Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 105

Responding To Mass Shootings Has Nothing To Do With ‘Gun-Free’ Zones.

What are we going to do about mass, public shootings which not only exact a terrible physical and psychic toll on our society, but also appear to be on the rise?  Well, there’s two ways we can go.  One way is to believe that the stupid, self-promotions of people like John Lott about ‘gun-free’ zones and armed citizens can provide a measure of safety and security. The other way is to sit down with the professionals in the field who are intently trying to figure out the problem based on real data and real-world experiences and listen to what they have to say.

The latter response is the basis of an important article in Mother Jones by Mark Follman, who writes frequently about guns and gun violence for the Mother as well as for just about every major news venue that can be found. This article is based primarily on a threat assessment conference that Mark attended in August at which 700 professionals got together to share ideas, experiences and strategies for what might and might not work to identify and stop mass shooters before they hit the ground.  The conference was sponsored by the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP), which comprises law enforcement officers, forensic psychologists, private security consultants, representatives of school districts, researchers; in other words, the people whose job it is to protect all of us from mass shooting events.  The annual conference was held this year at Disneyland because public amusement parks are considered a Numero Uno attraction for anyone who wants to commit serious mayhem with a gun.

                I’m going to pause right here for a moment and tell you why Wayne LaPierre wasn’t invited to this conference, despite the fact that he postures himself as an expert on how to respond to mass shooting events.  The NRA response to every type of gun violence – ‘good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns’ – may get an enthusiastic response from everyone who suffers from arrested development when it comes to fantasizing walking around with a gun, but it’s nothing more than a shabby marketing ploy to sell more guns.

In that respect it should be noted, incidentally, that the conference attendees were near-unanimous in their belief that easy access to guns, particularly guns that are favored by mass shooters like AR-15s, make these events not only more probable, but also more lethal.  This wasn’t the opinion of a bunch of tree-hugging, liberal do-gooders who want to get rid of guns.  This was the consensus view of law enforcement and security specialists who spend all their time trying to figure out what to do.  Nobody at the conference wasted a moment talking about the 2nd Amendment; it was simply recognized that when you have so many guns lying around, this creates more problems for professionals who are trying to stop mass killings in which invariably guns are used.

One of the reasons that the professionals dealing with mass shooters don’t come out and tell people like John Lott where to get off is because the nature of the task which confronts them requires that they operate in a non-public mode.  For example, the FBI has a special unit at Quantico that brings together specialists from five federal agencies in an effort to assist local police departments in identifying and tracking mass shooting threats.  Since 2012 this group has taken on more than 400 cases, in other words, good guys using computers to stop bad guys with guns.

Identifying a mass shooter means figuring out a probable profile and then figuring out who fits the profile before the shooting begins. I came away from reading this article with a greater awareness of the difficulties and challenges precisely because sometimes the mass-shooting profile fits and sometimes it does not.  But the profiles are all the same in one respect:  these shooters all have in common the ease with which they get their hands on guns.

The Cops Found 7,000 Stolen Guns But This Doesn’t Make Our Streets More Safe.

There’s a great story out of Chesterfield County, South Carolina, where law enforcement evidently found more than 7,000 stolen guns sitting in a storage bin on the property of a feller named Brent Nicholson who, in addition to the guns, also was in possession of chainsaws, some 4-wheelers and other stolen junk, much of it sitting in plain view on his front lawn.  Actually, the cops had been eyeing ol’ Brent for awhile because of some issues involving drug trafficking, and when they dropped by his house to serve a subpoena on the old boy, they found all those guns.

So the local cops, the State Law Enforcement Division boys and, of course, the ATF, are going to have a rollickin’ good time sorting through all those piles of firearms to figure out the rightful owners, notify and return the stolen property from whence it came and do what they gonna do to good ol’ Brent.  But for those of you who think that the seizure of these 7,000 guns means that 7,000 guns won’t have a chance to get out to the street and into the wrong hands, think again.  Because the reason the guns were sitting around in the first place is that nobody would take the time or trouble to cart them over to the Iron Pipeline, aka Interstate 95, where they could then be moved up to the crime-gun markets of DC, Baltimore, Philly and New York.

                The problem with ol’ Brent’s guns is that they are hunting rifles and shotguns, no handguns and no AR-15s.  And while the police said that it “appeared” that the old boy was just “hoarding” the weapons, the truth is that when you break into somebody’s place looking for guns, you’ll find all kinds.  Want the short odds that the homes which contained these rifles and shotguns didn’t contain any handguns at all? So as long as ol’ Brent keeps his mouth shut, he’s just guilty of holding stolen property which in a rural area like Chesterfield County just ain’t no big deal.

Back in 2010 Mayors Against Illegal Guns put up a website that showed the state origin and state destination of stolen guns, as well as a report based primarily on ATF trace data from 2009. The report clearly makes the connection between states with high export rates, shorter time-to-crime rates and little or no gun-control laws.  It turns out, of course, that states with lax gun laws (like South Carolina) tend to be the states that furnish most of the crime guns.  Everytown wants to expand its research but has been stymied by the ATF’s refusal to hand over more data, so the organization recently filed a complaint against the ATF and we’ll see what we see.  For all I know, the ATF’s refusal to comply with Everytown is because the agency’s afraid it will be criticized by the loony, pro-gun Congressional gang for infringing on the poor, gun-owner’s 2nd Amendment rights.  Or maybe it’s just the old story of another bureaucracy not wanting to tell the public what they really do.

Either way, assuming that sooner or later Everytown pries the detailed trace data away from the ATF, we might find out a bit more about all those other guns that were probably sitting in ol’ Brent Nicholson’s storage bin.  But before everyone gets all excited, let’s understand one major limitation about trace data from the ATF, namely, it’s based on when the gun was initially sold, not the date when it was stolen and then wound up in ol’ Brent’s shed.

The ATF tracing system provides “investigative leads in the fight against violent crime,” but the leads don’t shed much light on how guns end up in the ‘wrong’ hands.  After all, the states with lax gun laws are also the states in which virtually every house contains guns, which is why ol’ Brent probably sent lots of iron up North but still ended up with 7,000 guns.

 

The NRA Admits The Truth About How Often We Actually Use Guns To Protect Ourselves From Crime.

So my man Colion, he of the prancing around with his cute little AR, has just stuck up a new video on the NRA website, and it is simply a remarkable commentary on the Big Lie that the NRA has been spreading around for the last thirty years. And the lie I am referring to is the idea that armed citizens carrying their own guns are an effective response to crime.  In the old days they had real personalities like Charlton Heston drumming up the ‘guns protect us from crime’ doggerel, now it’s left to made-for-video characters like Colion Noir or AM Talk Radio hamsters like John Lott to spread this nonsensical and dangerous line around.  Why is it nonsensical?  Because it’s based on data which (I’m being polite) doesn’t exist.  Why is it dangerous?  Because it diverts attention from the fact that guns create risk.  Notice that I have bolded, underlined and italicized the word ‘fact.’  Get it?

                Anyway, so Colion has this new video in which he’s up on a stage and with lots of canned applause, ooohs and aaahs, performs a card trick in which it appears as though he is laying out 52 cards in a certain order and then tries to do it again.  And the odds of anyone being able to perform such a trick, he admits, are somewhere above a gezillion to one.  Which he then says – are you ready, are you ready? – that these are about the odds of an American getting attacked and, in their moment of peril, needing to use a gun.

What?  A spokesperson for the NRA actually coming out and saying that we aren’t all facing an immediate and continuous threat to our lives from the you-know-who’s that are stalking us down every street?  No.  Play it again Colion, play it again.  And here it is: “The odds of you or me needing a gun to protect our lives is not that much better than Colion the Incredible putting these cards back in the exact order.”   Then he drops the other shoe: “But the odds of someone needing a gun to protect their life with is a hundred percent.”

So what he’s saying in a somewhat scrambled way is that even though guns are the best way to defend yourself, the chances that you will ever have to defend yourself are a gazillion to one.  And this segues into the usual nonsense about how people who are anti-gun have no right to tell anyone else how they should defend themselves, and nobody has the ‘right’ to tell someone else that they don’t have the ‘right’ to do something.  I’m actually quoting our man Colion word for word and maybe he’s decided that if Donald Trump can get a big following by talking to his audience on a third-grade level, then Colion will get an even bigger response if he ratchets his language down to second grade.  I don’t really know whether he’s dumb, playing dumb or figuring his audience is dumb, or all three.  But I do know this: I never imagined I would ever hear anyone connected to the NRA admitting that the odds of ever using a gun in self-defense were about the same as bumping into a rhinoceros while you were taking Fido for his evening walk.

But come to think of it, that’s not really the reason why Wayne-o and the other NRA noisemakers tell us over and over again that we should be carrying guns. What the NRA has really been saying is that you shouldn’t be carrying a gun just to protect yourself, you should be carrying it to protect everyone else!  Remember the ‘only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun?’

Colion my man, it’s refreshing to see someone from the ‘other side’ of the gun debate actually saying something that’s based on a bit of the truth.  But don’t push the truth too far or you might find yourself looking for a job.

If You Want To Help End Gun Violence, Come To The National Cathedral on November 3rd.

On Tuesday, November 3, Washington’s National Cathedral will hold a special event on gun violence and if you can make it, I urge you to attend.  This won’t be the first time that people have gathered at the Cathedral to talk about gun violence and it certainly won’t be the last.  But the event is taking place at a time when the debate about the place of guns in American society seems to have hit a fever pitch, which is exactly why having a gun event at the National Cathedral is a good thing.

The debate started heating up when all the Republican Presidential candidates discovered how much they loved the 2nd Amendment.  Not to be outdone, Hillary and the Democrats volleyed back with an equally strong gun-control retort.  The current political divide on this issue reflects, if nothing else, a polarization that has always existed between the two sides.  According to the NRA, guns make us safe and protect us from crime; according to groups like Brady and Everytown, guns create risk. Not only do the arguments appear incapable of compromise at any step along the way, I also don’t recall another time that the arguments were as loud and continuous as they are right now.

               This brings me back to an event held at the National Cathedral on December 11, 2013 – a memorial service for Nelson Mandela who died the previous week.   I was a high school senior when Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly attempting to overthrow the South African apartheid state.  I witnessed the civil rights movement in the 60s, the anti-War movement in the 70s, the gender equality movement in the 80s, and Mandela still languished in jail.  He was finally released in 1990 because otherwise the de Klerk government would have collapsed.  It disappeared two years’ later anyway and Mandela was elected President of the Government of National Unity in 1994.

In my wildest dreams I never imagined the racial breach in South Africa would ever be healed.  I also never believed that Mandela would come out of prison after 27 years and immediately talk about reconciliation and peace.  Which made it altogether fitting that the United States memorialized his death at the National Cathedral, a site consecrated by the commitment to finding ways for people to occupy common ground, speak in language that everyone can understand, promote commonalities instead of differences about the important issues of the day.

Nelson Mandela came out of jail after 27 years of incarceration and didn’t speak about hatred or violence, but about unity, love and respect.  In the same way, the United To Stop Gun Violence event at the Cathedral on November 3 will take place in an atmosphere of understanding, fellowship and grace.  You’ll meet advocates, policymakers, influencers, social media and messaging experts, folks who just want to get involved and folks who are already doing their thing.  It’s a chance for you to decide how and what you can do to help hasten the end of gun violence, as well as to learn what you can say to others who then might be persuaded to get involved.

I am hopeful that everyone who comes to the meeting, including myself, will leave with a renewed sense of optimism about the daunting task that lies ahead.  But I’m also hopeful about something else, which is that we will all not just learn better ways to enlist more people in the crusade against gun violence, but better ways to talk about gun violence to folks who own guns.  If Nelson Mandela were alive, he would say that the problem of gun violence can only be resolved by bringing everyone to the table who has a stake in the game. We need to invite the other side to join us in the discussion; if they refuse, we need to invite them again and again. That would exemplify the true spirit of Nelson Mandela and again denote what Washington’s National Cathedral is really all about.

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Guns Are A Risk But There’s One Important Group That Doesn’t Agree.

Do we have a problem with gun violence in this country or do we have a problem with the gun violence committed by one particular group?  If you look closely at the numbers as well as the profiles of shooters, I’m not so sure that gun violence is all that difficult to figure out.  Think about this: Adam Lanza was 20, Jared Loughner was 27, James Holmes was 27, Seung Hi-Cho was 23, and the granddaddy of all mass shooters, good ol’ Chuckie Whitman, was 25 when he climbed up to the top of the University of Texas Tower and blazed away until 14 people were dead.

But let’s not focus only on mass killers because headlines and public clamor to the contrary, these guys don’t add all that much carnage to the gun violence numbers that we rack up each year.  In 2010, the most recent year for numbers from the FBI, the age cohort 20-29 was responsible for the commission of one-third of all homicides, no other age group by decade came even half as close.  Switch perpetrators to victims and the numbers stay the same: nearly 40% of all gun-homicide victims are between 20 and 29, again more than 50% higher than any other decade age group that can be found.

               It would be easy to take such numbers, align them alongside the ages of the mass shooters listed above and conclude that males between the ages of 20 and 29 have a propensity for violence that finds an outlet in the use of guns.  There’s only one little problem, however, which is that this same age cohort also accounts for the largest number of fatal vehicle deaths, scoring as high a percentage of overall vehicle fatalities as is the case with guns.  In 2013 there were 35,369 motor vehicle deaths and 7,563 of the victims, in other words, 21%, were between the ages of 20 and 29.  The only reason that this age decade didn’t experience the same preponderance of fatalities from cars as from guns is that gun homicides and violent behavior in general fades away once we get above age 49.

Another behavior that tends to fade with age is sex and its concomitant, sexually-transmitted disease.  There is very little incidence of STD in the pre-teen population for obvious reasons, with all STD cases reported prior to age 14 running around 1%.  But the incidence of female STD moves quickly upward beginning at age 15, with 22% of all female gonorrhea cases occurring by age 19, but an even larger incidence (34%) between ages 20 and 24.  Another female STD, chlamydia, also begins to occur after age 15, with 28% of all cases occurring up to age 19, but from 20 to 24 years old the percentage of all cases in the female population jumps to just under 40%!  As for male STD, since 2008 the incidence of syphilis is twice as high in men between the ages 20 to 29 as compared to the infection rate of any other decade age group.

What these three public health issues have in common is they all result from conscious behavioral choices – carrying a gun, exceeding the speed limit, having unprotected sex – in the face of massive social and educational messaging which clearly explains the risks of each. But the age group 20-29 is not averse to risk, it’s a population which often uses risk as a determinant for what they want to do. Want to know the number one killer for ages 18-29?  Unintentional injuries.

THE GVP community is united in promoting the idea that guns represent serious risk.  But the age group whose behavior contributes most to excessive gun violence is a group for whom the word ‘risk’ may be exactly what attracts them to guns.  In designing their messaging, GVP advocates should be sensitive to the fact that what words mean to them may have much different meanings to the audience with whom they need to connect.

 

A Court Decision That Uses The Gun Industry’s Own Fiction Against It.

Right after the Sandy Hook massacre, both New York and Connecticut passed laws that tightened up restrictions on owning ‘black’ guns, a.k.a., the military-style AR rifles like the type Adam Lanza used to kill 26 adults and young kids.  The laws basically toughened the earlier assault weapons bans, provoking immediate outcries from the pro-gun gang who challenged the laws based on their inalienable 2nd-Amendment rights.  After all, the 2008 Heller decision protected private ownership of all guns that are “in common use,” and what could be more common than AR rifles of which probably more than four million have been manufactured over the last twenty years?

                The gun industry began promoting black guns in the 1990s when they realized that hunting and traditional sporting use of guns was dying out.  This promotion took two forms: on the one hand creating the fiction that black guns, like all guns protected us from crime; on the other hand creating the equally beguiling fiction that military-style weapons were no different from other, traditional rifles since they could only be fired in semi-automatic mode.

The industry went so far as to create an entirely new shooting tradition, replacing the phrase

‘assault rifle’ with the nomenclature ‘modern sporting rifle’ so as to pretend that an AR-15 is nothing other than the same, old hunting gun that sportsmen have for generations been taking out to the woods.  And for those who like to imagine themselves mowing down ISIS or Al Queda in the streets and alleys of Philadelphia or New York, the guns being sold by Bushmaster, Colt, Stag and other black-gun manufacturers are referred to as ‘tactical’ weapons, which everyone knows is simply an assault rifle with a different name.

Both the CT and NY laws were challenged and upheld in District Court; now the Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, has upheld both laws again.  What is interesting about this decision, indeed remarkable, is the fact that it is based not just on the government’s authority to regulate guns that are in “common use,” but to regulate these particular types of weapons based on their definition as created and promoted by the gun industry itself!  The Circuit Court accepted the notion that black guns are just another type of sporting rifle, and it was the acknowledgement that black guns are no different from other types of sporting guns that ultimately legitimized the assault-rifle bans in Connecticut and New York.

Plaintiffs in this case argued that there were more than four million AR-15 rifles owned by civilians and that these guns, like other civilian weapons, could only be fired in semi-automatic mode.  As the Court said, “This much is clear: Americans own millions of the firearms that the challenged legislation prohibits.” Further, the Court also accepted the notion that many Americans keep an AR-15 in their home for self-defense.  Given those circumstances, how could the Circuit Court decide that prohibiting civilian ownership of such weapons was not a violation of 2nd-Amendment rights?  Because what the Court did was take the gun industry’s own fiction about these guns and stand it on its head.

The industry’s marketing of black guns as ‘sporting’ rifles is based on one thing and one thing only; namely, these weapons can only be shot in semi-auto mode.  Never mind that you can deliver up to 60 rounds of ammunition in thirty seconds or less; never mind that the .223 round has a lethality specifically designed to kill or injure human targets; never mind that many military and law enforcement units also deploy the semi-auto gun.  That residents in New York and Connecticut can own all kinds of semi-automatic rifles which do not contain certain military-style features means that the ban on AR-style rifles is not a prohibition of semi-automatic weapons at all.

As a noted Supreme Court justice once said, “History also has its claims.” And one of those claims is that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t give the gun industry the right to invent a tall tale to justify how it tries to sell guns.

 

 

Does It Matter Whether Hillary Is Wrong By Claiming That 40% Of Guns Are Sold At Gun Shows And Online Sites? No.

Glenn Kessler writes a column called Fact Checker for the Washington Post where he critiques statements made by politicians that don’t align with the facts.  Recently he reviewed a statement about gun violence made by Presidential candidate Clinton and judged her comment to have “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”  The statement in question was made by Hillary last week when she said that “forty percent of guns are sold at gun shows, online sales.”  Kessler argues that the offending statement is based on “very stale” data collected in 1994 and not subsequently verified by anyone else.  But the 1994 figure refers to guns that individuals received without first undergoing a background check, which was the point of Hillary’s speech; i.e., the need to expand background checks to all transfers of guns

                Hillary’s comment and my fifty-year experience in the gun business got me to thinking: is her statement about gun show and internet sales so far off the mark? Let’s try to build a little data.  There are probably around 500 gun shows held in the U.S. every year.  Some of these are mega-shows, like the Tulsa show, but most are local or regional affairs, usually hosting several hundred exhibitors with a few thousand gun nuts wandering around.  I have probably been to 200 shows and have had a dealer’s table at 20-30 such events.  Reflecting on that experience I would say that an average show might contain 10,000 guns available to be bought and sold, maybe half are on tables rented by people who do not have an FFL  Are there 2.5 million non-FFL guns on display at gun shows each year?  I’ll bet I’m not far off.

What about the internet?  I have sold guns on big auction sites like Guns America and Gun Broker, and I have also bought guns from listings on Armslist.  I belong to two private Facebook groups where members buy, sell and trade guns, there are also hundreds of gun blogs which allow registered members to buy and sell guns.  Every one of these sites contains very clear admonitions to the effect that everyone must conform to all applicable federal, state and local laws.  The only problem is that in most localities there are no state or local laws. And if two people who live in the same state want to transfer a gun, there’s no federal law requiring any paperwork at all.

Some of the guns sold on internet websites are posted by retail dealers who also sell guns on their own websites and at local shows.  A study of Armslist postings by Third Way found there were 15,768 listings by private sellers in 10 states, which might indicate that 75,000 privately-owned guns are listed for sale at any one time, which is roughly 75% of all the guns for sale on the Armslist site.  Gun Broker, the largest online gun auction site, claims to contain 500,000 listings at any given time, but probably half these listings are for ammo, optics and various non-gun crap.

Between the auction sites, the buyer-to-seller sites and the gun blogs, I’m probably not off by much in estimating that one million guns are available for sale on the internet, of which maybe 750,000 guns could be transferred without conducting a background check.  And despite the rush towards a totally digital marketplace, most communities still have print newspapers and most of these papers carry classified ads for guns.  I just took a random look at a local shopper, Thrifty Nickel, in Idaho Falls, and found ads to sell a Taurus revolver and a Para 45.

What Hillary meant to say was that 40% of all gun transfers occur without a background check and she may not be far off the mark. Kessler is concocting a straw horse by criticizing her for what was nothing other than a verbal slip.  What she knows is that more background checks equals less guns going to the ‘wrong hands.’ And Glenn Kessler loses all credibility by not pointing that out.

 

A New Gun Book That Is Different And Should Be Read.

Firmin DeBrabander teaches philosophy at Maryland Institute College of Art.  Which makes him about the most unlikely person to write a book about guns.  But he has written a book about guns, Do Guns Make Us Free? Democracy and the Armed Society, and the title neatly sums up what the book is all about.  Actually, the book isn’t really about guns so much as it’s a discourse on political theorists and philosophers whose writings contain discussions about the role of arms in defining the relationship of the citizenry to the ruling or governing class.

                The text abounds with references to the classic writings of Locke, Machiavelli, Hobbes and more recently, Michel Foucault, John Dewey and Hannah Arendt. DeBrabander describes, in detail, how ‘freedom’ on the one hand and gun ownership on the other often appear to be conjoint concepts but, in fact, are often contradictory and work at cross purposes to each other. Basically the author argues that promoting the idea that guns keep us ‘free’ by protecting us from government tyranny, the gun lobby is, in reality, increasing the possibility that freedoms will be lost as the government finds itself facing an increasingly armed and potentially violent citizenry. He also paints a disturbing picture about how increased government War on Terror surveillance has largely passed unnoticed by the pro-gun community, notwithstanding their alleged concerns about loss of ‘freedoms’ when anyone talks about controlling guns.

This book is the latest attempt to examine the motives and thoughts of gun owners from a cultural point of view.  DeBrabander is aware of Dan Baum’s book, Gun Guys, A Road Trip, which he references at length, but he published too late to include Jennifer’s Carlson’s book, Citizen Protectors, The Everyday Politics in an Age of Decline, which takes up where Baum left off.  These two books share a common theme, namely, the idea that people who identify themselves through their ownership and use of guns are not just ‘nuts’ or ‘weirdos,’ but are making an objective and conscious choice to define their lives through immersion in the gun culture, which invariably means walking around armed.

All three books make the argument that members of the gun culture agree that carrying a gun is an expression of their ‘freedom,’ but DeBrabander’s book is the only contribution to this genre that attempts to view the concept of ‘freedom’ through a two-dimensional lens. One dimension is created by taking these gun owners at their word which basically means listening to a jumbled argument about the no-good government which is a mélange of Tea Party, Limbaugh and Fox News.  The other lens is the anti-government philosophical tradition that comes out of Locke, winds its way through populist political eruptions like Shays’ Rebellion and now is manifested in the rhetorical anger of the Occupy movement.

But what sets the pro-gun movement apart from other expressions of anti-government dissent, according to DeBrabander, is the fact that it is armed, and in that respect becomes a threat to the peaceful and orderly demonstration of free speech and free expression on which a true democracy depends. It is the potential for violence and the frequent calls for violence that lead DeBrabander to insist that guns make us less, not more free.  It’s an interesting and provocative thesis, and makes this book a different and much more interesting text than other books that try to explain gun culture to the literate (read: non-gun) crowd.

I’m going to give this book five stars but there’s one point that needs to be raised.  The NRA does a masterful job using the member’s love of guns to wrap their support around other socio-political issues, but there are many people who hate taxes, hate Obama, hate liberals, but don’t necessarily own guns.  To solve the problem of gun violence, we need to figure out why some folks do and some folks don’t.  Because people who believe that guns are the answer to their greatest fears need to see that those fears are shared by others who don’t need to pick up a gun.

 

If The Democrats Want A Wedge Issue, Gun Control May Work.

If one thing came out of the first Democratic debate, it’s that the Blue Team isn’t afraid of talking about guns.  Or to be more precise, talking about gun control.  This has been something of a verboten topic among Democrats ever since Bill Clinton blamed Al Gore’s 2000 election loss on the virulent NRA campaign in Tennessee that cost Gore his home state.  Let’s overlook the fact that even with the disappearing Palm Beach County votes, Bush won a whole, big 271 electoral votes – one more than the minimum – and lost the popular vote.  So ascribing Gore’s loss to the ‘power’ of the NRA is something of a stretch, but it’s been accepted without question until now.

                And now it appears that the Democrats have found their wedge issue, namely, the issue of guns.  Not only was it the first, substantive issue discussed in the debate, but the candidates spent nine minutes trying to outdo one another over who had been given the worst grade by the NRA. All of them came out for expanded background checks, all of them lambasted the NRA, and of the more than 1,200 words uttered about guns by the five candidates, the 2nd Amendment was mentioned exactly once. Even Obama used to regularly mention his support of the 2nd Amendment when he would talk about guns.  That was then, this is now.  When it comes to the Democrats, all of a sudden Constitutional protections for gun ownership have disappeared.

The reason for this shift is very simple: enough is enough.  A mass shooting here, a mass shooting there, no big deal.  We’ve been living with this sort of thing since good ol’ Charlie Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas Tower in 1966 and began mowing people down. But when 11 people are killed and 14 injured in shootings at three college campuses in one week, all the stupid talk from the gun gang about ‘gun-free zones’ and ‘fixing the broken mental health system’ just doesn’t work. Nobody but the looniest among us would deny the accepted notion that government has a ‘compelling interest’ in keeping us safe; ipso facto, the shootings at campuses in Oregon, Arizona and Texas must, in the minds of most people, require some kind of government response.

Now you would think that the pro-gun gang would use these campus shootings to push their ‘armed citizen’ response as far as they can.  And in fact the NRA just posted a new story on their website about how folks with guns protect others from crime.  But since they couldn’t find any examples of armed citizens keeping students safe on college campuses, they fashioned a story around examples of armed response that took place in apartment complexes where “apartment dwellers are far from immune from violent crime.”   But to actually find eight instances where apartment-dwelling citizens used guns in response to crime, the NRA had to go back to 2012; i.e., less than three events per year. Sorry boys, that just doesn’t stack up against three campus shootings in one week.

Hillary and the other Democratic candidates have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by going after the NRA. After all, the NRA has been bashing her and Democrats in general for the last twenty years.  If she were to turn around tomorrow and announce, a la Donald Trump, that she “loves” gun rights, nobody would believe her anyway, at least nobody who supports the NRA.

On the other hand, it’s clear that the percentage of American households containing legal guns keeps going down.  Which means that using ‘gun rights’ to gain an edge on voter turnout becomes increasingly a dead end.  I’m not saying that all those politicians who routinely vote the NRA line are going to roll over and play dead.  What I am saying is that if guns continue to be a wedge issue, it may be a wedge issue for the gun-control side.

The Center For American Progress Has Some Good Ideas To Help Obama Define Who’s Really Dealing In Guns.

This week the Center for American Progress issued a report recommending changes in the definition of being engaged in the business of selling guns. Clarifying what constitutes dealing in firearms would bring more gun transactions under the purview of the ATF and thus create more barriers to guns moving from one person to another without a NICS-background check.  The CAP report is a response to President Obama’s announcement after Roseburg that he might invoke executive authority to redefine how many gun transactions would demonstrate an ongoing business activity, as opposed to simply owning or collecting guns.

                Gun dealers have been regulated by the Federal Government since 1938 when a law was passed that required dealers to purchase a Treasury license for one dollar and follow some simple rules whenever they transferred a gun, namely, verifying that the individual to whom they delivered the gun lived in the same state where the dealer was located.

The 1938 law was completely revamped and the scope of government gun regulation widened to an unprecedented degree by the Gun Control Act of 1968.  Now dealers were not only required to verify the age and address of the customer, but also to verify that the prospective gun owner was not a member of various prohibited categories; i.e., felon, drug addict, fugitive, mental defective, and so forth. A gun dealer had no way of checking the veracity of such information, but at least there was a document on file for every over-the-counter sale.

Verifying whether an individual was telling the truth about his fitness to own a gun was what lay behind the Brady Bill passed in 1994.  In lieu of a national waiting-period on all gun purchases was a provision that required every federally-licensed dealer to contact the FBI who then verified that the customer was telling the truth.  But in order to access the FBI examiners, you had to be a federally-licensed dealer.  No federal dealer’s license, no contact with NICS.  Which is where the whole notion of ‘loopholes’ in the gun-licensing system came from; which is what Obama would like to close. And the easiest way to close the loophole, or at least make it smaller, is to define the word ‘dealer’ in a way that requires more people to become FFL-holders if they want to buy or sell guns.

The CAP report is a judicious and careful attempt to set out some criteria that could be used to determine who is really engaged in the business of selling guns.  It does not recommend any specific amounts of guns that might be transferred nor how much money someone needs to earn over any given period of time.  Rather, it looks at how various states define commercial enterprises and whether such definitions would be a useful guide to creating a more realistic way to establish that someone is going beyond just collecting or owning guns.

What the report doesn’t mention is that if the FFL imposes some sort of uniformity over dealers at the federal level, when we look at how states license gun dealers, there’s no uniformity at all.  Every state collects sales taxes, every state imposes and enforces other business regulations, but when it comes to guns, most states simply place the entire regulatory burden on the Feds and the ATF.  In order to receive an FFL, the prospective dealer must send a copy of the license application to the local cops, but if the particular locality doesn’t have any local laws covering gun dealers, the local gendarmerie could care less.

I hope the CAP report will be taken seriously by the President before he issues an Executive Order that more clearly defines what it means to engage in the commerce of guns.  I also hope he won’t publish an Executive Order that places more unfulfilled regulatory responsibilities on the ATF and provokes the usual ‘I told you so’ from the pro-gun gang. If it were up to that bunch, there would be no gun regulations at all.