American social landscape—with its vast income inequalities, legacy of racial oppression, and enduring frontier mentality—responsible for the conditions in which violence thrives. Consider that our rape, robbery, and assault rates are much higher than those in other countries, yet only modest fractions of these crimes are committed with guns (1.4 percent for rape, 21.5 percent for robbery, and 22.7 percent for aggravated assault). Nine in ten violent crimes are committed without any weapon at all.
Guns play a large role in homicides, but they also play a large role in American life more generally. There are 250 million firearms in private hands in the United States, and the arsenal is growing by about 4.5 million new firearms each year. Two in five households have a gun. Last year, surveys estimated there were 14 million hunters above the age of 16 in the United States, to go with the 12.7 million who claimed to participate in target shooting. (By comparison, 11.2 million Americans play tennis, 15.6 million play softball, and 22.5 million jog for recreation.)
Guns are also a significant business: There are 191 firearms manufacturers, ranging from the largest, Smith and Wesson, to many small firms; these companies employ about 11,000 people and generate sales of $3.5 billion per year. Of the 250 million firearms in private hands, two-thirds are rifles and shotguns. Yet firearm crimes almost always involve handguns. There is good reason to think of the gun problem more narrowly as a handgun problem.
Right now, the practical effect of gun control is severely limited. In exempting a large portion of gun sales under the current laws, the regulatory system—including the highly touted Brady Law—defeats its own best efforts. Purchases made through Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) are heavily regulated, but purchases from private individuals are not. The result is analogous to a house with six deadbolts on the door and an open window. As long as casual or occasional gun sellers haven't declared themselves FFLs, there is no federal requirement that they run background checks on potential buyers or keep records of their sales. No federal law would stop them from using a classified ad that read, "Gun for sale: no background check required." It should come as little surprise that most criminals get their guns either via the secondary (non-FFL) market or at gun shows.
Even when background checks are performed, they fall well short of the stated ambition of the law. The Brady system relies on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), a federally administered database, which fails to cover many groups for whom guns are ostensibly off limits. No comprehensive lists exist for current drug addicts, mental patients, domestic abusers, or illegal aliens—all of whom are "excluded" from owning weapons by the Brady Law. Creating such lists would be expensive or, more likely, impossible. Their availability would violate privacy concerns.
If the law doesn't require background checks at gun shows, then criminals know that it's at gun shows where they should get their guns. If the law "forbids" selling guns to categories of people, but provides sellers no way to ascertain whether buyers fall into many of these categories, it serves only as political agitprop and not as policy. But expanding the law would be hard. Even after the Columbine massacre, the U.S. Congress would not pass the Gun Show Accountability Act (GSAA), a bill requiring background checks on all firearms sales at gun shows. That refusal was a strong reminder of the unwelcome status of gun control in American politics. Yet if the GSAA is an end in itself, it is hardly worth the effort. What's the purpose of requiring non-FFLs to put their customers through a background check at a gun show, but nowhere else? Criminals could just wait until after the gun show was over and buy their guns in the parking lot.
Proponents of gun control attempted to address these concerns with "Brady II," the popular name for an omnibus bill that has been languishing in Congress since the mid-1990s. Brady II seeks to cover all handgun transfers by requiring that gun purchasers be licensed and trained to use firearms safely, with local government asked to carry out these tasks. But in 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Printz v. United States that the federal government cannot compel state or local agencies to enforce a regulatory scheme, which almost certainly renders this tactic unconstitutional. A post-Printz version of Brady II would need to rely exclusively on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) or some other federal agency. Federal employees would issue (and revoke) licenses and keep records on all FFL and non-FFL handgun transfers.
Brady II acknowledges that an effective licensing system must be backed up by a comprehensive registration scheme. That way, authorities would be able to hold sellers accountable when their guns turned up in the wrong (i.e., unlicensed) hands. Brady II doesn't contain the words "national handgun registry," but that's what the bill would establish. It would expand the paper trail on every handgun by requiring the manufacturer and all subsequent sellers or transferors to fill out a registration form.
The full effect of Brady II would be to create a regulatory system for owning guns like the one now in place for driving cars. The DMV analogy is a good indication of the cost of this kind of program—every county in the United States has a DMV—but not necessarily of its effectiveness. The foremost goal of gun licensing is prevention—keeping guns out of the wrong hands —rather than punishment. But that's not the way the driver licensing system operates. It weeds out practically no one in advance; it has teeth only after a driver demonstrates dangerousness by violating a motor vehicle law or, more likely, after a series of violations.
The major impediment to making a national handgun registry work is obtaining compliance from present gun owners. A registry would mean little unless nearly all of the 250 million guns currently in circulation were listed with the government. In recent years, several states passed laws mandating the registration of assault rifles. For reasons ranging from ideology to laziness, these laws have been overwhelmingly ignored. A black market would invariably crop up where unregistered guns could be peddled. Moreover, unlike with cars—where drivers without license plates can be easily spotted by police—those who chose to carry around an unregistered gun would likely go undetected until after they committed a crime. So even if we overcame the political, logistical, and financial obstacles to passing the GSAA, extending background checks to the secondary market, and creating a national gun registry and licensing system, the question remains: Would a new generation of criminals find it difficult to obtain unregistered handguns? And would the gains in controlling guns be worth it?
The crime-solving potential of a registry and licensing system is diminished by a few realities. If a gun is recovered at a crime scene, it is usually because the police have arrested the person holding it. A savvy criminal can defeat a tracing system by filing down the serial number. Even if new technology, like a computer chip containing a serial number, could prevent destruction of a gun's identity, it would be possible to wipe out the serial numbers of handguns manufactured before the new technology was available. Criminals would still be able to use the millions of guns already in circulation. And handguns can last up to 100 years.
Where does that leave us? Prohibition of civilian ownership of firearms is not a feasible option. To the extent that it remains on the agenda at all, its effect is counterproductive. As long as gun owners believe that gun control advocates want to prohibit civilian ownership, they will resist all handgun measures, seeing them as part of a step-by-step march toward prohibition and confiscation.
Gun "control" should be about reinforcing a norm of responsible gun ownership and use. We should approach the issue with the same mindset with which we approach alcohol consumption and driving, where we talk about "responsible drinking" and "safe driving." Here's a modest set of proposals to augment the current system built around Brady.
Ballistics fingerprinting—requiring manufacturers to test-fire new guns and supply the government with samples of the bullets and shell casings—is worth trying because the implementation and enforcement costs are low. Criminals could learn to defeat this system by altering the gun barrel with an instrument, but the system could prove useful. Restricting handgun sales to one handgun per buyer each month makes sense for the same reason. Very few legitimate users would be inconvenienced by that limit. Brady II would require such laws, and perhaps they would keep black marketeers from stockpiling guns quickly.
A waiting period could prevent a person in a murderous rage from running out of the house and, on the spot, purchasing a firearm from an FFL, then rushing back home to use it. Gun control advocates should also try to repeal the so-called "shall issue" laws. These state laws grant permits allowing practically any citizen without a criminal record to carry a concealed weapon in public. If anyone can legally carry a firearm, the police have no probable cause to stop a person they believe is armed.
By far the easiest way to strengthen firearms policy in the United States is to provide severe punishment for every defendant who uses a gun to commit a crime. There are no interest groups that oppose tough treatment for gun offenders. The NRA, the police, and victims' groups all support long prison terms for individuals who commit crimes with guns. If the laws about illegal possession of a firearm are viewed as too harsh and are not enforced, it makes sense to relax them: A modest punishment routinely enforced is better than a draconian threat rarely applied.
Even without a major gun initiative, there is reason to be optimistic about our potential to reduce crime. Violence has decreased dramatically in the United States, against a backdrop of increasing gun ownership. This tells us that the accessibility of firearms is not the most important factor driving gun crime. Instead of being distracted by proposals that focus narrowly and unrealistically on guns, policymakers should now look to the other anti-crime strategies and the social welfare policies that might be contributing to this unprecedented decrease in violent crime and gun crime. Scant attention is paid to the novel strategies to reduce violence being tried throughout the country: anti-bullying programs in schools, for example, and comprehensive state-funded counseling for dysfunctional families. We need to reduce the devastating amount of violence in poor inner-city neighborhoods by working to rebuild them physically and socially. That's a difficult task, but we would have more resources to devote to it if we weren't distracted by the false promise of gun control.
A savvy criminal can defeat a tracing system by filing down the serial number
There are now techniques that are able to reveal a serial number even after it's been completely machined off (the stamping of the serial number causes some sort of stress on the underlying metal in the shape of the numbers. This "ghost" image can be brought ought even after physcal defacement of the serial number).
The courts won't let the police stop a person because they "believe" he might be armed. Its called reasonable cause. This dweeb points out the fatal flaw in the gun control argument. Namely that we'll impose sanctions on all law abiding citizens in order to stop the law breakers. The law abiding don't need to be stopped and the law breakers won't be stopped.
How do you know? If you put a hand grip on your rifle, or a folding stock on your semi-auto shotgun you're halfway to creating an 'illegal assault weapon'. I haven't recently checked to see what other modifications meet 'assault weapon' definition, but anyone who hasn't is at risk of possessing 'illegal assault weapons' Is your paperwork in order? What will you do if they show up to check? Will you show them your guns and let them see if they're 'illegal'? Or will you shoot them in the face?
The author is speaking from theory here, not from data. The latest Justice Department figures indicate that less than 2% of crimes are committed by guns purchased from gun shows. Maybe criminals should (in his opinion) get their guns at guns shows, but they don't. One reason is probably that a whole lot of cops hang out at gun shows too.
But this is excellent: What is the problem for which gun control is the solution?
The problem has little to do with guns directly. The problem is that a number of people who depend on government regulation to mold society in ways congenial to their politics feel that they are insufficiently able to regulate this area, or more properly, this demographic. They view gun owners as "unregulated," and hence lawless. Neither is true.
No national gun laws should ever be made, since no national gun law can be applied differently in North Dakota and Washington DC.
According to U.S. Department of Justice · Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics:
most homocides( 51.5%) and most felony murders (59.2%) are committed by blacks, which are only 12% of the population living on 3% of the land area. The murder rate for most of America, 87% of it, is comparable to most other developed countries.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm
States like North Dakota, which have a homocide rate of 0.6% does not need more gun control. The state of North Dakota has a lower homocide rate than any other "country" in the world. There are vast areas of America which are realatively crime free, and no one should tamper with changing things.
Any government action to reduce homocides, should be addressed and applied to only those areas where the homocides are: like in Washington DC,
and leave the rest of the country alone.
I thought I had a handle on that last night. But I may have been dreaming.
This author is a liberal but not a real leftist. He is unknowledgeable about and a bit intimidated by firearms but he is not a true gun grabber. He is trying to apply common sense to the gun-control question from a liberal's POV and in so doing he has dug up a lot of factual information but is still laboring under some heavy delusions from anti-gun propaganda.
I wonder what he will think when he finally snaps to the real agenda of gun-control? He is blissfully unaware that it isn't really 'for the chirren'.
LIBERTY! Just ask General Gage, (former) military governor of Boston. Of course, things didn't work out quite as he had planned ....
Gun control isn't about guns, its about control. Thanks to some less than bright anti-gun politicians in NYC, MD and CA, gunowners in this country are aware that registration is a stalking horse for the true anti-gun agenda, one that is the same here as in England and Australia - confiscation.
Canada, a country with no history of violent revolution, is experiencing massive civil disobedience in its attempt to register guns. Even the normally docile Canadians are highly suspicious of their government - and rightly so. I wonder what will happen here when (not if - it will happen) some sort of a registration scheme is implemented? Massive civil disobedience will probably be the least of the problems, IMHO. And that, unlike so much of what has happened in this country for the last couple of generations, would make the Founding Fathers proud.
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