By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
On Sunday, I answered as briefly as I could – which in many cases was not very briefly
at all – some common questions about the gun-control debate. I have a few
even-less-brief observations for Tuesday, but I think you will find them
useful.
I begin with what seems to be a mystifying
paradox at the center of our gun-control efforts: We only want to enforce the
law on the law-abiding, while we ignore the law-breakers almost
entirely in our gun-control debate.
Almost every single substantive
gun-control proposal put forward by our progressive friends is oriented toward
adding new restrictions and regulatory burdens to federally licensed firearms
dealers and the people who do business with them: what they can sell and what
they cannot sell, to whom they can sell, under what conditions they may sell,
etc. But, as I often remark, gun-store customers are just about the most
law-abiding demographic in the United States, even accounting for situations
such as that of the Uvalde killer, who was able to purchase his firearms
legally because he had no prior criminal record. The best information we have
comes from the Department of Justice, which found in 2019 that less than 2 percent of all prisoners
had a firearm obtained from a retail source at the time they committed their
crimes. A different 2013 study by researchers at
the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins found that only 13 percent of the offenders in
the state prison population obtained their firearms from a
retail source.
Criminals mostly don’t get their guns at
gun stores — because they mostly can’t.
In contrast to those modest figures of 2
percent or 13 percent, the great majority of murders committed in the United
States — upwards of 80 percent — are committed by people with prior
arrest records, often by people with prior convictions for violent crimes or
prior weapons offenses — and almost none of our gun-control proposals is
targeted at this group.
If you have not bought a gun from a gun
dealer, then you might not appreciate just exactly how law-abiding and how
i-dotting and t-crossing you have to be to make the purchase: Not only are you
excluded for a felony conviction, you also are excluded for misdemeanor
convictions involving domestic violence or any other misdemeanor for which you
could have been sentenced to more than one year in jail, irrespective of the
sentence you actually received; you are excluded if you are a “fugitive from
justice,” meaning someone with an active arrest warrant who has left the state
to avoid arrest; you are excluded if you have been dishonorably discharged from
the military; you are excluded if you are a drug addict or a user of illegal
drugs; you are excluded if you are an illegal alien or an alien legally present
on a nonimmigrant visa; you are excluded if you have been judged mentally
deficient by a court of law or committed to a mental institution; you are
excluded if you are subject to a restraining order; you are excluded from
purchasing a handgun if you are not a resident of the state in which the
purchase is being made; you are excluded if you are buying a gun for anyone
other than yourself; you are excluded if the information on your
government-issued identification does not match current records and the
information on your application, a provision that is enforced with such
exactitude that an application may be rejected if it says “111 Main St.”
instead of “111 Main Street.”
Democrats who complain that it easier to
buy a gun than it is to vote are lying for partisan political purposes and
should be dismissed with contempt.
That being said, there are some
deficiencies in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS)
that should be part of the conversation. One is that NICS depends on a variety
of agencies for reporting, and these agencies are not always reliable. For
example, the shooter in the Sutherland Springs church attack should have been
excluded from buying firearms, but the U.S. Air Force neglected to report his
criminal history to the FBI, which manages NICS. (A judge has
held the Air Force partially responsible for the deaths in that case.) Other problems: Non-federal fugitives are not often reported as such,
and in the majority of cases the state with the warrant does not know whether
the fugitive has left the state; some localities are slow or negligent in
reporting restraining orders or misdemeanor convictions, and some apparently
don’t even know what needs to be reported; mental-health reporting has long
been slow and desultory — the number of mental-health records in the NICS
database jumped from 234,628 in 2005 to 3.8 million in 2014 not because of some
sudden spike in mental illness in the United States but because the feds made a
priority out of it and put money into helping states and municipalities meet
their reporting obligations; the United States does a notoriously poor job of
tracking illegal aliens and enforcing immigration law; the process basically
relies on self-reporting for illegal drug use.
That lattermost issue is dramatically
illustrated by the case of
Hunter Biden, who almost certainly violated federal
law by lying about his longstanding drug problems when purchasing a handgun in
2018, but was never charged — and, let’s be frank, never will be charged
and knew he was never going to be charged, even if caught — under the very
law his father boasts of having “shepherded through Congress.”
These are real shortcomings in the system.
But, even with that being the case, I should reiterate here that the data very
strongly suggest that people who buy firearms from firearms dealers very rarely
commit crimes of any kind with those firearms — less than 2 percent of the
prisoners in the federal system and about 13 percent of those in the state
systems had a firearm obtained from a retail source when they committed their
crimes. (And even those figures may overstate the prevalence of retail-sourced
firearms in that they probably include some straw purchases and firearms stolen from
retailers.) Given the very weak statistical relationship between buying a gun
from a gun dealer and committing a crime with that gun, why is there so much
focus on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business
with them?
The answer is that this conversation has
almost nothing to do with violent crime, and almost nothing to do with policies
aimed at reducing violent crime.
The gun-control debate is first and
foremost a culture-war issue for Democrats. There is a great deal of violent
crime in the United States, and that crime is concentrated in big cities over
which Democrats enjoy an effective monopoly of political power. The people who
commit most of the murders in the United States — and the people who most
often die in those murders — check a lot of Democratic-voter demographic
boxes: They are very disproportionately low-income African Americans in urban
areas. Democrats are desperate to put a more Republican-looking face on the
violent-crime problem, preferably one that is older, white, middle-aged, rural,
southern, and Evangelical. That is the reason for the focus on the National
Rifle Association in particular and on gun dealers and “gun culture” in
general. As is so often the case in our contemporary politics, what we
are talking about matters mostly because it is a way of not
talking about something else.
I am not particularly an admirer of the
National Rifle Association. The NRA once was a very effective — and
notably bipartisan — single-issue advocacy organization, focused on the
legal rights and interests of U.S. gun owners. Contrary to the myth that has
grown up around it, the NRA has never been powerful because it throws around a
great deal of money — which it doesn’t do: In the 2020 cycle, the NRA was
not among the top 1,000 political donors or among the top 250 in lobbying
outlays. It is true that the NRA is currently in a weakened condition after a
series of self-inflicted wounds, but even back in 2012 it was No. 301 among
campaign contributors and only No. 181 on lobbying outlays. The NRA’s strength
has never been its pocketbook — it has always been the fact that it
represents millions and millions of American gun owners who prioritize Second
Amendment issues when they go to the polls. The NRA’s political clout has
always been of the most genuine kind — the kind you cannot purchase. If
you think clout like that can be bought, ask Mike Bloomberg about his efforts
on the gun-control front.
The NRA went wrong when it made itself
into a subsidiary of the Republican Party and allowed itself to be taken over
by people who wanted to be Fox News pundits — a textbook example of Yuval
Levin’s observation about self-interested
people who use institutions as platforms. (I do not and never have given a fig about Wayne LaPierre’s
million-dollar salary and his natty Zegna suits — frankly, I am surprised
that he isn’t paid more: Very effective
nonprofit executives do pretty well.) The NRA was better off — and Americans’ gun rights were more
secure — when the group still had a few high-ranking Democrats on its
side, and when its employees were not famous. You probably can’t name one
employee of Squire Patton Boggs, a Washington lobbying powerhouse, and that
suits the firm and its clients just fine. It is true that the NRA’s position as
culture-war lightning rod was not entirely a matter of the organization’s own
choosing, but it has leaned into the role more than it had to.
If this were a matter of public policy,
the thousands of people who were standing outside the convention center in
Houston to shout obscenities at the NRA would be standing outside the office of
the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Chicago and raising absolute
hell about the failure — about the refusal – of the federal government and
most big-city DAs to prosecute straw-buyer cases. If this were about policy,
Joe Biden would be in New York with Kathy Hochul in a headlock demanding to
know why career
criminals arrested on murder charges are being released — without bail! — into the streets of our largest city. Or, short of that, President
Biden could take a brief walk down the street to the ATF
headquarters and find out why the agency won’t even bother to go around and
pick up guns in sales that it knows were wrongly approved. But none of that
happens.
The reason none of that happens is that
this is not about crime — it is about culture war and cultural enemies.
Don’t take my word for it: Ask Charles
Blow of the New York Times, who demands that “Gun Safety
Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear,” as the headline puts it — not what is effective, not what
is reasonable or prudent, but whatever it
is that Republicans don’t want. Blow is unusual only in that he is
relatively open about the fact that this is a culture issue for him: “Gun
culture,” he writes, “is a canard and a corruption.”
(Set aside, for the moment, that a marquee
columnist for the New York Times apparently does not know what
the word “canard” means.)
The Democratic Party and the progressive
movement more generally are dominated culturally and financially by
college-educated, affluent, white metropolitan professionals, mostly living in
those two-thirds of U.S. households in which there is no firearm present. They
present themselves as the champions of poor, black, urban communities about
which they know almost nothing, and understand themselves as the enemies of
lower-income, aging, white, rural communities — the stereotypical NASCAR crowd
— about which they also know almost nothing. Never mind that much of the
increase in gun ownership in recent years has been driven by women, African
Americans, and recreational shooters in urban areas — the eggbound
snake-handling hayseeds and would-be militiamen of Georgia and Alabama, whose
cultural prominence is almost exclusively a matter of the progressive
imagination, simply must be the face of gun ownership, at
least for the purposes of culture war. Never mind that most of the violent
crime involving guns in this country is carried out in zip codes where the
voters elect Democrats almost exclusively, and never mind that the reason we do
not act on those “common sense” gun-control measures on which almost all of us
notionally agree — such as prosecuting straw-buying and other everyday weapons
offenses — is the fact that doing this would irritate important Democratic
constituencies in the big cities and among unionized government workers.
Even if we read the data in the way that
is most generous to the gun-control cause, fewer than one in five criminals
uses a gun acquired from a gun dealer, while more than four out of five
murderers have prior arrest records. If we go by the DOJ findings, the share of
criminals who use guns from gun dealers is more like 2 percent. And yet almost
all of the new proposals from Democrats are new regulations and restrictions on
firearms dealers, while almost none is focused on the relatively small body of
prior offenders who carry out most murder and other violent crime. The
progressives are protesting the NRA in Houston and not in front of city hall in
Philadelphia or St. Louis.
Among the few proposals that are targeted
at someone other than licensed gun dealers and their customers is the idea of
so-called universal background checks, also known as “closing the gun-show
loophole.”
According to the DOJ, the share of prisoners who obtained guns
through gun shows was — commit this figure to memory —
0.8 percent.
Like I said, this isn’t about crime — it
is about Kulturkampf.
A Few More
Thoughts about This . . .
After nearly 3,000 Americans died in the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nobody — nobody sane, anyway —
said: “But the real killer is heart
disease!” Terrorist attacks are consequential not only because of
the numbers killed but also because they change the nature of public life —
that is, after all, what they are intended to do. Likewise, the number of
Americans who die in massacres such as the ones recently carried out in Buffalo
and Uvalde represents a tiny share of the total number of Americans who die in
homicides, most of those deaths being the result of ordinary, quotidian crime.
An American public-school student is considerably more likely to die in a
school-bus accident than in a mass shooting. But those homicidal spectaculars
change the nature of school life, and of public life in general.
It is for this reason that they deserve
our attention, not because they tell us anything about the lethality of any
particular class of firearms or the prudence of changing the regulation of such
firearms. The killer in Uvalde was armed with a semiautomatic 5.56mm rifle, not
exactly a “weapon of war” (that phrase itself presents a complicated question;
see below) but a very effective firearm, and, not coincidentally, the most
common rifle sold in the United States. But the killer was barricaded in a room
full of fourth-graders for an hour — he could have been armed with a revolver,
a kitchen knife, or a brick and achieved the same results. Most of the victims
at Sandy Hook were six or seven years old — it is difficult to imagine how
magazine-size restrictions would make much of a difference in such a situation.
The worst school massacre in American history was carried out nearly a century
ago by a killer who used bombs rather than firearms. These kinds of crimes are
not going to be prevented by the sorts of measures being put forward.
But surely it is the case that we could,
if we were serious about this — which, as I argue above, we really aren’t —
walk and chew gum at the same time, using straightforward law-enforcement
methods to reduce the numbers of ordinary criminal murders while also working
on new data-driven techniques to try to identify mass killers and prevent their
crimes before they happen, while also taking commonsense measures to improve security
at schools and in other public places.
One thing we are going to have to do is
decide whether we still think 18-year-olds are adults. Some gun-control
advocates would like to see all firearms sales restricted to those who are at
least 21 years of age. This is not an isolated idea: Increasingly, our colleges
are organized around the belief that students as old as 22 years of age are, in
effect, children who require “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and other
measures by which school staff members act in loco parentis. In
certain situations, a person can be charged with a felony sexual crime for
having consensual sexual relations with an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old, even
in places where the formal age of sexual consent is less than 18 years of age.
And, of course, we generally forbid alcohol sales to legal adults younger than
21 years of age.
I am not what Michael Oakeshott would have
called a rationalist, in that I am perfectly comfortable with some
measure of organic inconsistency in the law, but I do not think that it
probably is tenable in the long run to have an explicitly guaranteed
constitutional right denied to people who are old enough to vote. Nor do I
think that it is tenable to have people who otherwise enjoy the full rights of
adulthood treated as though they were children in the context of higher
education. What this means — although the notion is practically taboo — is that
it is time to reconsider not the Second Amendment but the 26th Amendment, which
forces the states to enfranchise 18-year-olds. If we are going to proceed as
though adulthood starts at 21, then we need to raise the voting age to 21, too
— because we don’t give children the vote.
Of course, we’ll have to do something
about all those child soldiers in our military, with the
median age of new Marines hovering around 19.
‘Weapons
of War’
As I have pointed out many times, the
5.56mm semiautomatic rifles that progressives like to call “weapons of war” are
not really that, inasmuch as they are not generally issued to troops in the
United States or elsewhere. But do you know what is a weapon of war? Granddad’s
deer rifle. The ubiquitous Remington 700 bolt-action rifle has long been a favorite
of hunters, and it also is the go-to sniper rifle for military services around
the world. Earlier American wars were fought with bolt-action .30-06 rifles
functionally identical to what most American hunters used for generations.
Gun-control activists insist that AR-style
rifles are not hunting rifles. A typical tirade found on the Internet: “An
AR-15 is not a hunting rifle. Do you really need a high-powered rifle round and
high-capacity magazine to take down Bambi? Last time I checked, Bambi wasn’t
wearing a bullet proof vest or hiding behind cement barriers.” That isn’t Joe
Biden, but it could be.
This is, of course, wrong on every count:
The rifles in question not only are hunting rifles; they are today the most common
hunting rifle in the United States. But they are not rifles that typically fire
a “high-powered” round — in fact, the standard 5.56mm round has long been
considered insufficiently powerful for humane deer hunting and has been
prohibited at various times in various places for that purpose for that reason.
Hog-hunting is one of the most popular kinds of pursuit in the United States,
and many outfitters will not allow a hunter to use a 5.56mm rifle for hogs —
because it is not powerful enough. The idea of shooting through concrete barriers
and body armor with that round is an uncertain proposal at best. You’d be
better off with a traditional big-game hunting rifle, which is four or five
times as powerful as the “higher-powered” 5.56mm. But, in any case, most of the
popular hunter cartridges either began as military rounds (such as the .30-06)
or still are military rounds (such as the .308 Winchester). As a practical
matter, you aren’t going to find a rifle that is good for killing elk that
isn’t also good for killing people.
And that fact matters . . . almost not at
all, since rifles are almost never used in murders in the United States,
accounting for only 2.5 percent of homicides. What murders in 2022 have in
common with murders in 1922 is that the gun most commonly used in a murder is
the most common handgun. Once upon a time, it was the Colt Single-Action Army
revolver, and then it was the .38 Special, and now it is the 9mm pistol. In 20
years, it may be something else — but the shooters probably will be the same
people, i.e., habitual criminals with prior records.
And gun-control advocates will still be
focused on the 2 percent of criminals who buy guns from gun dealers, or
possibly the 0.8 percent who get them from gun shows.
In Other
News . . .
If you haven’t had enough gun stuff, check
out this brief
report from NYPD. In 2021, the department made 4,499 gun
arrests, resulting in . . . one conviction at trial. There were
698 plea deals and 983 dismissals.
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