Why Do We Enact Gun-Control Laws?
Tuesday night C-Span carried the debate and vote of the
House Judiciary Committee about the ‘red flag’ law. The statute was sent to the
full House where it will pass and then no doubt languish until sometime next
year when the GOP begins to read the tea leaves seriously and decides what
legislation will and will not help or hurt them in the 2020 race.
There’s a chance that three gun bills will be waiting Senate
action during the current Congressional session: comprehensive background
checks, red-flag laws and another assault-weapons ban. If there’s a blue sweep
come next November, we might even seen these bills consolidated into one, major
piece of legislation, which would mark the fifth time the Federal Government
enacted a gun-control law, the previous
laws having been passed in 1934, 1938, 1968 and 1994. The initial assault
weapons ban was also enacted in 1994, but it was stuck onto the Omnibus Crime
Bill which was also passed that year.
The four statutes which got the Federal Government into
gun-control big time, defined certain guns as being too dangerous for ordinary purchase
and sale (1934), defined the role and responsibilities of federally-licensed
gun dealers (1938), created the definition of ‘law-abiding’ individuals who
could purchase or possess guns (1968), and brought the FBI into the mix to make
sure that people who claimed to be law-abiding gun owners were, in fact, what
they claimed to be.
These laws approached the issue of gun control from
four different perspectives, but they all shared one common thread; namely,
they were enacted to help law enforcement agencies deal with the issue of crime.
Here’s the preamble to the 1968 law: “The Congress hereby declares that
the purpose of this title is to provide support to Federal, State and local law
enforcement officials in their fight against crime and violence….” The
other Federal gun laws basically say the same thing. In other words, these laws
may have been enacted to regulate the ownership and commerce of guns, but their
real purpose was to help fight crime.
Every other advanced nation-state also enacted gun-control
laws, for the most part either before or after World War II. Most of these laws
were patterned after our initial law, the National Firearms Act of 1934, but these
laws were all different from our gun-control laws in one, crucial respect,
namely, they prohibited the purchase of handguns except under the most
stringent and restrictive terms.
Why do we suffer from a level of gun violence
that is seven to twenty times’ higher than any other advanced nation-state? Not
because we have so many more guns floating around, but because we make it very
easy for folks to get access to handguns, which happen to be the guns that
kill and injure just about all those 125,000+ Americans every year. Oh, I
forgot. Some of them aren’t real Americans. They snuck in here, got on welfare
and deserve to get shot.
The reason that countries like France, Italy and
Germany banned handguns had nothing to do with crime. The gun-control laws passed
in these and other countries were based on government fear of armed, rebellion
from the Left – Socialist and Communist labor unions to be precise. The United
States Federal Government also once had to deal with a serious, armed
rebellion, but this was a rebellion not about class oppression or workers
versus owners. It was a disagreement about race.
For all the nonsense about how guns keep us ‘free,’ the
truth is that owning and carrying a Glock has nothing to do with freedom at
all. It has to do with a totally irrational belief that we are surrounded by
predators who just can’t wait to invade our homes, beat us up and run off with
that wide-screen TV. Since we know this to be a fact, how come the
violent-crime rates in countries
where nobody can protect themselves with a handgun are lower than the rate of
violent crime in the United States?
