Stopping Mass Shootings: Andrew Ross Sorkin Gets It Wrong.
For all the talk about how the liberal media tries to
present a balanced view on issues that provoke public debate, a column by Andrew
Ross Sorkin goes so far beyond what should be the proper boundaries for
defining discussions about gun violence that The New York Times should be ashamed of themselves for
running it earlier this week.
I am referring to Sorkin’s claim that he found a pattern
running through the preparations made by people who committed mass shootings,
the pattern being that they used credit cards to make large and expensive purchases
of guns and ammunition which would not have been possible had these guys been forced
to use cash.
Sorkin reviews documentation from various mass shootings,
including The Pulse and Aurora, where it appears that both shooters, Mateen and
Holmes, may have secured credit cards for the express purpose of stocking up on
large amounts of ammunition and multiple guns, which were then used in both
attacks.
That’s fine as far as it goes. But Sorkin then steps
across the line, actually leaps across the line, by talking in very positive
terms about how easy it would be for banks and credit card underwriters to
track such purchases and alert law-enforcement authorities if and when someone’s
credit card account suddenly shows all kinds of buying activity involving
ammunition and guns. Sorkin claims it would be a simple process for financial
institutions to create and administer the same kind of data-crunching systems
which they currently use to track fraud, money-laundering or terrorism.
Basically,
such a scheme would require merchants who take credit card payments to identify
the type of object being purchased, which is almost always found in the item’s
SKU, which is that bar-code on the package which tells a merchant how to adjust
inventory levels after every sale. All we would need to do is create a specific
SKU for guns or ammunition that would be reported to the credit card
underwriter and then flow directly to the cops.
The idea
that we would give the police any information about our buying habits except
when we make an illegal purchase, simply blows my mind. If this isn’t the most
egregious violation of just about every, Constitutional protection we have, I
don’t know what is. And while Sorkin
spends two paragraphs on the civil liberties issue with the requisite comment
from the ACLU, he doesn’t seem overly concerned about the loss of privacy where
guns are concerned. If he knew anything about the gun industry (and when was the
last time that any of the self-appointed ‘experts’ who write about guns for
media outlets like The New York Times knew anything about the gun industry?) he
would realize that the system for spotting people who purchase large numbers of
weapons in short periods of time is already in place.
The
system is called FBI-NICS, and while the FBI is supposed to destroy data generated
by all background checks within 24 hours, duhhh, they don’t. And there is no
statute which prevents the FBI from alerting ATF if a background check with the
same personal identifiers shows up multiple times on the same day.
I can
guarantee you that if Sorkin had written an article about why we need to track
purchases of any consumer item except guns, there would have been an enormous geschrei from every civil libertarian around. But giving the cops an unfettered look into
the most personal habits and behavior of every American who owns guns because,
after all, that’s how we will prevent what happened at Aurora and Sandy
Hook? Is he serious?
Until
Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse and shot the place up, the record for the
highest number of shooting casualties was held by Seung-Hui Cho, set at
Virginia Tech. Between the pistol, the extra mags and the ammunition, the
rampage that cost the lives of 32 faculty and students cost him less than $500
bucks.
That
wouldn’t have happened if VISA had sent a ding to the cops after Cho bought his
Glock? Give me a break.
