“Common Sense Is Not So Common”: Universal Background Checks A First Step On Gun Violence
For the better part of 20 years, I have lived and worked in Washington, D.C., an urban metropolis once dubbed “the violence capital of America” by the Economist. I was born and raised, however, in Alaska, a largely rural state, where guns are an intricate part of its hunting culture and often necessary for survival.
I have lived and witnessed both sides of the gun control debate with my family and my friends, and I have sought to understand the valid points of each. My family believes that guns are to be used responsibly for hunting, sport, recreation and protection. My friends living in Washington, D.C., and other urban areas fervently believe that banning and restricting the use and flow of guns will reduce gun violence.
This past week, while visiting my family in Alaska, I attended my first gun show. I wasn’t sure what to expect and did see my share of interesting characters: One woman was carrying her AR-15 like it was a Gucci purse, and camo-chic was definitely the preferred attire, along with military bunny boots and Carhart coveralls. But what struck me most was that vendors were not professional dealers with slick advertisements, instead they were everyday citizens simply looking to sell their wares: Colt 45s, Glock revolvers, hunting knives, bear traps and the increasingly popular AR-15. As one vendor told me, “President Obama should be given the ‘gun dealer of the year’ award for increasing the sales of the AR-15.”
At the show, one could sense the ingrained culture surrounding gun ownership from both the vendors and attendees. They were patriotic, law-abiding citizens who want their constitutional rights to be respected and preserved and to protect their family and allow them to hunt the land.
Unfortunately, not everyone in possession of a gun is a law-abiding citizen. Law enforcement is asking for additional tools, such as the ability to have background checks conducted on all sales and to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Today, two out of every five guns sold in the U.S. change hands without a background check. In nine of 10 gun crimes, the gun used was not owned by the original purchaser.
Since the Brady Law took effect, which requires background checks on purchases from a federal licensed dealer, 172 million Americans have been subjected to background checks and 1.3 million criminals and other prohibited purchasers have been stopped from buying guns. In the three of the five states that host the most gun shows, Illinois, Pennsylvania and California, the “gun show loophole” was closed, requiring universal background checks on gun sales by unlicensed and private dealers, proving they can be done efficiently without harm to business.
In January, both Gallup and Fox News polls showed separately, that 91 percent of Americans favored universal background checks on all gun purchases with as many as 77 percent of National Rifle Association members supported the checks.
Ultimately, we must acknowledge the root cause and seek to change our nation’s heart and attitude toward the preciousness of life and not default to having violence solve our problems. My dad recently lamented that, “Until there is a societal attitude about the great value of each individual life, the carnage will continue.”
In the meantime, implementing universal background checks that preserve the rights of law-abiding citizens while denying those who target the innocent to perpetrate evil seems like a balanced, common sense first step.
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2013
“Straw Purchasing”: Senate Gun Trafficking Bill Advances With Only One Republican Vote
Gabrielle Giffords on Wednesday urged senators to be “bold” and “courageous” in acting now on gun violence legislation, specifically universal background checks.
Seven Republicans sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Jeff Flake from Giffords’ home state of Arizona, couldn’t even bring themselves to vote for a federal gun trafficking bill, which would for the first time enhance criminal penalties for straw purchasers and gun traffickers.
On Thursday morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the bipartisan Stop Illegal Trafficking in Firearms Act of 2013, with 10 Democrats and only one Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), voting to bring the bill to a full Senate vote, which will likely take place after Congress returns from April recess.
The seven Republicans who voted against the measure — whose chief sponsor is committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (pictured) and is co-sponsored by Republicans Mark Kirk (IL) and Susan Collins (ME) — are: Orrin Hatch (UT), Jeff Sessions (AL), Lindsey Graham (SC), John Cornyn (TX), Mike Lee (UT), Ted Cruz (TX), and Flake.
ThinkProgress quotes Cornyn as saying “my concern is that this bill is a solution in search of a problem. Straw purchasing for purpose of directing guns to people who cannot legally attain them is already a crime,” in explaining his opposition to the federal gun trafficking law.
Giffords and husband Mark Kelly’s new gun safety advocacy group, Americans for Responsible Solutions, states on its website why the gun trafficking law is important. They say, contrary to Cornyn’s assertion, that “law enforcement can only go after gun traffickers for what are essentially paperwork violations,” and that these offenses generally lead to minor sentences (the law would stiffen penalties for straw purchases to up to 25 years). They also state that “one percent of licensed firearm dealers account for 57 percent of guns recovered in crimes.”
The committee is also set to consider three other gun bills, including universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons, and a ban on high-capacity magazines. Although a majority of Americans support all three proposals, many congressional Republicans and the National Rifle Association oppose any new gun laws.
“The number one thing we can do to stop gun trafficking is a universal background check system. But Congress should also institute stiff penalties for straw purchasers and pass a clear federal statute that makes gun trafficking a serious crime,” Americans for Responsible Solutions says.
By: Josh Marks, The National Memo, March 7, 2013
“18 Year Olds Can Buy Handguns”: Easier To Buy Three Glocks Than A Case Of Bud
If you’re 18, the law says you can’t buy a handgun. But you can buy a handgun without breaking the law. This paradox exists thanks to a little-noticed manifestation of the so-called gun show loophole, which keeps government regulations out of private gun sales.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 made it illegal for a gun dealer to sell handgun to anyone under the age of 21. “Sales of handguns and ammunition for handguns are limited to persons 21 years of age and older,” the ATF’s official Federal Firearms Regulations Reference Guide states. But the agency’s regulations only apply to federally licensed firearms dealers, not to non-professional private sellers.
“A high school senior in most states can go to a gun show, go online, or any other place that they might find a private seller and lawfully purchase a gun that they couldn’t otherwise at a gun dealer,” explained David Chipman, a former ATF special agent who now works with Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
“That is correct,” confirmed George Semonick of the ATF. “Under federal law, it’s not unlawful for an 18-year-old to posses a handgun,” Semonick explained to Salon, though some states have their own age requirements for handgun possession.
While Congress will soon consider legislation to close the part of the private seller loophole that lets them sell guns without background checks, the handgun age restriction loophole has so far not been specifically addressed or even much noticed. “I’m shocked that the media hasn’t jumped on this,” Chipman told Salon.
But the Internet is way ahead of Washington (and the media) and can helpfully explain this nuance in the gun laws to anyone looking for answers. “How should I go about buying a pistol? I’m 18 years old?” one user asked on Yahoo’s question forum. There are plenty of informed responses: “You cannot buy from a dealer if you are under 21. You can buy from a private sale in many states, but not all states,” one read.
Another: “To be honest your best bet is to place a WTB [want to buy] classified, make sure you are up front about your age because lots of Face to Face sellers won’t sell to someone under 21.” A third: “Basically you have to put an ad in your paper saying you would like to purchase one of these or pick it up at a gun show.”
A separate user wrote that he or she had “heard from a lot of virginia residents that you can buy a gun at 18 years old in virginia at a gun show without a license i also know a couple of people that have bought from gun shows.”
The topic has come up on numerous gun forums as well, where commenters can give sophisticated explanations of the dichotomy between licensed dealers and private sellers. “I hate when people don’t know that you can sell a handgun to a 19 year old in a private purchase,” one commenter complained. Another responded: “Unfortunately, it will be very hard to convince something is legal if they feel it is illegal … All you can do is print out 18 USC 922(x) and the ‘providing firearms to juveniles or minors’ statutes in your state.”
“It’s quite legal for a nonprofessional to sell it to the 18-to-20-year-old, and for the 18-to-20-year-old to buy it, even if the nonprofessional knows or suspects that the buyer is under 21,” wrote libertarian-leaning lawyer Eugene Volokh on his popular blog back in 2010. Volokh notes that while the 18-to-20-year-old “can’t have someone buy it specifically for him, since that would be conspiracy to make a false statement, given that the straw purchaser would have to falsely assert that the gun is for the straw purchaser himself,” he can buy it from a private seller. (Although, one 18-year-old in Pennsylvania found a state-specific loophole that let his father legally purchase a handgun for him.)
Laws vary from state to state and while some make it illegal for people under the age of 21 to purchase or possess a handgun at all, others go by federal law, which deals only with sales from gun dealers. An 18-to-20-year-old cannot, however, obtain a concealed carry license in any state, as they all set the threshold at 21.
The ATF’s Semonick explained that this loophole sometimes creates unexpected complications. For instance, if an 18-year-old brings their legally purchased handgun into a gun store for repairs, the licensed dealer is not allowed to return the gun, as that would violent federal law prohibiting the transfer of a handgun from a dealer to someone under 21-years-old.
“As a law enforcement professional, this was one of my concerns,” former ATF agent Chipman said. “It shouldn’t be easier to go buy three Glocks than to buy a case of Bud. But that’s the case.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 5, 2013
“Reasonable Expectations”: Why The NRA’s Best Argument Is Still Bunk
Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association was back in the spotlight on Wednesday—this time to appear before a congressional committee contemplating new gun violence legislation. And while LaPierre got emotional at a few points, he spent most of his testimony trying to make a pragmatic argument: “We need to be honest about what works and what does not work,” LaPierre said, in a prepared statement. “Proposals that would only serve to burden the law-abiding have failed in the past and will fail in the future.”
LaPierre didn’t specify which past laws he had in mind, but it’s a safe bet that he was thinking about two high-profile pieces of legislation from the early 1990s. One was the Brady Law, which created a system of background checks for people purchasing guns. The other was the 1994 crime bill, which included a ban on some assault weapons. LaPierre is hardly the only person who thinks those laws demonstrate the futility of gun control. Most experts agree that the cumulative effect of the laws was, at best, modest.1
It’s one thing to say gun laws haven’t significantly reduced gun violence, but quite another to say they couldn’t.
But it’s one thing to say gun laws haven’t significantly reduced gun violence, quite another to say they couldn’t. Both the Brady Law and assault weapons ban had serious, specific flaws. The most conspicuous problem with the Brady Law was that it didn’t affect private sales: You could buy a gun from a non-licensed dealer—say, at a gun show—without anybody checking to make sure you didn’t have a criminal record or some other characteristic that made it illegal for you to have a weapon. The big loophole in the assault rifle ban was that its definition of prohibited weapons, which manufacturers were able to circumvent by making minor modifications to existing guns. But gun control advocates have learned a lot since that time. And that’s one reason to think the proposals now on the table could have a bigger impact than their predecessors did.
To be fair, it’s not as if architects of the Brady Law or assault weapons ban thought either law would have a huge impact on crime. It’s easy to forget now, but enactment of the Brady Law culminated a decade of political struggle against the opponents of gun control, particularly the National Rifle Association. It took the election of Bill Clinton, who had promised to sign such a bill as president, to break the logjam—and even then it was a struggle. “I remember going up to the final day of that vote, we were whipping it for over a month,” says Jim Kessler, who was an aide to then-Congressman Charles Schumer, one of the law’s co-sponsors, and is now senior vice president for policy at Third Way. “We did not have the support of the speaker, we did not have the judiciary chairman, Jack Brooks of Texas, we had to do it on our own—and up to the day of the vote, we felt we might not have the votes to pass.” Given that political reality, the advocates of gun laws knew they would be settling for highly imperfect legislation. One hope was that passing Brady would demonstrate the political viability of gun legislation, making it possible to pass stronger legislation later on. “The NRA had such a stranglehold around the neck of Congress, we knew that if we were going to get anything through, it had to be narrow,” says Richard Aborn, a former prosecutor who was president of the Brady Campaign during the early 1990s.
But advocates of gun legislation in the 1990s didn’t simply lack sufficient political power. They also lacked know-how. At the time, experts didn’t really understand gun shows—and they certainly didn’t grasp the role that gun shows might play in facilitating sales once the Brady Law was in effect. “The notion of private sales and, in particular, gun show leakage was not on ours, or anybody else’s, radar screen,” Aborn says. And even if lawmakers had been thinking about gun shows, it’s not clear how much they could have done to restrict sales, at least in that political environment: Requiring private dealers to run full background checks, cross-checking identifications with criminal records and such, would have been time-consuming and in some cases unwieldy. Tom Diaz, a former Democratic staffer for the House Judiciary Committee and former policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, explains, “There was no established system to do the background check. It seems easy now, but in the mid-1990s there were no ‘apps’ and the communication among computers was fragile. It was just much easier and more realistic to require federal firearms licensees—i.e., dealers—to do the background check, since they were already regulated under existing law.”
Veterans of the assault weapons ban fight recall facing similar obstacles. Lack of technology wasn’t an issue, but lack of understanding about guns was. Diaz, author of a forthcoming book called The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It, remembers the crafting of that bill as a decidedly amateur exercise:
In the case of the assault weapons ban, it was as inelegant as this: a bunch of politicians (mostly in the Senate, then in the House as the Senate bill became the vehicle) who knew (and some still know) precious little or even nothing at all about guns in general and assault weapons in particular literally sewed together (1) a list of guns, like Uzis and AKs, and (2) a silly list of “features” (bells and whistles) that “defined” in law what an assault weapon was supposed to be. If the gun had two or more of these features, well, it was an assault weapon. The defect was that manufacturers easily just eliminated the bells and whistles, but kept the major design features that make assault weapons so problematic, namely the ability to accept a high-capacity magazine, and a pistol grip to hold the gun for rapid fire.
One sign that the advocates of new gun laws have learned from the past is that their proposals are more sophisticated, and savvy, than the ones they put forward last time.2 Under the assault weapons proposals circulating now, including the proposal from California Senator Diane Feinstein, a gun would be illegal if it had just one criteria of an automatic rifle, rather than two. Lawmakers are also talking about new restrictions on high-capacity magazines. Christopher Koper, a criminologist at George Mason who was co-author of the official Justice Department review of the old assault weapons ban, thinks a stronger law has potential. “Restrictions like the old ones on assault weapons and large capacity magazines probably won’t lower the overall rate of gun crime,” he says, “but they may modestly reduce shootings by reducing gun attacks with particularly high numbers of shots fired. My best estimate is that the impact on shootings would be under 5 percent overall. I wouldn’t consider this trivial, however, given the seriousness and social costs of shootings.”
More important, advocates for gun laws have quietly shifted their priorities. The assault weapons ban continues to get the most publicity, but the real focus—for advocates and the lawmakers they support—is on a better system of background checks. “Universal background checks… would have much greater impacts,” Koper says. “That could be a game-changer, but they also need to make sure the law is accompanied by meaningful penalties and enforcement.” The advocates for new gun laws seem to grasp that last point. And that includes the president. Obama has already ordered law enforcement agencies to trace the history of guns they seize in crimes. It was one of the executive orders he issued when he unveiled his full gun plan.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the new push for gun legislation is destined to succeed—or to have dramatic effects on crime. Lawmakers in more conservative and rural districts remain reluctant to take on the National Rifle Association and its allies. And even the new laws will have loopholes. The more government regulates gun purchases from legal dealers, for example, the more criminals will seek to get them illegally. And the more government limits the manufacturer certain types of weapons, the more criminals will use older, grandfathered versions—or get them from overseas.
But even a modest impact on violence would represent progress. It would create a framework on which future lawmakers can build stronger regulations and, in the meantime, it would save at least a few lives. “Just because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can,” says Aborn. “Will it stop all gun crime? No. But … we don’t say repeal the murder statutes because it doesn’t stop all murders. There have to be reasonable expectations and a reasonable expectation is that it will make a difference and save some lives.”
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, January 31, 2013
“A Complete Reversal”: Wayne LaPierre Flip-Flops On Background Checks During Contentious Hearing
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre strenuously opposed new gun laws — including expanding the background check system — during a contentious Wednesday morning hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
When committee chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) pressed LaPierre on his opposition to the universal background check, LaPierre repeatedly placed blame on the law currently in place that fails to prosecute individuals who are denied to purchase and own guns. “None of it makes any sense in the real world!” LaPierre said of background checks, after arguing that they would only impact “the little guy,” while criminals continue to buy guns illegally.
LaPierre’s reasoning drew a sharp rebuke from Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who heatedly told LaPierre, “criminals won’t go to purchase the guns, because there will be a background check! We’ll stop them from the original purchase,” adding, “You missed that point completely!”
LaPierre’s position is a complete reversal from his 1999 testimony, when he told the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime, “We think it’s reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone.”
Despite LaPierre’s bluster, a majority of gun owners actually disagree with him on background checks. According to a Johns Hopkins Center For Gun Policy and Research survey conducted in October 2012, “82 percent favored mandatory background checks for all firearms sales, not just for those by licensed dealers.”
Under the current laws, the federal government has prosecuted 44 individuals out of the 80,000-plus who have lied about their criminal histories in an effort to obtain a gun. Despite the fact that the federal government has prosecuted few, there is no doubt that it has in fact kept guns out of the wrong hands.
Testimonies also came from Captain Mark Kelly, husband of former representative Gabrielle Giffords, victim of Jared Loughner’s Tucson, AZ shooting rampage in 2011, Adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at Denver University and policy analyst for the Cato Institute David Kopel, Police Chief James Johnson of the Baltimore Police Department, and Gayle Trotter, attorney and Senior Fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
The hearing began with an emotional appeal from Giffords, who still struggles with her speech as a result of her injuries. “Too many children are dying. We must do something,” Giffords said. “It will be hard, but the time is now. You must act. Be bold, be courageous. Americans are counting on you.”
Kelly maintained that as a gun owner, that “right demands responsibility,” a responsibility that the U.S. is failing to uphold in allowing dangerous individuals to obtain dangerous weapons.
Like Kelly, Chief Johnson — who has over 30 years of experience in law enforcement — spoke out in full support of expanding background checks to private gun sellers and gun shows, declaring, “The best way to stop a bad guy from getting a gun in the first place is a good background check.”
Other individuals on the panel, like David Kopel and Gayle Trotter, chose to focus on the proposal to place armed guards in every school and guns in the hands of teachers, rather than amending the law to assure that the wrong individuals can’t obtain guns in the first place. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), agreed with them, warning that because of America’s fiscal situation, “there will be less police officers, not more, in the next decade.” For Graham – who has received contributions from the NRA — the solution to this problem is not increasing funding for trained professionals like Chief Johnson, but having more Americans to arm themselves (a goal that universal background checks would hinder).
Although he largely opposes gun control, Kopel did argue that gun control does not violate the Second Amendment, so long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of responsible Americans. This raised the question of why he opposes the proposed reform efforts; after all, common-sense restrictions on unnecessary guns and magazines and a repair to the current federal background check system would pose no discernible threat to any responsible gun owners.
Even as the senators were debating gun violence on Capitol Hill, another mass shooting was taking place in Phoenix, Arizona.
By: Allison Brito, The National Memo, January 30, 2013
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