Do You Really Think The NRA Supports The 2nd Amendment To Keep Us Free? Think Again.

December 28, 2024

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One of the reasons often advanced to explain the success of the NRA in promoting pro-gun attitudes and laws is something known as the “intensity gap.” According to this argument, the NRA wins because their supporters are more committed, more dedicated and more fiercely loyal to the organization and its goals, as opposed to the GVP movement whose supporters are only driven to express their support for more gun control after a mass shooting or other high-profile violence involving guns.

The latest iteration of this argument is the handiwork of Professor Gary Gutting, whose op-ed appeared today in The New York Times. Gutting, who teaches philosophy at Notre Dame, claims that the GVP movement should borrow the energies and viewpoints of recent anti-racist efforts like Black Lives Matter who have successfully enlisted black and white support by pointing out the basically racist nature of police (and civilian) shootings of inner-city blacks. He further argues that white antipathy towards racism would counteract the intensity that gun owners exhibit whenever they feel that the 2nd Amendment is being attacked, an intensity based on America’s fear of ‘tyranny’ which explains the strong support for 2-A rights.

Gutting may or may not be correct in asserting that Black Lives Matter has tapped into a concern held by white liberals about violence and racism directed at blacks, but his attempt to build a case for the NRA’s anti-tyranny argument through support of the 2nd Amendment is just dead wrong. The NRA doesn’t promote itself as an anti-tyranny organization pari passu, it promotes the anti-government position only when the government is in the hands of what Fox News calls ‘the Left.’ Ever hear Dana Loesch, Sarah Palin, Wayne LaPierre or any other pro-gun noisemaker talk about the gun-control law that Governor Ronald Reagan signed that mandated, among other things, a fifteen-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns in the Golden State?

Know which members of Congress voted against GCA68? Virtually the same southern federal office-holders who voted against GCA68 also voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And they voted the same way for the same reason: both were instances in which Northern liberals passed laws to teach Southern whites how to behave. If anyone believes that the current opposition to gun control is anything other than a reprise of the conservative-liberal battle over states’ rights as it originally played out during the struggle over civil rights, think again. The NRA can tell you that gun control today leads to gun confiscation tomorrow, but from 1939 (Miller v. United States) until 2008 (District of Columbia v. Heller) we had plenty of liberals running the federal government and passing gun-control laws. Meanwhile, not a single gun was ever confiscated from a law-abiding gun owner. Not once.

2A I’m also confused, frankly, by Gutting’s pronouncement that the GVP movement lacks the intensity that’s found among followers of the NRA. That’s a rather shop warn view of things lately owing largely to a bunch of street-wise, energetic and savvy woman both in leadership and grass-roots positions who have levelled the advocacy playing field to a degree not previously seen. If there’s an intensity gap about gun violence nowadays, I perceive it more as a gender gap within the GVP movement itself. But as in so many other things, the men (like myself) tend to sit back, watch the sports on a widescreen, pop a few tops and let the women do the work.

What moved America on civil rights were pictures of blacks being hosed, beaten or worse when they sat at segregated lunch counters, enrolled in all-white schools or stood fast against Sheriff Connor at the Selma Bridge. What has moved Americans to rally against gun violence is the carnage at San Bernardino, Umpqua and Sandy Hook. Racism and gun violence are cut from the same cloth. There’s no reason why we need to borrow the outrage against one to be outraged at the other.

 

In The GVP-NRA Contest, GVP Will Win.

December 26, 2024

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I have been involved in the gun business since 1965, which is longer than most of the people have been alive who follow me here and on Huffington Post. And that is because in 1965 I went down to North Carolina to work for my great-Uncle Ben who owned something called the Imperial Metal Products Co., where he manufactured a little 22-caliber revolver called the IMP. The gun held five rounds but the effective capacity was far less, because by the third shot either the 2-inch barrel would fall off or the cylinder would crack in half. This Saturday Night Special sold for about thirty bucks in pawn shops all over the South, and when GCA68 ended Ben’s life as a gun maker he became the Smith & Wesson law enforcement distributor for North Carolina and sold plenty of better-made revolvers to the cops.

gun free So there’s very little about guns and the gun business that I don’t know, and in that regard when I say that the GVP movement is soon going to eclipse the NRA, it’s not a feeling based just on hope or whimsy, it reflects what I have seen and heard over the past fifty years. The truth is that when it comes to guns as an issue of public safety, until the last couple of years the NRA had the playing field all to itself. Every once in a great while there would be a little public dust-up, like after good ol’ Charlie Whitman climbed the Texas Tower in 1966 and killed or wounded more than 45 people in a 90-minute spree. Or again in 1969 when the cops and the Black Panthers in Los Angeles exchanged several thousand rounds of gunfire from which, unbelievably, no one was killed. But the deliberations leading up to GCA68 hardly, if ever made front-page news, and even the gun bills passed by Clinton in 1994 were hardly front-page stories except perhaps on the day of the votes.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the NRA is a paper tiger that will roll over and play dead every time a new GVP initiative comes down the line. To the contrary, since the mid-90’s the gun gang has scored some notable victories, in particular a rewriting of CCW laws in nearly every state, a law gagging doctors in Florida and three other states, and a public mood shift towards more support for 2nd Amendment rights. And of course let’s not forget the biggest victory of all, namely the 2008 Heller decision by gun-nut Scalia which says that the 2nd Amendment protects private ownership of guns once and for all.

Notwithstanding the above, I still believe that the GVP’s time has come. First, anyone who pretends that GVP is not a strong, widespread and growing grassroots movement is either a pro-gun sycophantic noisemaker paid to say otherwise, or is blind, deaf and dumb. And let’s not forget that much of the GVP organizational activity has only been spurred since the massacre at Sandy Hook. Second, for the first time in all time we have a national Presidential candidate who is not only calling for a national GVP movement, but promises to lead it if she is elected in 2016. And let’s not forget the remarkable GVP ads that ran yesterday during NBA games. Nothing the NRA will ever push out on its silly video channel will ever achieve even a fraction of the audience that heard Carmelo Anthony or Chris Paul.

Last week the NRA put out a statement reminding its members that Obama, Hillary, The New York Times and every other liberal politician and publication is basically anti-gun. They have been running this same message for the last twenty years. But often there hasn’t been much of a response from the other side. For the first time in my 50 years of watching the gun industry, the GVP message is loud, continuous and clear. And it’s going to get louder, of that I’m sure.

 

Dana Loesch Opens Her Mouth About Guns And Gets It Wrong Again.

November 19, 2024

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When the NRA has to join forces with the paranoid fantasists who shoot their mouths off on The Blaze, you know that a decision has been made by the folks in Fairfax to abandon even a shred of reality-based discussion in order to hold onto their ever-dwindling base. And like it or not, the number of Americans who own guns keeps dropping, which means that in order to sell more guns, a way has to be found to convince current gun owners to buy more, and more, and more. And the game plan that has always worked in this regard is to sell the idea that Armageddon in the form of gun confiscation is right around the corner or lurking down the block.

The most successful use of this strategy occurred over the last seven years due to the fact that our President made no bones about the fact that he was, generally speaking, anti-gun. So it was easy for the gun industry to remind its supporters that Obama was the tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a conclusion that spoke for itself. Of course the problem now is that he can’t run again; but until January 20, 2025 we can remind the gun folks that he’s still capable of doing terrible things.

And who better to push the most conspiratorial argument from this point of view than Dana Loesch, who got going as a right-wing noisemaker promoting her own, nutty view of the world on The Blaze, but has now been hired by the NRA. And her inaugural video, which floated onto YouTube yesterday, is a combination of conspiracy, fear-mongering and downright falsehoods that could put even the most ardent conspiracy theorists (I’m thinking of Jade Helm, for example) to shame.

The only statement in Dana’s entire spiel that even remotely aligns with the truth is when she says early on that Obama is considering using Executive Orders to expand government regulation over guns. In fact, the Kenyan has made it clear that he is looking at options to close some loopholes which, under current gun laws, let individuals transfer large quantities of guns without undergoing NICS-background checks. And what this would amount to is making a clear distinction between the gun owner who buys, sells or transfers guns from time to time because he’s a hobbyist and he just enjoys fooling around with guns, as opposed to the guy who brings 50 ‘personally-owned’ handguns into a gun show, sells these guns and then restocks his inventory to sell more guns for profit at the next show. I’m not saying that a gun transferred without a NICS-background check is necessarily going to wind up in the ‘wrong hands.’ But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that someone who can’t pass a background check today still won’tencounter any great difficulty if he wants to get his hands on a gun.

So here’s how Dana puts it: “You see, the President could use his pen to require that even the simplest transfer of a firearm between family members, like if my husband handed a rifle to his oldest son, be treated in accordance with FFL requirements.” She then goes on to paint a frightening picture of the ATF coming into the home of every gun owner, kind of a throwback to Wayne-o’s calling the ATF ‘jack-booted thugs,’ in a fundraising letter sent to the membership in 1995.

This extraordinary mangling of gun law, you should know, comes out of the mouth of someone who claims to have written a book about guns and Constitutional law. But the fact is that the entire FFL system, as defined by GCA68, has nothing to do with personal transfers at all. Dana obviously doesn’t know the difference between personal transfers on the one hand and business transactions on the other. But why should she care? Do you honestly believe that anyone who takes her rubbish seriously is interested in an evidence-based discussion about guns?

Here’s A New Approach To Gun Violence: Get Rid Of The Second Amendment.

November 17, 2024

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If you want to prove you’re a real gun nut, the way to do it is to refer to yourself as a “Second Amendment absolutist.” Now in fact that phrase has no real meaning at all, at least not in any legal sense, but it’s a way of identifying with the group that went nuts at the 2000 NRA meeting when the words ‘not from my cold, dead hands’ were intoned by then-NRA President Charlton Heston, whose movie career was just about over except for a bit part in Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore tried, unsuccessfully, to pester him to death.

As far as I can figure out, to be a Second Amendment absolutist means that government cannot pass any law that would keep American citizens from getting their hands on guns. Which means bye-bye background checks, bye-bye permit-to-purchase requirements, bye-bye waiting periods and, most of all, bye-bye to any restrictions on walking around with a gun. It also goes without saying that there wouldn’t be any attempts to restrict the types of guns. Well, maybe we’d let the government continue to regulate full-auto guns, if only because these items fall into the category of military, rather than civilian small arms. Otherwise, if you can pull the trigger and the gun goes bang only once, you can own and carry anything that you want.

heston What the gun nuts really want is a legal system which, when it comes to small arms, really doesn’t operate at all. Which is why I find a new effort to abolish the 2nd Amendment a very interesting response to the absolutist point of view. Because while the absolutists want the amendment ignored, the abolitionists want it to disappear which, to all intents and purposes, amounts to the same thing. The difference, of course, and the difference is crucial, is that the absolutists want limitless Constitutional protection for their gun-nuttery; the abolitionists know that getting rid of the 2nd Amendment will go a long way towards getting rid of the guns.

Ironically, this was somewhat the state of affairs after the SCOTUS handed down its previous 2nd Amendment decision known as United States vs. Miller in 1939. In this case, which involved transporting a sawed-off shotgun across state lines, the Court held exactly the opposite from the way it ruled in 2008, namely, that the Constitution did not protect the private ownership of guns. But interestingly, for at least fifty years following Miller, there was little, if any legislative activity involving gun ownership, and even the landmark GCA68 law which got the Feds into gun regulation big-time, didn’t really touch on Constitutional issues at all. It wasn’t until the Clinton Administration passed two gun laws (Brady and Assault Weapons) in 1994 that arguments over the 2nd Amendment began to heat up, leading eventually to the 2008 decision – a history that is covered thoroughly by Adam Winkler in his well-written book.

The reason I am so taken with this new effort to abolish the 2nd Amendment is that the gun-control community has always been somewhat ambivalent about the statute and, if anything, has found it necessary to defend the amendment from a liberal point of view. In fact, the debate that led up to the 2008 decision was inaugurated by a pro-2nd Amendment article written by a liberal legal scholar, Sandy Levinson. His 1989 article, “The Embarrassing Second Amendment,” called upon liberal legal circles to support the amendment because, like free speech supporters who argued in favor of the Klan, the Constitution protected the bad along with the good.

Ever since Levinson, liberals have fallen over themselves to proclaim their devotion to the 2nd Amendment while, at the same time, invariably calling for more regulation of guns. But I don’t see how the constitutionality of gun ownership has anything to do with the 100,000 people injured and killed each year with guns. Sorry, but the kids and teachers in Sandy Hook would be alive today if Adam Lanza had to leave his gun ‘rights’ at the front door.

The Center For American Progress Has Some Good Ideas To Help Obama Define Who’s Really Dealing In Guns.

October 16, 2024

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This week the Center for American Progress issued a report recommending changes in the definition of being engaged in the business of selling guns. Clarifying what constitutes dealing in firearms would bring more gun transactions under the purview of the ATF and thus create more barriers to guns moving from one person to another without a NICS-background check. The CAP report is a response to President Obama’s announcement after Roseburg that he might invoke executive authority to redefine how many gun transactions would demonstrate an ongoing business activity, as opposed to simply owning or collecting guns.

cap logo Gun dealers have been regulated by the Federal Government since 1938 when a law was passed that required dealers to purchase a Treasury license for one dollar and follow some simple rules whenever they transferred a gun, namely, verifying that the individual to whom they delivered the gun lived in the same state where the dealer was located.

The 1938 law was completely revamped and the scope of government gun regulation widened to an unprecedented degree by the Gun Control Act of 1968. Now dealers were not only required to verify the age and address of the customer, but also to verify that the prospective gun owner was not a member of various prohibited categories; i.e., felon, drug addict, fugitive, mental defective, and so forth. A gun dealer had no way of checking the veracity of such information, but at least there was a document on file for every over-the-counter sale.

Verifying whether an individual was telling the truth about his fitness to own a gun was what lay behind the Brady Bill passed in 1994. In lieu of a national waiting-period on all gun purchases was a provision that required every federally-licensed dealer to contact the FBI who then verified that the customer was telling the truth. But in order to access the FBI examiners, you had to be a federally-licensed dealer. No federal dealer’s license, no contact with NICS. Which is where the whole notion of ‘loopholes’ in the gun-licensing system came from; which is what Obama would like to close. And the easiest way to close the loophole, or at least make it smaller, is to define the word ‘dealer’ in a way that requires more people to become FFL-holders if they want to buy or sell guns.

The CAP report is a judicious and careful attempt to set out some criteria that could be used to determine who is really engaged in the business of selling guns. It does not recommend any specific amounts of guns that might be transferred nor how much money someone needs to earn over any given period of time. Rather, it looks at how various states define commercial enterprises and whether such definitions would be a useful guide to creating a more realistic way to establish that someone is going beyond just collecting or owning guns.

What the report doesn’t mention is that if the FFL imposes some sort of uniformity over dealers at the federal level, when we look at how states license gun dealers, there’s no uniformity at all. Every state collects sales taxes, every state imposes and enforces other business regulations, but when it comes to guns, most states simply place the entire regulatory burden on the Feds and the ATF. In order to receive an FFL, the prospective dealer must send a copy of the license application to the local cops, but if the particular locality doesn’t have any local laws covering gun dealers, the local gendarmerie could care less.

I hope the CAP report will be taken seriously by the President before he issues an Executive Order that more clearly defines what it means to engage in the commerce of guns. I also hope he won’t publish an Executive Order that places more unfulfilled regulatory responsibilities on the ATF and provokes the usual ‘I told you so’ from the pro-gun gang. If it were up to that bunch, there would be no gun regulations at all.

The Gun Guys Win An Important Court Case - But I’m Not Sure Anyone Loses.

February 12, 2024

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In what could turn out to be the most important legal decision since the SCOTUS affirmed private gun ownership as a Constitutional right in 2008, a Federal District Judge in Texas, Reed O’Connor, has just issued a ruling which basically invalidates, actually it really demolishes the entire Federal gun regulatory infrastructure that has been growing and growing since the feds got into the business of regulating gun ownership back in 1938. The 1938 law not only set licensing standards for gun dealers, but also required that dealers and gun customers reside in the same state. Congress re-visited the law in 1968 and at that time not only defined certain groups of ‘prohibited persons’ who could not purchase guns, but ultimately granted ATF the authority to manage the whole regulatory system from end to end.

The ban on requiring gun purchasers to only patronize dealers in their home state was partially lifted in 1986 with a further revision of the law that allowed individuals to purchase long guns in states other than where they lived, but the limitation on in-state handgun purchases remained in effect until Judge O’Connor found that it not only violated the 2nd Amendment’s right to bear arms, but was also an unreasonable limitation on interstate commerce and trade.

atf What O’Connor pointed to in his decision to allow interstate purchase of handguns was the implementation of the Brady bill, which requires all gun dealers to perform a background check (NICS) at the point of sale before transferring a gun. And since any dealer, no matter where he’s located, can perform such a NICS check, what rationale could still exist for forcing a buyer to only do business with a dealer in his own state? And while the whole purpose of the in-state purchase requirement was to make it more difficult for the ‘bad guys’ to get their hands on a gun such as by crossing the Potomac River to go from gun-nasty District of Columbia to gun-friendly Virginia, the whole regulatory system, as O’Connor pointed out, regulates purchases by the ‘good guys,’ who aren’t buying guns for the wrong reasons anyway.

Unfortunately for gun nuts like myself and the two gun buyers who brought this suit in Federal court, I have a strong feeling that Judge O’Connor’s decision will be overturned either at the Circuit level or if the case goes up to the Supreme Court. Because if this ruling were allowed to stand, it would throw open the whole issue of whether the feds should be regulating gun ownership at all. And while folks who believe that regulating guns is an essential requisite for the ongoing effort to reduce gun violence, I can tell you that, opinion polls notwithstanding, there’s not a single gun guy out there who would be at all upset if he never had to fill out another ATF form 4473 (which is how the background check is performed.)

The other problem with O’Connor’s ruling is that some of the reasons proferred for his decision seem to be quite a reach. He criticized the government, for example, for using data from the 1968 GCA to support the idea that the current ban on interstate handgun sales should be allowed to stand, but he has to know that more recent data shows exactly the same thing. And while this is the first court test on government gun regulation in which the decision was based on strict, rather than intermediate scrutiny (meaning that the law in question has to respond exactly to whatever issue is being addressed), O’Connor’s argument will probably not displace the government’s ability to show a “compelling interest” in the regulation of guns.

This decision does not throw into question recent efforts to promote comprehensive background checks at the state, rather than the federal level. If anything, it forces us to ask whether a national regulatory system outdated by advances in technology serves any useful purpose at all. That’s a conversation we should always be willing to hold – and not just when it concerns guns.

Gun trafficking

Kindle edition is here.

Why Wait To Ask Congress For Universal Background Checks?

January 4, 2025

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Shannon Watts just gave a detailed and articulate response to the Pew poll which shows that a slim majority of Americans now believe that “gun rights” are more important that “gun control.” And as Shannon points out, the either-or question makes it really impossible for any poll respondent to address the fact that supporting the 2nd Amendment doesn’t ipso facto mean that someone also can’t support common-sense measures to curb gun violence, like expanded background checks.

At this point the strategy of Shannon and other gun-sense advocates appears to focus on policies enacted at the state level (e.g., expanding background checks) combined with localized, grass-roots efforts to engage corporations like Target and Starbucks to subscribe to gun-free zones. Given the 2013 defeat of Manchin-Toomey, energies at the federal level appear to be more distant and long-term, with the goal towards electing members of Congress who might eventually vote the other way. On the other hand, I happen to think that Manchin-Toomey was not quite the NRA bone-crusher that it was described to be. If anything, I was surprised at the closeness of the Senate vote and I’m not sure that gun control at the federal level is as dead as many on both sides would like to believe.

Shannon Watts

Shannon Watts

The fact is that had background checks been extended to cover all private transactions, and if, as Shannon says, private transactions account for 40% of all movement of guns, then what Manchin-Toomey represented was an enormous expansion of government control over what gun owners can and cannot do with their guns. This would have been the fourth time that the federal government, beginning in 1938, regulated the ownership and transfer of civilian guns, but in all three prior instances, the regulation was aimed at the behavior of federally-licensed dealers and said nothing about the behavior of gun owners themselves.

The 1938 law created the federal gun license and mandated that dealers could only sell guns to residents of their own state. The original federal firearms license, or FFL, cost one buck. The 1968 law, known as GCA68, established certain categories of ‘prohibited persons,’ i.e., felons, mentally ill, drug addicts, fugitives, et.al., but again prohibited federally-licensed dealers, not individual gun owners, from engaging in transactions with such individuals and also prohibited private individuals from buying mail-order guns if they came from another state. Finally, the 1993 Brady Bill updated the process that allowed dealers to determine by contacting the FBI at the point of sale whether the purchaser was telling the truth about not being prohibited from owning a gun.

The bill proposed after Sandy Hook was a horse of a different color altogether. It left government regulation of federal dealers intact but for the first time gave government the right to regulate the behavior of gun owners themselves as to how, when and where those selfsame gun owners could sell or acquire guns. In one fell swoop, the government would go from looking over the dealer’s shoulder while a transaction was being conducted inside the shop, to looking over the shoulder of every gun owner if/when that owner decided to make any change in the number or type of guns that he owned.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not making any kind of argument against the reasonableness of universal background checks. What I am suggesting, however, is that extending background checks to almost all gun transactions is almost a tectonic change in the regulatory authority of the Federal government, and I don’t know any changes of such scope that happen all at once.

The bill that became GCA68 was first introduced in 1963. The Brady Bill spent six years floating around Congress before it became law. Both were signed by Presidents who just happened to come from gun-rich states. I’m not so sure that energetic and effective advocates like Shannon need to forget going directly to Congress until after 2016. After all, like we say in the gun business, it never hurts to show the product, even if this year’s buying season has come and gone.

 

 

 

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