By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, June 02, 2016
Yesterday, at UCLA, a Ph.D. student shot his professor
dead. Not too long afterwards, he turned the gun on himself.
As soon as the story hit the news, the usual suspects
began cranking themselves up. Americans, they said, need to “do something.” It
was time, they argued, for “more laws.” And the NRA? It was, of course, to
blame.
Forgive me for being a broken record, but I have some
questions in response to these reactions: Namely, “what something?”; “which
laws?”; and “what, specifically, did the NRA do wrong here?” Rolled into one,
these congeal into a single, simple inquiry: “What law — specifically — would
have prevented yesterday’s shooting?”
I ask because, absent the total ban on firearms that
gun-control advocates insist that they don’t covet, it is not at all obvious
which rules would have stopped the perpetrator from carrying out his plan.
According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the shooter bought a 9mm
handgun legally in Minnesota, passing a background check in the process; then,
gun in hand, he killed a woman in that state; and, finally, he drove with his
guns to California, where he killed both his professor and himself.
In the process, he both obeyed and broke a number of
existing laws. In Minnesota, he followed the purchasing rules to the letter,
and, because he had no criminal record, he was rewarded for his fealty. But
after that moment he resolved to ignore whatever rules got in his way. In both
Minnesota and California he violated the statutes that prohibit gun owners from
carrying their weapons without a permit; at UCLA he violated a rule issued in
September of 2015 that prohibits gun owners from carrying firearms onto campus;
and, rather obviously, he violated the flat-out prohibition on murder that obtains
in all 50 states. He was, in other words, entirely happy to follow the rules
when it suited him, and entirely happy to break them when it suited him. He
was, like most shooters, not much interested in the sanctity of the law.
Typically, those who favor more gun control argue that
America’s “patchwork quilt” of rules and regulations help those who would do
harm to slip through the net. Furthermore, they contend that adding further
barriers would prevent young men with evil intent from getting hold of lethal
weaponry in the first instance. But it is hard to see how such criticisms can
apply here, in response to a crime that could have been carried out with a
double-barreled shotgun from 1872.
During his presidency, President Obama has proposed three
substantial changes to the legal status quo: 1) the imposition of mandatory
instant background checks on each sale or transfer of a firearm, including
those sales and transfers that are conducted entirely privately; b) a hard
limit on the capacity of commercially available magazines; and c) a ban on
so-called assault weapons. But none of these proposals even intersects with this case. The shooter
passed an instant background check in Minnesota; his murders did not involve or
require him to “spray” bullets or even to reload; and he did not use an
“assault weapon,” but a common handgun.
Elsewhere, the president and many in his party have
expressed opposition to concealed carry in general and to “campus carry” in
particular, usually on the (faulty) assumption that permitting private citizens
to carry weapons on their persons will lead to more violence. California,
however, does not permit campus carry; it is almost impossible to get hold of a
carry permit in the city of Los Angeles; and the shooter did not have a
California concealed-carry permit.
Which brings me back to my initial question: When
President Obama tweets, as he did earlier today, that Americans must “take
action to prevent this from happening again,” what exactly does he mean? I
understand that he’s upset; everybody is upset. I understand that he’s
expressing frustration; that’s fine. But I want specifics. In free countries,
laws are clear and they are limited; they have a specific purpose; and they can
be understood and followed by laymen. Which precise provisions does President
Obama want to add to the legal code?
And has he changed his mind? Thus far, his agenda has
been limited to a set of proposals that don’t relate at all to this incident.
Should we presume that he now wants to go further? Does he perhaps believe that
handguns should be banned entirely, and, by extension that D.C. v. Heller should be overturned? Does he believe that we should
have roadside-checks at the state line, lest a gun owner from Minnesota makes
it out West? Does he want to impose far more stringent background checks as a
prerequisite to all sales? If he does, he should say so — and so should those
who agree with him. Until then, the standard question will obtain: “What,
exactly, do you intend to do about this?”
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