Want An Internet Loophole For Guns? Try The Dark Web.
Right after the new House of Representatives convened,
we took a small step towards aligning our gun-control laws with countries that
don’t have to worry about the so-called 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ with
the introduction
of H.R. 1. And what this bill does, is expand background checks to secondary
gun transfers, a procedure that has been a signature GVP demand since the FBI-NICS
process went live back in 1998.
I haven’t see the text of the bill yet, but I
understand that it basically says that in order to sell or give a gun to
someone else, the gun owner must make sure that an FBI-NICS background check occurs before the transfer takes place.
The idea behind this law is that expanding background checks will make it more
difficult for people who couldn’t pass a background check to get their hands on
a gun.
The reason I call this measure a ‘small step’ forward
in the regulation of guns is because in countries like England, France,
Germany, in other words, in the rest of the advanced world, what really keeps
gun violence at minimal rates is the vetting process which is required before
someone can buy or own a gun. Most important to this process is: a) all guns
are registered, so the cops know who has them and who don’t; b) getting
permission to own a handgun is not only onerous and time-consuming, but often
results in the request being turned down.
Here’s the bottom line. We suffer a level of gun
violence which is seven to twenty times higher than any other advanced society
because we give our citizens free access to handguns; with the exception of a
few jurisdictions, we impose no greater legal requirements for handgun ownership
than we impose for someone who wants to own a rusted, used, single-shot shotgun
that I sell in my shop for fifty bucks.
Last year I published
a study in SSRN where I did a word
search on more than 350,000 crime guns confiscated by the cops, and words like
Remington, Winchester, Marlin and Savage, guns which are only hunting guns,
came up 3% of the time or even less.
But at the same time that we may be pushing ourselves
more towards the European model in terms of gun control, it now appears that
Europeans may be starting to push themselves in the direction of our current
regulatory environment, namely, by showing a greater interest in owning
handguns. An article has just appeared
in the Wall Street Journal which
indicates that residents in various European countries are not only getting
more interested in owning handguns, but in carrying them around.
At the same time that legal gun ownership as well as
concealed-carry appears to have increased by as much as 10% over the last
several years, there has also been what experts refer to as a ‘surge’ in
illegal, unregistered guns. According to the Small Arms Survey, of the estimated 77 million small arms floating
around Europe, more than 60% are illegal guns, many of them smuggled in from
war zones further east, or purchased from U.S. dealers on the dark web. Dark
web gun sales were discussed
in a RAND report published in 2017, and while the authors focused only on gun
sales within Europe, the implication of this report should be considered in
terms of the U.S. gun market as well.
The problem is that regulating any product doesn’t
necessarily reduce demand. And if 90,000 Americans really want to use a gun to
hurt someone else every year, which is the reason we suffer from gun violence,
they will find a way to circumvent the regulations, no matter how
well-intentioned those regulations might be.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t implement a background
check on all transfers of guns. I’m saying that in solving one problem we may
be creating another for the simple reason that we continue to avoid the
fundamental issue which creates gun violence, namely, the existence of the gun.
