National Review Online
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
President Obama announced his plans for gun control just
before noon today. He put 23 executive actions in place immediately following
his speech, and called on Congress to take additional measures. There are
useful small steps in the president’s agenda, but his boldest proposals are
misguided — and unlikely to pass the Republican House. The announcement —
during which Obama was accompanied on stage by four children, and which he
frequently punctuated with emotional appeals — was primarily an act of
political theater.
Many of the actions the president has taken or proposed
are unremarkable. For instance, few would object to his appointing a director
for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; requiring federal
agencies to supply relevant information to the background-check system; or
making efforts to educate mental-health professionals about their options for
reporting threats of violence. Congress should indeed stiffen penalties on
straw purchasers, those who buy guns from dealers and then pass them off to
people who are not allowed to have them. It is not the federal government’s
role to fund local schools’ safety efforts or provide money for hiring police,
but such efforts are hardly out of the ordinary or a serious threat to liberty.
The president overstepped his bounds, however, in
directing the Centers for Disease Control to study gun control. Congress has
taken steps to deny the CDC funds for this purpose — the unfortunately
imprecise statutory language is that the CDC may not “advocate or promote gun
control” — primarily because the agency has proven itself unable to address
this topic in an unbiased fashion. If the president wants to spend federal
dollars on these studies, he should go through Congress. Anyway, the
administration does not seem interested in learning from the research we
already have. Serious research reviews by the National Academy of Sciences and
the CDC itself have failed to find evidence that gun control reduces crime —
despite the massive amount of work that has been done. (And in case anyone in
the administration is unclear on this point, gun ownership is not a disease.)
President Obama also called for restoring the
assault-weapons ban and capping magazine size at ten rounds. As we have
explained previously, these measures are not useful if the goal is to reduce
crime: President Obama can call assault rifles “weapons designed for the
theater of war” all he wants, but in fact they are semiautomatic guns,
functionally indistinguishable from hunting rifles. High-capacity magazines,
meanwhile, are of dubious benefit to someone intent on harming innocents: They
require less frequent reloading, but are more likely to jam, and at any rate
changing magazines is not difficult even for the untrained.
In addition, the president backed mandatory background
checks on gun sales between private individuals; under current law, checks are
required only for sales conducted through licensed dealers. In theory, a
comprehensive background-check system could be helpful — but in practice, any
attempt to implement such a system would probably be cumbersome and unworkable,
and the president did not offer specifics. It would be wrong to make gun sales
difficult and expensive, or to spend massive amounts of money on a project with
dubious benefits.
All in all, the president’s agenda seems better designed
for the polls than for public safety. Gun control means hitting what you aim
for, goes the slogan, and Obama has picked his target carefully.
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