Should ATF Become Part Of The FBI? The Center For American Progress Says “Yes.’

May 20, 2024

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The Center for American Progress just released a lengthy, detailed and fully-documented study on the organization and functions of the ATF, concluding that the agency be merged and managed by the FBI. The report argues that the lack of a defined mission, coupled with budget shortfalls, operational impediments and intensely negative public scrutiny have combined to create what the CAP calls an “identity crisis” that can only be resolved through a major change in where the agency is placed. Moving ATF under the FBI would not only allow the nation’s premier law enforcement agency to take over primary enforcement of gun laws, but would also give ATF access to the management and personnel resources that it currently lacks.

I have no quarrel with the Center’s recognition of the organizational and operational shortcomings of the ATF, nor would I disagree with their idea that moving primary responsibility for enforcing gun laws to the FBI would elevate the importance of solving crimes involving guns and therefore help diminish gun crimes and gun violence as a whole. My problem with the report however, is that it is based on some of the assumptions about the relationship between guns, crime and enforcement which have defined the role and activities of the ATF, notwithstanding the fact that these assumptions have yet to be proven true.

cap logo Take, for example, the whole notion of gun trafficking, whose elimination is the cornerstone of the entire ATF regulatory and enforcement edifice. Gun trafficking is discussed in the CAP report, which notes that a majority of crime guns picked up in states with tough gun laws, like New York, come from states with weak gun laws, particularly states in the South. But I have never seen any study about the interstate movement of crime guns which differentiates between guns that move into criminal commerce because of ‘straw sales’ in retail shops and guns that are simply stolen and then end up somewhere else. The DOJ-BJS says that 200,000 guns are stolen each year; Brady claims the number might be twice as high. Why does the ATF assume that all those crime guns got into the ‘wrong hands’ only because someone lied on a NICS Form 4473?

They make this assumption because one of the agency’s primary missions is to “accurately and efficiently conduct firearms tracing and related programs to provide investigative leads for federal, state, local and foreign law enforcement agencies.” In 2014 the ATF conducted more than 360,000 traces and the CAP report states that “the tracing of crime guns recovered by local law enforcement has provided a significant benefit to law enforcement efforts to respond to gun crimes.” With all due respect to the ATF’s self-congratulatory description of its tracing activities, less than 20% of all traces involve guns linked to serious crimes. The ATF may believe that its current staffing level is far too low, but this could easily be addressed by relieving some of the National Tracing Center staff from tracking down the origin of guns used in such violent crimes as election laws, gambling, fraud, immigration, invasion of privacy and sex crimes, to name a few of the more than 60 categories for which ‘crime guns’ are traced.

The ATF’s real identity crisis stems from the fact that there isn’t a single federal or state statute that outlaws a crime known as ‘gun trafficking,’ so the ATF ends trying to enforce laws that don’t actually exist. Antonin Scalia got it right in the Abramski decision when he noted the extremely thin line which exists between a bone-fide straw sale, as opposed to the guy who buys a gun, walks away from the gun shop and decides to resell it to someone else before he gets into his car. If the ATF is ever going to become an effective agency for dealing with gun crimes, whether it ends up under the FBI or anywhere else, then the statutory vacuum in which it now operates has to be eliminated or filled in.

 

A New Book Says That Gun Control In America Is Just As American As Guns

May 19, 2024

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There’s a reporter for the Washington Star named Emily Miller who tried last year to get a gun license in Washington, D.C., and then wrote a book about her experience which was splashed over every right-wing blog and media outlet imaginable. She became, no slight intended, the darling of the pro-gun movement. Around the same time a professor at SUNY-Cortland applied for a gun license in upstate New York following the passage of Andy’s SAFE Act, and he also wrote about his experience in a chapter of a new book, and nobody noticed the chapter or the book at all.

But I got news for you. In terms of advancing and/or illuminating the current argument about guns, the book written by Miller is a dud. It’s nothing more than an over-hyped, stupidly obvious attempt to promote the gun industry’s obsession with concealed-carry licensing, with the usual anti-Obama, anti-liberal asides thrown in as well. About what you would expect from the Washington Times. On the other hand, Robert Spitzer’s book, Guns Across America, is not only an important addition to the gun debate, but contains many small gems and nuggets of information that cannot be found elsewhere.

The basic thesis of the book is that the attempt to justify the current movement towards more relaxed gun laws, supposedly based on long-standing traditions of gun ownership recognized well prior to the 2nd Amendment, is actually an exercise in standing history on its head. According to Spitzer, who presents meticulously-researched documentation to back up his argument, if there’s anything exceptional about America and its guns, it can be found in the degree to which the ownership and use of firearms was the subject of numerous laws and regulations from the earliest times. Moreover, the notion that keeping a gun in the home for personal defense, had little, if any basis either in practice or laws, notwithstanding the effort by Antonin Scalia to legitimize this so-called ‘tradition’ in the majority opinion written for the landmark Heller decision in 2008.

How far back on the North American Continent did gun control go? In fact, the first gun-control ordinance appeared in 1619, when the very first General Assembly met at Jamestown, twelve years after the colony was established, deliberated for five days and produced a series of statutes including one that punished by death anyone who supplied the Indians with a gun. Virtually every colony passed some kind of ordinance regulating guns during the colonial period, including five colonies that severely restricted or outlawed carrying of weapons on the person. If keeping a gun at home for self defense, particularly a handgun is, according to Justice Scalia, an American ‘tradition,’ then the legal precedents that should serve to justify that tradition simply aren’t there.

Spitzer is at pains to create a balanced picture of the issues surrounding the gun debate, and in many instances describes how the gun-control community has often fostered as many mistaken notions about gun use for which the pro-gun movement is often blamed. But one place where he digs up some really choice nuggets is the discussion about the assault weapons ban. He notes there is nothing intrinsically unsafe about AR or AK-style weapons, even though they appear to be frequently used in mass shootings and attempts to kill police. On the other hand, he also references gun industry advertisements which clearly illustrate the degree to which it was the industry, not the anti-gun liberals, who first began promoting the nomenclature of ‘assault weapons’ in order to spur sales of guns.

Spitzer ultimately argues that, in fact, there are two traditions in America involving guns; a tradition of ownership and also a tradition of regulating guns. He doesn’t see any contradiction between these two traditions because even the New York SAFE law didn’t prevent him from owning a gun. In sum, Guns Across America is a really good book and you should read I when you get a chance.

The NRA Better Get It’s Act Together About Gun Safety Or It’s Act Might Close Out Of Town.

May 18, 2024

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Over the past couple of weeks, I have documented the fact that the discussion about gun safety is no longer owned by the NRA and, for the first time, appears to be involving organizations and viewpoints that one could hardly call pro-gun. After all, when groups like the Brady Campaign and Everytown start talking about gun safety, it’s pretty hard to imagine that they share much in common with groups like the NRA. And now we also have a major gun-safety initiative being rolled out by the Ad Council and the National Crime Prevention Council, again hardly folks whose raison d’etre has anything to do with promoting the ownership of guns.

I suspect that the folks sitting down at the NRA headquarters in Fairfax, VA aren’t crazy about the appearance of these organizations onto the gun-safety playing field because until now, they’ve had the safety discussion all to themselves. After all, the NRA was founded in 1871as a firearms training organization by a former Army commander, George Wingate, who lamented the fact that so many of the Union troops who fought in the Civil War came to fight with little or no shooting experience at all. So the NRA comes by its commitment to gun safety honestly, and millions of young men and women have profited from NRA training courses over the last nearly 150 years.

safety2 The problem with the NRA approach to gun safety, however, is that it reflects a mind-set about guns and shooting that is now completely out of date. I joined the NRA in 1955 when I was eleven years old because I wanted to shoot real guns instead of my plastic toys and the NRA sponsored a shooting club that met each week in a shooting range located in the basement of my brother’s junior high. Every Friday we were allowed to take one of the surplus 22-caliber training rifles home to clean it over the weekend, so I walked from the school to my house with the gun wrapped up in a cloth sack and tucked under my arm. Was I living in Topeka, Kansas, or Abilene, Texas, or Fort Pierre, South Dakota? I was actually born, raised and residing in the middle of Washington, D.C. The rifle range was in McFarland Junior High School on Crittenden Street, named after a former Attorney General, and we lived on Hamilton Street, I don’t have to tell you after whom that street was named. I went home with my little rifle by going up Georgia Avenue or 14th Street and it never occurred to me that walking home this way created any issue at all.

In order to join and shoot in the NRA club, I had to learn some basic gun safety rules. And while I don’t remember what the rules actually said, I can tell you that the current safety rules on the NRA website were probably written before I ever shot a gun. According to the NRA, the best way to be safe with a gun is to always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction, always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot, and always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use. If you want, the NRA will happily send you these rules printed out on a nice piece of cardboard which you can distribute to all your shooting friends.

There’s only one little problem with these safety rules – they were developed long before the NRA started promoting the idea of carrying handguns around for self-defense. And unless the NRA comes up with a new set of safety rules that reflect the new CCW gospel, the NRA will not only find itself sharing the playing field when it comes to gun safety, but being elbowed off to one side. After all, if you’re going to carry a gun for self-defense, how could you imagine only loading it when you’re ready to shoot? That might work at a shooting range, but it’s hardly a prescription for safely carrying a gun in the street.

When The Ad Council Starts Talking About Gun Safety, Everybody Listens.

May 16, 2024

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I listen to AM Talk Radio because the programs help me get to sleep. But the other night as I was dozing off to the local shock jock Rush wannabe, I was jolted awake by a 30-second public service announcement about gun safety presented by the Ad Council. Now when the Ad Council runs a PSA on gun safety, you know that gun safety has become a mainstream issue. After all, we’re not talking about just another group that says nice things about worthwhile projects. We’re talking about the outfit which started off selling War Bonds in 1941, then created Smokey the Bear, the March of Dimes, McGruff the Crime Dog and Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No among hundreds of other public service campaigns. Wow!

The gun-safety messages, which are hitting television and radio stations around the country (I heard the radio spot on a local Fox-affiliate station)were funded by a million-dollar grant from the Department of Justice that was awarded in 2013. The radio script has a no-nonsense voice stating that guns have to be kept away from “curious children, troubled teens, thieves, or anyone else who might misuse your gun.” The television ads are just as direct, and there are also graphics and digital ads, along with additional information on safe storage provided by the National Crime Prevention Council, another blue-ribbon advocacy group that partnered with the Ad Council to create and sponsor this campaign.

A couple of years ago the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s lobbying group which runs the SHOT show, put together a little gun-safety video featuring the National Crime Prevention Council’s mascot, McGruff the Crime Dog, which could be sent out to school and community organizations, along with a Teacher’s Guide and a pledge for students to sign. The pledge, of course, was the NRA’s Eddie Eagle stop – don’t touch – find an adult mantra, which has been floating around since God knows when and is still considered the gun-safety gospel by an industry which until now had the safety playing-field all to itself.

What I like about the Ad Council’s message, like the message being delivered by Melissa Joan Hart for Everytown, is not just the no-nonsense tone of the narration, but the degree to which both campaigns cut through the usual bromides about gun safety to really tell it like it is, specifically mentioning groups that are particularly vulnerable to unsafe guns, like young children and depressed teens. And even more important, the Ad Council message is very simple: an unlocked gun is an unsafe gun. Period. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Contrast this PSA with the latest effort by the NSSF to pretend that gun safety is of paramount concern. It’s a video that runs more than 5 minutes featuring a competitive shooter, Julie Golob, who goes on and on about the “importance” of talking to your kids about guns. After several lengthy sermons about the difference between communicating with young children and teens, Julie actually mentions in 5 whole seconds that adults should set an example through “safe handling and proper storage” of their guns. Nowhere is the word ‘lock’ mentioned, nowhere is anyone identified as being particularly vulnerable if guns are in the home. I’m not casting aspersions at Ms. Golob for narrating a video so devoid of any reality about gun safety at all; it’s not her fault that she’s working for an organization for whom safety is secondary to selling guns.

All of a sudden the NRA and the NSSF are no longer controlling the game when it comes to discussions about gun safety; in fact they may find themselves on the sidelines while the Ad Council and other non-gun owning groups redefine how the game is played. The gun industry’s going to have a problem trying to get everyone to walk around with a gun while trying at the same time to figure out how to keep the guns locked up or locked away. Given the power, reach and authority of the Ad Council, this could be an interesting state of affairs.

 

Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership Are Actually Totally Irresponsible.

May 15, 2024

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Sooner or later I knew that Tim Wheeler, who runs a blog called Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, would come out and say something that reveals how far away he is from thinking like a serious physician. Or thinking like any kind of physician, for that matter. Since he started his so-called organization, which is basically just a blog, he has spent his time promoting one stupid and/or senseless notion for the gun industry after another stupid and/or senseless notion. From denying that physicians should question patients about guns, to advocating that physicians should hand out gun safety information that has never been reviewed by the medical academies, Wheeler pushes out opinions that pander to the lowest common mental denominator and misrepresent the role of doctors in dealing with health issues, guns or no guns.

Wheeler has now trained his sights on a situation in New Jersey where the legislature is thinking of amending a ‘smart gun’ law that was passed in 2002 but has never been implemented because no manufacturer could deliver a smart-gun product that both worked and was made available for retail sale. A brief attempt was made to sell one of these models in California, but the gun shop in question quickly removed the produce from its shelves when local gun nuts threatened a boycott of the store or worse.

hippo Wheeler refers to smart-gun technology as a “sweeping infringement” of the 2nd Amendment, a judgement obviously based on his expertise on the area of Constitutional law. If he would bother to actually read the 2008 Heller decision, he might notice that Scalia explicitly states that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on … laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” [p. 54] Notice the phrase, ‘commercial sale of arms,’ which even a jerk like Wheeler must know means that the government can decide what types of guns can and cannot be sold.

Smart guns were first hyped during the Clinton administration when the government awarded R&D grants to various inventors and entrepreneurs to develop new gun-safety technologies. You can get a very complete overview of the history and development of smart-gun products by reading a report published by the Department of Justice in 2013. The report brought together representatives of federal agencies and test labs, law enforcement bodies, technology institutes, public health researchers, and was discussed with staff from Smith & Wesson, Colt, FN and Ruger, among others.

If Wheeler read the report, perhaps he would have noticed right up front that the primary group of users for whom such technology is being developed is “people responsible for public safety (i.e., law enforcement personnel.)” [P. 8] I think that Wheeler only blogs about issues, like Heller, for which he hasn’t read the relevant texts, but why should a physician depend on anything other than his own opinions, correct?

Wheeler not only believes that smart-gun technology represents an ‘infringement’ on the 2nd Amendment, but worse, is a solution in search of a non-existent problem; i.e., accidental deaths of children from firearm misuse. He refers to these deaths as “miniscule,” claiming a “few dozen” lives each year. In fact, more than 75 children under the age of 18 died from accidental shootings in 2013, and more than 560 were treated for gunshot wounds.

But worse than understating the numbers is what this says about Wheler’s approach to medicine. Let me break the news to him gently: physicians don’t define a medical problem by how many patients present a particular symptom during an exam. The role of the physician, according to the Hippocratic Oath, is to reduce harm. And this applies to every single patient, whether the harm comes from something which is nearly universal, or is something that a physician might see only once.

Wheeler’s attempt to make readers believe that the severity of a problem is in any way based on its frequency is a conscious misstatement of the role of the physician and shows him to be the crackpot and gun industry mouthpiece that he really is.

Don’t Look Now, But Obama Ain’t The Only One Trying To Take Away Our Guns.

May 14, 2024

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There’s a gun nut in Alabama named Mike Rogers who represents the 3rd Congressional District, an area which includes the town of Anniston. And every gun nut like me knows Anniston because it’s the headquarters of the Civilian Marksmanship Program, aka the CMP. One of the easiest ways to get certified as a gun nut is to buy a rifle from the CMP. I bought two of the surplus M-1 Garands , one an original made at Springfield, the second a 1950’s makeover turned out by Harrington & Richardson located right up the road in Spencer, MA.

Congressman Rogers, like most Republicans, has no trouble pushing government spending if the money is somehow connected to the military and the result is to create civilian jobs. So he’s attached an amendment to the 2016 military spending bill which changes the law covering the CMP. If the amendment stays in the bill, from now on civilians will not only be able to purchase rifles, but all “firearms” that the Army considers to be surplus and thus available for anyone to buy. And it further turns out that the Army happens to be sitting on 100,000 old Colt 45 pistols that were first brought into service in 1911 and then replaced by the Beretta 9mm beginning in 1981.

There are probably more pistols built on the Colt 1911 frame than any other handgun ever made. Commercial models newly manufactured by various companies sell quite well; hundreds of thousands manufactured overseas have been imported back into the States. I have probably owned at least a dozen Colt 1911s since I bought my first commercial model in 1976, but the ones that were made for the military and are stamped “United States Property” are few and far between. As opposed to the M-1 Garand and Carbine, of which the Army has probably sold off several million guns, the pistol has never been made available to the civilian market, although on occasion one pops up here or there.

The problem that gun nut Rogers has encountered, however, is that the Army doesn’t appear willing to go along with his scheme. Last week the military sent a memorandum to Congress citing concerns about public safety, accountability and possible violations of federal gun laws that needed “additional study” before the CMP’s charter could be revised. In brief, the Army feels that these handguns, as opposed to CMP rifles, would be released to the public through unverified, online sales, therefore could not be traced by the ATF, and would therefore be a violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968. And don’t think that the Army made this up on its own because the document cites as its source for this information none other than the DOJ.

This document is a quintessential example of the blind leading the dumb, or maybe the other way around. The CMP ships all its guns from and to federally-licensed dealers; purchasers must fill out a NICS background check form and agree that NICS must approve the transaction before the gun is released. Judging by my experience when I bought my Garands, the CMP creates a larger paper trail for each transaction than anything done in the local shop. Incidentally, although the Army cites DOJ as the source for this misinformation, the DOJ no doubt was given this nonsense by those regulatory geniuses at the ATF.

Given the stink that was made over the ATF’s attempt to ban some 223 ammo, you would think that the gun lobby would be yelling and screaming about what is a bone fide violation of 2nd-Amendment rights. But while some of the pro-gun blogs are blazing away, so far the NRA has uttered nary a peep. And I’ll bet they continue to keep their mouths shut, because for all their talk about being the first line of ‘defense’ for gun owners’ rights, these stalwart defenders of the Constitution aren’t about to say jack when it’s the Army and not Obama who wants to keep us from owning guns.

 

 

 

Want To Bet Against Background Checks? You Might Lose.

May 13, 2024

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Score another win for the gun-sense team. On Monday the Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, signed into law a bill that basically requires background checks for all gun transfers in the state. The measure is similar to the I-594 initiative that now requires universal background checks in neighboring Washington State. So now, with a few exceptions, anyone living on the West Coast between Canada and Mexico must undergo the NICS background check process in order to buy, sell, or transfer a gun.

I wouldn’t necessarily take the short odds against background checks becoming law of the land, if only because although we usually think our country was settled east to west, in fact much of our culture has moved west to east. California was already settled by Spanish conquistadores and their descendants while Virginia, Massachusetts and the other colonies were still largely woods, and much of our modern culture first appeared on the West Coast in the form of movies and tv. I first heard of ‘health food’ when I went from New York to teach at Berkeley in 1976. And let’s not forget where Starbucks got started, ditto Ronald Reagan and the ‘modern conservative movement’ along with half-and-half.

nics I have no issue with the notion that background checks keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’ I also don’t believe the nonsense thrown around by so-called 2nd-Amendment ‘absolutists’ that background checks are a violation of their constitutional rights. But we shouldn’t just assume that because the FBI says that slightly more than 1 million NICS transactions have been denied since the system became operational in 1998 that this somehow translates into one million guns being kept away from the ‘wrong hands,’ which means kept away from people who will use those guns to commit violence and crimes.

We really don’t know why violent crime rates, particularly gun crime rates, have dropped by 50% over the last twenty years. And because we don’t know why this has occurred, it’s not clear that any of the solutions, including background checks, will result in gun violence dropping any more. I’m not suggesting that we should stop strengthening gun regulations just because, to parrot the NRA, criminals don’t obey laws. If we used criminal response to laws as a criteria for judging the effectiveness of our legal codes, we would never pass a single statute at all. What I am suggesting is that if we continue to define gun violence as a preventable public health issue, which is how we have been defining it since 1981, we should set realistic goals for reductions in gun violence and use these goals to judge the effectiveness of the policies and strategies that are espoused.

In fact, the CDC has adopted what they believe to be realistic goals for reductions in gun violence over the next five years. These goals call for a 10% reduction by 2020 in gun homicides, non-fatal shootings and children bringing guns into schools. I think the time has come for activists who are working to end gun violence to sit down, en masse, and figure out whether the CDC numbers are realistic, or need to be adjusted, or need to be replaced by a different set of criteria and a different set of goals. And the gun industry should be invited to participate in this discussion as well.

The gun industry used to count on the fact that the upsurge in concern about gun violence which followed every high-profile shooting would quickly run its course. Frankly, I thought the groundswell provoked by Sandy Hook would be over by the time the first anniversary of the tragedy rolled around. But recent events in Washington State and Oregon have proven me wrong. And when it comes to public health policies, things have a way of taking on a momentum and a life of their own. As I said early on, I wouldn’t take the short odds against more gun regulations down the line.

 

 

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