Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 14

Want To End Gun Violence? Figure Out Why People Own Guns.

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              In  1960, the
Gallup organization ran a national survey in which they asked respondents
whether they would support a ban on handguns. Not stricter
licensing, not PTP, an absolute ban. By a margin of 60 percent, the
respondents said ‘yes.’ Had we passed a gun-control law which had reflected
this national survey, we would not be dealing with a public health issue known as
gun violence today. And the reason that we are the only advanced country which
suffers from this public health problem is that we are the only advanced
country which gives law-abiding citizens the right to own handguns.

              In 1975, two years before the ‘revolution’ at the NRA
meeting in Cincinnati, when a more aggressive leadership began to shift away
from supporting sports shooting to pushing armed, self-defense, this same
survey found that the percentage of respondents who favored a ban on private
handgun ownership had dropped to 41 percent. In 2002, the number was down to 32
percent and in 2016 it hit its lowest point – 23 percent.

              Since I signed a non-disclosure agreement I am enjoined
from identifying the gun company involved in this episode; let’s just say it
was one of the biggest and certainly best-known gun companies in the United
States – then and now.  In 1985, I was
part of a team which began putting together an incentive program for gun
dealers who carried this company’s products, a strategy that was a response to
the ‘invasion’ of European handguns; i.e., Beretta, Glock and Sig.

              Before we designed the program, the company engaged a consulting
firm to conduct a survey of potential customers, the first such survey the
company had ever done. It turned out that roughly two-thirds of everyone who
participated in the survey believed that law-abiding Americans should have the
right to own a handgun.  This response
cut across every demographic (gender, race, income,) category, every geographic
area, every other way in which the respondent population was sliced and diced. And
non-gun owners were just as willing to support the idea of law-abiding gun
ownership as were the respondents who said they owned guns.

              Anyone who thinks that John Lott created a national
‘movement’ for armed, self-defense with the publication in 1998 of More
Guns, Less Crime, needs to spend a little time thinking about the Gallup
surveys mentioned above as the results of a national, marketing survey conducted
in 1985.  The purpose of this column is
not to validate John Lot’s work; in fact, I have published a very clear
critique of his argument which can be downloaded here.

              The issue isn’t whether John Lott is a stalking horse
for the gun industry’s desire to sell more guns. The issue is whether my
friends in the gun-control community really understand or even want to discuss
how to deal with the fact that, like it or not, America is truly a gun culture.
Our belief in using a gun to commit ‘virtuous violence’ wasn’t invented by the NRA
or by John Lott, and sad to say, the idea that guns are more of a benefit than
a risk isn’t just a fantasy confined to the lunatic fringe.

              I keep seeing survey after survey which
shows that most people now own guns is for self-defense. Are they afraid of
being victims of a violent crime when the crime rate has dropped by more than
half over the last twenty years? Are they afraid they might be sitting in a
hi-rise office building when a 727 controlled by a terrorist slams into the 50th
floor? Are they afraid they won’t be able to own a gun?

              I have yet to see a single, gun-control group try to create
a narrative that acknowledges these fears. After all, it’s much easier to
demonize John Lott and the NRA than to sit down and figure out feelings
that are not necessarily based on reality, but are nevertheless strongly resistant
to change. This task remains to be done.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Guns.

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              Back in February, representatives of more than 40
medical groups got together in Chicago, spent a weekend
gabbing and chowing down, and then put together a list of strategies to deal
with gun violence: research, safe-storage, universal background checks, more
licensing, blah, blah, blah and blah. Then in April,  group of well-meaning gun-control activists
got together
in Denver, spent a weekend chowing down and gabbing and then basically produced
the same list. This week, the Democrats held their first debate for some of the
2020 hopefuls, and taken together, they also said more or less the same thing
about gun violence.

              I may be missing something, or maybe I’m just an old,
dumb gun nut, but I really don’t understand how one discussion about ending gun
violence follows on another without any of them mentioning what really
needs to be done. And what really needs to be done, which happens to be what
has worked whenever we have regulated any consumer product to reduce injuries
suffered from when it is used, is to regulate the industry which makes and
sells the product. But somehow, when it comes to dealing with injuries
caused by a particular consumer product called a gun, the gun industry always
seems to escape any regulation at all.

              You say – wait a minute! We can’t regulate the
gun industry; they’re protected by the infamous PLCAA law which keeps gun
makers from being sued.  Wrong. The PLCAA
law protects
gun makers from being sued based on the behavior of people who use their
products, which isn’t the same thing as how the products are made and sold.
Want to get rid of gun violence? Do what Bill Clinton tried to do back in 1999,
come up with a plan that gets rid of the guns.

              I am referring to the plan that was put together by
then-HEW Secretary Andy Cuomo which imposed regulations on the industry to
monitor and regulate itself at the initial point of sale. Had a few votes not
disappeared in Palm Beach County, had Al Gore gone to live at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue instead of George Bush, this plan would probably have been imposed on
every gun maker (it was briefly adopted
by Smith & Wesson, resulting in the company’s temporary collapse) and the
gun industry would have quickly followed the dodo bird into extinction, just
like that.

              This plan
required every gun maker to impose and monitor specific sales practices on
every retailer who sold just one gun bearing that company’s name. Such dealers
would be required to conduct fitness interviews with prospective customers
before selling them a gun; install better security equipment, hire more
qualified sales personnel, attend classes on gun laws, on and on and on. The
gun companies would have to visit every, single dealer selling their products,
fill out compliance reports which would then be submitted to some government
agency to be reviewed and approved.

              There is not a single gun company which could ever come
up with the resources to monitor the more than 5,000 licensed dealers who sell their
guns. What the industry would be forced to do is consolidate supply to a few
big-box store chains like Cabela’s and Bass Pro, with the result that most of
the friendly, local gun shops which sell 90 percent of all guns would disappear.

              The gun industry fought and prevailed against this plan
because they knew that if it had been implemented industry-wide, the gun
business would come to an end. No gun business, no guns. No guns, no gun
violence.  The problem with the plans to
reduce gun violence produced by all the gun-control groups, medical
associations and Presidential wannabees, is they don’t understand the gun
business at all. What they do understand are the emotions and feelings of the
people who want an end to gun violence but that’s not the same thing.

              I keep saying it again and again but repetition is the
key to good learning so I’ll say it again: Want to get rid of gun violence? Get
rid of the guns.  

Are Democrats Afraid Of Gun Control? Not Any More.

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              Last night’s Democratic Presidential debate had to register
joyous excitement within the ranks of Gun-control Nation because the candidates
spent 15 minutes trotting out their various ideas about how to reduce violence
caused by guns. Remember when gun control was verboten as a campaign
issue on the Democratic side?  Ain’t true
no more, that’s for sure.

              Booker rolled out his plan for national gun licensing,
Warren admitted to voting for an assault-rifle ban, Castro said he had no
problem with some gun buybacks, on and on. Where they all come down on the same
side, however, is restoring CDC gun-research funding, an item that has been
stripped from the CDC budget every year since 1997, but which this year has been
stuck back into the House version
of the budget to the tune of $50 mil.

              Before I say what I am about to say, let me make it
perfectly clear that I have no problem with research being done on any health
issue, particularly an issue which results in more than 125,000 fatal and
non-fatal injuries every year. But let me also make it clear that while my
Ph.D. research was on economic history, not gun violence, I know a little bit
about the requirements for conducting academic research, and certain requirements
remain true whether the research covers gun violence or the 16th-century
origins of capitalism, which happened to be my field.

              Those requirements include the following: (1). The data
used for the research must be valid and must be directly relevant to the topic
at hand; (2). The problem being solved must be defined by its importance to the
specific field of inquiry, not by whether data exists which can be properly
used.  Unfortunately, much of the research
which comes out of the public health research community on gun violence doesn’t
meet either of those requirements, and this is not because there hasn’t been enough
research money to go around.

              Public health gun researchers love to talk about their
work as a contribution to the ‘epidemiology’ of gun violence, you can find this
nomenclature in the work of leading gun-violence scholars here.
Now I always thought that the term ‘epidemiology’ means that one identifies a threat
to health, figures out how it spreads from host to host, and then figures out
how to immunize or protect the not-yet-infected population from contracting the
disease. But in the case of gun violence, the disease doesn’t spread from victim
to victim, the disease is caused because someone picks up a gun and shoots themselves
or someone else. And we can’t study this population because either they are not
about to admit what they have done, or in the case of suicide, they happen to
be dead. That’s a big problem with guns. The rate of fatal injury is much higher
than what happens if you fall off your bike.

              Virtually all the gun-violence research published since
the CDC ban took effect is based either on CDC injury data which covers the victims
of gun violence who do not play a primary role in the spread of this disease,
or is based on telephone surveys which, by definition, exclude participation by
the shooters themselves.  Does it really
matter that most gun owners support
background checks for secondary gun transfers when these same gun owners have
little, if any direct responsibility for the violence caused by guns?   Our
friend Philip Cook
interviewed an incarcerated population about how and why they carried guns,
but he wasn’t about to ask them to explain the circumstances in which they
actually used a gun.

              I hope CDC gun research starts up again so that my
friends in the gun research community receive the financial resources they
deserve. If they do, then they need to figure out how and why less than five
percent of the people who commit violent assaults each year use a gun. And that’s
not going to change no matter how many laws we pass to regulate the behavior of
law-abiding folks who own guns.

How Did NRA-TV Get Undone?

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              Poor Dana
Loesch. America’s home school queen and one of the country’s foremost
practitioners of the art of armed, self-defense, all of a sudden finds herself
unemployed. For that matter, she’ll be lining up for unemployment benefits with
all the other media luminaries who have spent the last few years gracing the
digital portals of NRA-TV, because NRA-TV is finished
and dead.

              Of course
you can watch some reruns any time you want and see Colion Noir prancing around
some shooting range or Grant Stinchfield bemoaning the continued downward slide
of America into a socialist mess. You can even find some old videos starring
Oliver North pretending to kn ow something about guns. Remember him?

              Until all
the sturm und drang broke out between the boys in Fairfax and their advertising
agency, Ackerman-McQueen, I didn’t know that Dana wasn’t employed by the NRA.  The press release that came from Wayne
LaPierre defined
her role like this: “Dana Loesch, the conservative leader, online pioneer
and nationally syndicated radio host, will serve as a major national
spokesperson for the National Rifle Association. NRA Executive Vice
President and CEO Wayne LaPierre named Loesch as a Special Assistant to
his office for Public Communication, with direct attributable authority on NRA
matters.”

              Now this
statement doesn’t actually say that her salary was being paid by the NRA.
But it was obviously written to give that impression, okay?  And this impression, it turns out, was a lie.
Because Dana and all the other talking heads on NRA-TV were employees of
Ackerman-McQueen, which happens to be suing the NRA to recover the monies
they need to compensate these employees for acting jobs which will now not get
done.

              All of
this raises an interesting question about the past relationship between the
NRA and Ackerman-McQueen, namely, which organization was the dog and which
was the tail. Did the video messaging reflect what the NRA leadership wanted
its members to see and hear, or was the content of NRA-TV determined by
what the folks at Ackerman-McQueen thought was the best way to sell the NRA?  The answer to this question isn’t just an
issue of nuance because either the membership belongs to an organization which controls
its own affairs, or the organization itself has become a subsidiary to an
advertising agency who viewed America’s ‘first civil-rights organization’ as
just another product to be marketed and sold.

              Either way,
some of the information coming out from this imbroglio makes me begin to think
that maybe, just maybe the boys in Fairfax may be hanging onto the ropes.  Last week I mentioned
that monthly visits to the NRA-TV website had dropped from 370,000
in February to 210,000 in May, a decline in viewership of nearly 50 percent. But
an even more ominous statistic is that the number of unique visitors to the video
channel in January was only 49,000; in other words, NRA-TV hasn’t even
been attracting one percent of the organization’s membership – a pretty
pathetic state of affairs.

              The NRA
has always presented itself as the only group out there which stands between law-abiding
gun owners and the anti-gun hordes. And whenever the hordes put one of their own
into the White House, the NRA ramps up its messaging to underscore the
‘threat’ to our 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ But that’s a pretty tough
sell when, to everyone’s astonishment, the tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
turned out to be a guy who basically ran an entire national campaign on his
love of guns. And when this guy turns around and invites
Wayne-o to the White House for the Easter Egg hunt, it gets pretty hard to convince
anyone that their guns are about to be taken away.

              It’s been
more than forty years since the NRA stopped promoting sports shooting and  began pushing a more extreme messaging
which became the staple content
for NRA-TV. But maybe this  reflected
the degree to which the NRA had become the tail wagged by a dog named Ackerman-McQueen.
To quote Queen Elizabeth and Tony Montana: “Every dog has his day.”

What Doctors Don’t Know About Guns Could Kill You – Part 1.

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              Back in February, representatives from 44 ‘major’
medical organizations came to Chicago to hold a ‘summit meeting’ on gun
violence. Four years previously, eight of these same organizations published a ‘Call to Action’ on the same
topic. Obviously, the medical community’s concern about how to deal with what
they refer to as a ‘public health’ issue resulting in 125,000 or more fatal and
non-fatal injuries every year has reached a fever pitch.

              FolIowing the February conference, the group published a Magna Carta to define what
physicians and public health specialists need to do about guns. Having now read
this entire epistle, along with most of the 80 research papers on which it is
largely based, I happen to believe that this approach is taking the medical
community down the wrong path. While the programmatic and research efforts
recommended by the summit participants may help some of them burnish their CV’s
or perhaps get them interviewed on the Ambulance Driver or one of the
other medical blogs, I don’t believe that any of
the recommendations contained in this document will result in a substantive
decline in gun violence at all.

              The paper begins by offering a very novel revision of
what its authors believe to be the basic reason why gun deaths, as opposed to
deaths from traffic deaths, heart disease, cancer and HIV haven’t declined,
which is because gun injuries have been treated not as a medical but as a political
problem. Many of the earlier medical efforts were “mired in a debate
about personal liberty and the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
Instead of this dead-end strategy, the Summit wants “research agendas to
understand and address root causes of violence,” an approach which
“mirrors the public health model that has been so effective in improving
outcomes in traffic-related injury.”

              Over the next several weeks, I am going to devote a
number of columns to the specific research agendas and programs advocated by
this Summit. I am going to make a point of sending those columns, as well as
this column, to the authors of this document asking them to reply.  What is unique about gun-violence research,
as opposed to research in other medical fields, is the remarkable paucity of
public discussion and debate within the research community itself. This
document, for example, references 80 peer-reviewed articles but I do not
believe that the findings or the data of any one of those articles was ever
challenged in print.  Are we all so completely
correct in our work?

              Unfortunately, understanding and addressing the ‘root
causes’ of violence is simply not the same thing as understanding and
addressing the root causes of gun violence, a distinction which the
authors of this piece don’t acknowledge or attempt to explain. On a yearly
basis, somewhere around two million individuals suffer violent attacks. A
significant number (i.e., most) of these victims exhibit the same socio-economic
status, family backgrounds and personal histories as the less than 5 percent
whose injuries are caused by guns. So the issue here isn’t violence per se;
it’s a very specific type of violence that needs to be understood on its own
terms.

              A bigger problem involves the belief that the public
health model for understanding and responding to automobile injuries can be
just as effective when the model applies to guns. This is wishful thinking to
the nth degree. It simply flies in the face of reality because cars
aren’t designed to do the one and only thing which guns are designed to do,
namely, to kill yourself or somebody else. If your car smashes into someone and
they die, you weren’t driving the way you’re supposed to drive. If you pull out
your Glock and blow the guy’s head off, the gun is being used exactly the way
it’s supposed to be used.

              How do you design a valid research agenda about a
threat to public health when the threat is so poorly defined? I’ll continue
this next week while I await any replies from the authors of this piece.

Want To Make A Million In The Gun Business? Start With Two Million.

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              Everyone in Gun-control Nation is exulting over the
latest news about how the NRA is in a state of free-fall collapse. But
there was another piece of gun news which is far more important in terms of
what it says about the future of America’s love affair with guns that gun-control
advocates and noisemakers completely missed.

              I am referring to news out of South Carolina that a
company named Ellett Bros., has filed for bankruptcy, an event hardly making a ripple in Gun-control
Nation, but I can guarantee you was of great importance to the gun industry
itself. This is because Ellett’s happens to be, or happens to have been, one of
the largest gun wholesalers in the United States, and if you are or were a
retail gun dealer, sooner or later you bought something from the sweet ‘thangs’
salesgirls who used to answer the Ellett phones.

              I visited Ellett’s back in 1976. As a certified gun
nut, going to Ellett’s was the equivalent of a Muslim making the pilgrimage to
Mecca during Holy Week. You could stand at the end of a big room and watch all
the women busily taking orders and whispering sweet nothings into their
customer’s ears, or you could glimpse inside the warehouse and see thousands of
guns stacked up just waiting to be shipped. You might even get an opportunity
to shake hands with one of the Ellett family members himself!

              What made the Ellett operation so successful back in
the day was that it was the only gun wholesaler whose inventory basically
contained not only every, single gun that was being made, but you might also be
able to buy parts for old guns that needed to be repaired. For those of my
readers who don’t know anything about the gun business, which happens to be
most of my readers, always bear in mind that guns don’t wear out. So just about
every guy who comes into a gun shop sooner or later needs a new part for an old
gun. And who carried all those parts? 
Ellett’s, that’s who.

              In addition to an enormous inventory, Ellett’s also
pioneered telephone marketing at a time when most of the other gun wholesalers
were still relying on catalog sales. This direct-sales approach, along with an
annual dealer’s show which drew just about every retailer in the Southeast,
made Ellett’s the powerhouse wholesale operation for much of the country east
of the Mississippi River, particularly when they acquired another wholesale
house, Jerry’s Outdoor Sports, which catered primarily to retailers in the
Northeast.

              So what happened to bring about the collapse of
Ellett’s at a time when, thanks to Obama, the gun business had enjoyed its best
sales years of all time? To begin with, nobody in the gun business believed
that Sleazy Don was going to move into the White House in 2017, which meant
that Ellett’s, along with everyone else in the distribution chain, loaded up
inventory anticipating that Hillary’s election would prolong and even increase
the demand for guns which occurred during the Obama ‘regime.’

              The other problem in the gun business is that the
distribution system is regulated end-to-end because of licensing requirements,
which means you just can’t dump unsold inventory into a job-lot retailer or
maybe ship the stuff overseas. The moment that gun owners stop coming into
retail stores to buy more guns, and it’s always the same people who keep buying
guns again and again, the retail inventory backs up, the wholesale inventory
doesn’t ship out and someone gets stuck with the unsold load.

              Not only did Ellett’s bet the wrong way in 2016, but so did everyone else. Another major wholesaler, Accu-Sport, filed Chapter 11 last year, which means that the unsold inventory of two major distributors is available at rock-bottom prices. Which means that if you want to make a million in the gun business, now you have to start not with two million but with three.

Will The NRA Survive?

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              I have been reluctant to join my many friends in
Gun-control Nation who have been exulting in the possible demise of the NRA because
as a long-time member (I joined America’s ‘first civil rights-organization’ in
1955) I see the gun group from two very different perspectives. On the one
hand, it has become a major political and PR force, using its money and
influence to maintain a very public presence in and out of the
government-lobbying ‘swamp’ in Washington, D.C. 
On the other hand, it continues to be an important social and cultural
grass-roots circle for gun owners and gun enthusiasts (read: hobbyists) in
hundreds of local communities throughout the fifty states.

              On the political front, I always thought the NRA‘s
decision to get into bed with Sleazy Don was a mistake. By cozying up to him so
early in the 2016 campaign, the NRA was hitching its wagon to someone
who was going to force them not only to support a very radical messaging
narrative, but also require a complete and abrupt messaging turnaround from the
previous eight years. The NRA was always comfortable demonizing liberals
like Obama, but how do you maintain even a shred of credibility when you try to
justify the AR-15’s that the dopes were carrying at Charlottesville,
particularly the dopes representing the Nazis and the KKK?

              Of course the NRA was going to endorse Trump,
they always endorse the Republican candidate, but the endorsement has usually
been near the end of the Presidential campaign when it doesn’t really count for
all that much. This time around, it was almost as if the NRA‘s ad
agency, Ackerman-McQueen, was actually working for the Trump campaign, given
the extreme messaging of noisemakers like Dana Loesch who, it turns out, was an
employee of the ad agency and not, as it was
claimed, working for the NRA.

              Meanwhile, the attempt by NRA to become a media
presence through its video channel, NRA-TV, appears to be collapsing alongside
the crumbling of the organization itself. Since February, monthly visits to the website have dropped
from 370,000 to 200,000, with the decline since the April meeting a startling
35 percent! There is simply no way that this trend can continue much longer
without severe repercussions for both Ackerman-McQueen and the NRA.

              On the other hand, the less-noticed but more
fundamental activity of the NRA continues to grow and expand. I am
referring to the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any lessening of interest
and activity on the weekend gun show circuit,
with estimates for yearly shows running between 2,000 and 5,000 events, each of
which usually attracts at least 5,000 gun nuts who will stroll past the NRA
booth which is present at just about every show. Between now and mid-October,
Friends of the NRA will be holding 8 social events just within 70 miles
of where I live. If I lived in Baltimore, MD I could easily get to 10 weekend NRA
events over the same three months. In Georgia, I can go to five events just in
July and August alone. At every event there’s some good bar-b-que to eat, a gun
raffle, you sit around and shoot the you-know-what with your gun nut friends.

              When it comes to this kind of activity, Gun-control
Nation can’t begin to compete with the NRA. And this isn’t just a
function of a long-time organizing effort, it also reflects the degree to which
many gun owners define their social behavior around their ownership of guns.

              What seems to have happened over the last several years is a clear disconnect between the behavior of the NRA as defined by the leadership of the home office, as opposed to the way the organization relates to its membership in the field. Not to worry, because If the current fight between the NRA and its ad agency results in the collapse of the Fairfax operation, somebody will figure out how to capture and maintain the enthusiasm of all us nuts who really love our guns.    

A Great Gun Story From Joyce Carol Oates

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If you
want to read a remarkable piece of writing which really captures what guns are
all about, see if you can pick up a
collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless, and read ‘Gunlove,’
which I read again last night. If there’s another piece of fiction out there
which brought home to me why guns are such a problematic issue in American
life, I haven’t seen it yet. And when all is really said and done, the ability
of someone with this writer’s remarkable talents to capture the most profound dimensions
of what guns represent, goes far beyond what we get from even the most
authoritative scholarly research.

The
story is narrated in first-person by a young woman who is recalling certain
events and people over the course of her life, all of which involve the use of
guns. A gun is brandished, a guns is used for self-defense, a gun is played
with, a gun is taken to a shooting range, a gun is carried around for
protection, a gun figures in a suicide or maybe it was an accident. In other
words, every vignette which together creates the story’s text, gives us a quick
portrait of all the different ways that Americans think about using guns.

And then
there are the guns themselves, described and even named: Bauer 25-caliber
pocket pistol, 12-gauge Remington shotgun, a Saturday-night special Arcadia, a
Colt 45-caliber Army gun, a Winchester 22-caliber rifle, a Sterling pistol, a
44-magnum, a Colt Detective Special, even a Glock! And the fact that the Glock
is actually an AMT pistol makes the whole thing even better because the
ditz-brain narrator of this story, who spent her college years at Vassar continuously
stoned and/or high, really didn’t know one gun from another. Which is exactly
the point. It doesn’t really matter which gun is which.

These
guns float through the life of the story’s narrator in the same quick and easy
way that her relatives, friends and lovers come and go. At one point, she
appears to be getting serious about shooting – goes to a shooting range in
Staten Island but finds it difficult to actually pull the trigger and hit the
target downrange. On the other hand, she has no trouble buying at last four
different oils and cleaning fluids, cleaning patches and rags, various gunsmith
tools and other crap. She easily spends a hundred bucks or more on this stuff,
takes it back to her apartment, but never actually cleans her gun. She’s the
type of customer that the gun business loves.

At the
end of the story, she meets up with a sometime lover who gives her a remembrance
gift because after a final embrace (in the middle of Central Park, no less)
he’s evidently going to clear out of town. She goes back to her apartment,
unwraps the package and of course it’s a gun – a 9mm Glock. She thinks for a
minute about possibly giving it up but she can’t. She ‘loves’ her gun.

Of
course the gun which she loves isn’t a Glock at all. She describes it as having
a stainless steel frame but Glock never produced any guns except with polymer
frames. So she has absolutely no idea what she is talking about but she’ll
never get rid of this gun. Perfect.

By the
end of this story, what you come to understand is that this ditz-brain has
absolutely no idea why she loves her guns. But one reason for her obsessive gun
infatuation which is never mentioned is any concern for her 2nd-Amendment
‘rights.’ She couldn’t care less about the 2nd Amendment.

And here’s the dirty, little secret about guns: Nobody else cares about the 2nd Amendment. Gun owners will tell you in no uncertain terms that they support the 2nd Amendment because otherwise they might have to admit that their decision to own this lethal consumer product has nothing to do with any kind of reality or necessity at all. They love their guns because guns are fun. And if you don’t believe me, just read this penetrating story by Joyce Carol Oates.

Download and read the story here.

Does PTP Reduce Gun Violence? The Jury’s Still Out.

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              All of a sudden, two of the blue-team candidates, Cory and Pete, are talking about something which has never been even so much as whispered in a national political campaign, namely, a federal gun licensing system. This is kind of like a driver’s license for gun ownership, except in this case the license will be issued by the feds. It’s still something of a halfway house, because such a procedure wouldn’t require gun owners to register their guns. On the other hand, if you combine national gun licensing with universal background checks (UCB) you’re almost there. Not quite, but at least almost.

               All of this
new-found political concern about gun violence should be a sweet tune to the
ears of gun-control advocates and advocacy groups, but I’m not so sure. In
fact, in the process of moving from being marginal to central in the gun debate
compared to the ‘other’ side, there’s a good chance that this transition may
provoke splits and arguments within the gun-control movement itself. After all,
when nobody’s listening, it doesn’t really matter whether this group agrees
with that group. But when every gun-control group now finds itself being heard
and can use its new-found voice to grow its influence and organizational
strength, all of a sudden the last thing you want to do is sound like everyone
else.

              Last week our friends at Everytown announced they were
sending a questionnaire to all Presidential candidates asking them where they
stand on 18 different gun issues: background checks, assault weapon bans, the
usual gun-control things. One of the questions they did not ask was
where candidates stood on pre-purchase gun licensing, which is known as
permit-to-purchase, i.e., PTP. The reason this question wasn’t on the
Everytown list is because, according to John Feinblatt who runs Everytown,
PTP procedures, including Corey’s idea for a national licensing system, “has not been fully researched and proven to have public support.”  This statement immediately drew criticism
from some self-appointed gun experts in the gun-control community, who are now
lining up behind a PTP law that was recently introduced.

              Except there’s only one little
problem with the gun-control activists who think they can support PTP to
increase their own presence while taking Everytown down a peg or two.  When it comes to whether or not PTP‘s
value has been shown true through evidence-based research, Feinblatt’s
hesitation happens to be correct.  The
PTP procedures haven’t been fully researched, partly because the definition
of PTP happens to differ significantly from state to state.  In New Jersey, every separate purchase of a
handgun requires approval from the cops. In Connecticut, you get one license
from the state police whether you buy a gun or not. The fact that Connecticut’s
homicide rate is lower than other comparable states without a PTP
process doesn’t mean the difference is due to PTP. Possible? Yes.
Definitive? Absolutely no. At least not yet.

              The PTP bill just filed by Congressman
Raskin (D-MD) authorizes the Department of Justice to make grants to states
that enact some kind of PTP law which will only allow handguns to be purchased
if the applicant passes a background check with fingerprints and is 21 years or
older. The bill, however, does not require any licensing authority to determine
whether the applicant really needs to own a handgun, the whole point of PTP being
that the cops should get to decide the fitness of handgun owners based on
something more than whether they can pass a background check.

              Before gun-control advocates jump
on the PTP bandwagon, they might take the trouble to understand how
PTP laws work and don’t work. On the other hand, making your voice louder
in any advocacy community doesn’t necessarily require that what you say bears
any relationship to the truth. If you yell loud enough, someone will respond
and join your parade. Trump proves that one true every day.

Do We Really Need FBI-NICS Background Checks?

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              If there is one new gun law which everyone seems to
agree we should enact, it’s the law which would require a background check every
time that anyone transfers a gun. Right now, according to our friends
at Giffords, roughly half the American population resides in states where some
kind of background check beyond the initial over-the-counter check takes place.
But even in the states where some kind of additional background check occurs
after the gun has been sold for the first time, there’s no consistency and the
process varies from state to state.

As for
states which require no kind of background check when a gun owner sells or
transfers his gun to someone else, most of those states happen to be the same
states where a majority of the residents own guns.  And don’t think for one minute that it’s only
a coincidence that states with lots of gun owners usually have fewer gun laws.

I have
no problem with universal background checks for guns if I thought for one
second that this procedure might result in less violence caused by guns. After
all, right now we Americans own somewhere between 260 and 350 million guns and
gun researchers have been telling us forever and ever Amen that we suffer from
an extraordinarily-high rate of gun violence, precisely because we have too
many guns floating around and they can easily move from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ hands.
So if we instituted universal background checks, so the argument goes, we
wouldn’t have less guns but at least they wouldn’t so easily end up in the wrong
hands.

This
sounds like a very logical and reasonable proposition, which is why Gun-control
Nation has gotten behind universal background checks (UBC) because the
process is, after all, reasonable, which happens to be a favorite gun-control
word. And UBC wouldn’t be a threat to 2nd Amendment ‘rights’
because everyone, even the nuttiest of the gun nuts agrees that only
law-abiding citizens should be able to own guns.

Mike the
Gun Guy doesn’t agree. Mike the Gun Guy actually believes that deciding whether
or not to institute UBC shouldn’t be considered in terms of
reasonableness or 2nd Amendment ‘rights’ at all. In fact, Mike the
Gun Guy (that’s right, it’s trademarked) would feel much more
sanguine about the whole background check issue if his friends in Gun-control
Nation would stop proclaiming the virtues of UBC and try to understand
what the term ‘universal’ as in Universal Background Checks really means.

What it
means is that a lot of time, energy, paperwork and money is going to be spent
making sure that a lot of guns which have absolutely nothing to do with gun
violence end up being regulated simply because such items meet the legal
definition of the word ‘gun.’ When our friends at The Trace published
a list of more than 9,000 guns that were confiscated by more than 1,000 police
agencies between 2010 and 2016, I ran the entire batch through a word search
using the words Remington, Winchester, Savage, Marlin, Browning and H&R to
see how many times these words came up. 

These
six words happen to be the names of gun companies who together probably
manufactured and sold 100 million hunting rifles and shotguns over the past hundred
years; most of those guns, believe it or not, are still in private hands. Know
how many times these words appeared in the list of more than 9,000 ‘crime’
guns?  Exactly six times and in every,
single case, those guns were confiscated because the owner didn’t have a gun
license – that was the big, serious crime.

If  we believe that background checks will reduce gun violence, why do most background checks involve guns that aren’t connected to gun violence?  Sorry, but the idea that I have to drive forty miles round trip to a gun shop to run a background check on my son before I give him my old, single-shot Sears Roebuck bird gun just doesn’t make any sense at all.