EDMUND BURKEToday I checked the websites of leading gun control organizations, including the Violence Policy Center, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the Law Center to Prevent Violence, and the Brady Campaign. As of noon, all of those organizations were silent about whether they support or oppose the so-called Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act, famously sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin (D-WVA) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), along with Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Mark Kirk (R-IL).
So far only one gun control organization – the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence – says anything at all about the bill on its website. The Coalition chose its words carefully. While it isn’t (yet) opposing the bill, the Coalition says that it is “deeply concerned with several elements of the compromise.” First, the Coalition says that what the nation needs is a system of universal background checks for all gun sales – regardless of whether they are sales by licensed dealers or transfers among private parties. This bill does not create such a system. It expands background checks to gun shows and other events, but it exempts other sales and gifts between private parties. Second, the Coalition says that this bill would – for the first time – allow people to purchase guns in states other than their home state. That would make it difficult, and perhaps impossible, for states with registration and licensing requirements – which includes California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut – to enforce their laws. Third, the Coalition is concerned that the bill would give the FBI less time to conduct background checks for gun show sales than it presently has for gun store sales, even though the FBI is now having difficulty completing checks under a longer time frame. The Coalition reserved final judgment until it has a chance to read he bill (it posted its comments on April 10, when the bill was apparently not yet available, and some details of the bill may differ from what the Coalition previously believed the bill would include), but the Coalition’s bottom line was this: Why are compromises and loopholes necessary to get universal background checks when 91% of the public wants universal background checks?
Well, the answer may simply be politics. If this is the best bill that can pass, one may legitimately ask: Is it, on balance, good? But another question is this: Even if does both good and bad things, and the good marginally outweighs the bad, will passing it mislead the public into believing that Congress has enacted something equivocally good? Frankly, that's what happened when Congress enacted the Brady Law and the federal assault weapons ban. Both laws were fatally flawed and did very little good. But passing them persuaded Americans that meaningful gun control had been achieved, and that they could turn to other issues.
Undoubtedly, as I write this, gun control groups are working hard to understand the complicated 49-page Manchin-Toomey bill. (It’s no easy task. One has to read the bill side-by-side with existing law that it amends. Even for people well versed in the area, it can take many hours to read and understand the bill. The not-faint-of-heart can read the bill here.)
Gun control groups have undoubtedly seen this video of Alan Gottlieb, head of the extremist Second Amendment Foundation, who claims that he helped Senators Manchin and Toomey write their bill. Gottlieb says the bill is a Christmas tree hung with “a million ornaments” for gun owners. “I think we snookered the other side, and they haven’t figured it out yet,” he boasts.
Gottlieb may well be right. I haven’t yet fully figured out this complicated bill, but my initial impression is that it will do more harm than good.
It is likely only to change the customs and practices of private gun sales, while still allowing sellers and buyers to evade background checks. The bill expands background checks to gun shows – which are defined as events at which more than 75 guns are offered or exhibited for sale – and the “curtilage” thereof, that is, the enclosed space surrounding the event. Will this allow sellers and purchasers to evade background checks by finalizing sales just outside the building in which a gun show is held, say, from the seller’s car or truck in the parking lot? The legislation also exempts sales made from a seller’s private residence. And it exempts all manner of gun transfers among family members – not only from parents, grandparents, and siblings, but from uncles, aunts, and first cousins too. There is no adequate reason why any of these sales and gifts should be exempt from background checks. All a purchaser has to do is go to his local gun store, get a background check, and provide the seller or gift giver with certification that it has been completed. Will this be an inconvenience to a father who wants to give his son a rifle for a birthday present? Yes. But between convenience and public safety, the time has come to give public safety the higher priority.
The bill also seems to create a long and burdensome process to take guns away from veterans who have been determined to be mentally incompetent. As I read the bill, it would give veterans the right to administrative review, and then to judicial review, before their guns could be taken away. It can take a very long time to get judicial review, and a veteran could be declared to be mentally incompetent by the VA and yet maintain possession of his or her guns for many months, and perhaps even years, pending final judicial review. Veterans are – and should be – entitled to many benefits, but when it comes to possessing guns, they should be treated just the same as other citizens.
The bill also extends bizarre prohibitions on the collection and collation of records, which are necessary to the rational investigation and enforcement of gun laws, but which nonetheless send some gun nuts into orbit because – in their paranoiac fantasies – these records may someday be used by a totalitarian government to disarm the citizenry and enslave us all. Following along with this general “thinking,” the bill prohibits the Attorney General from collecting or centralizing records concerning the distribution of firearms unless the records contain material evidence of crimes. The problem with this is that the records must be collected and analyzed to determine whether they contain such evidence. We know, for example, that just a tiny fraction of bad-apple gun dealers sell the majority of guns used in crimes. But Congress has enacted legislation protecting such dealers from being properly scrutinized by regulators, such as ATF, or from being publicly identified. This bill continues to make it difficult for law-enforcement authorities to acquire information they need to effectively enforce gun laws.
What we need is simple legislation extending background checks to all gun sales and transfers, without exceptions and loopholes. That would be preferable to this bill.
UPDATE (April 15, 2013, 6:00 PM): It's been drawn to my attention that Mayors Against Illegal Guns did, in fact, endorse the Manchin-Toomey Bill last week. I missed it because I assumed that an endorsement of the legislation would be on the organization's home page. It's statement is here. On the same day, the Brady Organization also endorsed the bill, though in more qualified terms, here. And this afternoon the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence also endorsed the legislation here. So people who have studied this legislation far more closely than I think that, on balance, it does more good than harm.