National Review Online
Tuesday, January 05, 2016
This much can be said for President Barack Obama’s
executive decrees on gun control: By shifting some federal funds into
intervention for the mentally ill, he at least acknowledges, in some small
part, one of the key problems.
As for the rest . . .
President Obama will seek to rejigger some of the
licensing rules in such a way as to cause some casual sellers of firearms to
fall within the federal definition of “firearms dealer,” and thus oblige them
to obtain federal dealers’ licenses and to perform background checks before
selling a gun. What kind of well-thought-out criteria will the government use
to determine that somebody is a firearms dealer under federal law? Whether he
has a business card is one consideration (really) and whether he processes
credit cards is another. Given the ubiquity of credit-card-processing
technology attached to mobile phones, this could very well present a
significant expansion of the legal
definition of firearms dealer under federal law. The president insists that he
is acting within preexisting statutory authority; he has been wrong about that
before, and the inevitable litigation may show him to be wrong this time
around, too: The relevant statutes make no reference to such considerations as
the president is putting forward.
The so-called gun-show loophole, which doesn’t actually
exist, refers to the fact that people who are not professionally engaged in the
business of selling firearms are not obliged to become licensed firearms
dealers (FFLs) if, say, they sell an old shotgun at a garage sale, or sell a
brother-in-law an old deer rifle for $50. Similarly, if you hang a “For Sale”
sign in the window of your 1983 Honda Prelude, you need not become a licensed
automobile dealer. This purported loophole covers sales made anywhere, not only
at gun shows or online. It isn’t clear that this would have any impact on
criminals’ acquisitions of guns — unlicensed sales at gun shows are not a large
source of firearms used in crimes — and, at any rate, the president is here a
bit behind the times: Many gun shows keep FFL-holders on site to perform
background checks, and online gun shops, which are licensed dealers, ship
exclusively to other FFLs in order to secure legal transfer. Many casual
sellers do the same thing, because they have strong incentives to secure legal
transfer of the firearms they sell.
The president has some better options. Gun shows are not
major sources of firearms used in crimes, but straw buyers are. We already have
strong laws against straw purchases, but they are barely enforced. In fact, a
few years back, the U.S. attorney’s office responsible for blood-soaked Chicago
(which had more than 2,000 shootings last year) announced that it would not
prosecute straw-buyer cases at all; apparently, such crimes aren’t sexy enough
to command the attention of federal prosecutors. President Obama has absolute
power over the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys, and he could, if he were so
inclined, simply order them to start prosecuting straw-buyer cases in
high-crime locales such as Chicago and Detroit — or dismiss recalcitrant
prosecutors and replace them with those more committed to doing their jobs. But
actually prosecuting straw buyers, as opposed to hassling legal firearms
dealers, is a great deal of work and usually results in putting some hoodlum’s
nephew or girlfriend in prison. But the only way to bring the force of law down
on straw purchases is to prosecute those cases.
Ordinary street crime, as opposed to terrorist
spectaculars such as the massacre in San Bernardino or psychosis-fueled mass
shootings of the all-too-familiar sort, is involved in most of the murders in
the United States. On terrorism, we may take it as indicative that the
Department of Homeland Security recent informed Congress that it doesn’t even
know how many visa violators there are in the United States, despite the fact
that two 9/11 hijackers were visa overstayers who would have been deported
under a functional system. That, too, is within the president’s legitimate
theater of action.
On the matter of the mentally ill, our neglect of them is
a national disgrace and a source of crime ranging from vagrancy to mass
shootings. It also diminishes the quality of life in American cities. We should
be doing more about that, and more federal funding won’t make a difference
unless it is focused on the severely mentally ill (the Obama executive order
doesn’t target its funding specifically enough). The bipartisan bill sponsored
by Representative Tim Murphy (R. Penn.), currently stalled in Congress, would
push the mental-health system toward addressing the severely mentally ill much
more effectively.
Meanwhile, absurdity reigns. Consider what is happening
right now in New York City: The governor of New York has ordered the relocation
of homeless people to shelters, forcibly if necessary, on winter nights when
low temperatures are apt to kill them. But the mayor, Bill de Blasio, complains
that forcible relocation is a violation of the rights of the homeless, who are
often afflicted by serious mental illness and thus not in the best position to
understand freezing to death as an exercise in personal autonomy.
But all of this is far too much detail for President
Obama, who thrives off one thing and one thing only: an enemy. In this case,
the president has calculated that having the National Rifle Association as a
foil in the final year of his failed presidency will provide some lubrication
as he endeavors to jam his presidential legacy into the body politic. That
won’t prevent much crime or secure treatment for any mentally ill Americans,
but President Obama has always been at the top of President Obama’s agenda.
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