Gun control class warfare
It’s vigorously scorned among the high-minded progressive set, but let it be said anyway: No truer slogan was ever uttered than the one, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
When guns are outlawed, any who continue to possess them will, of course, by definition be outlaws. So it’s a “truism,” a truth so obvious it goes without saying.
An even truer slogan, however, might be: “When guns are outlawed, pigs will fly.”
There are, according to the Small Arms Survey, 393 million firearms out there in private possession. Fully 40 percent of households are reckoned to possess the dreaded instruments.
The NRA is in bankruptcy, but America’s gun owners still constitute a mighty force, 72 million strong, according to a survey by the Pew Research Foundation.
It’s time, therefore, for a reality check. Love it or leave it, America is privately armed to the teeth. To echo the bumpersticker sentiment popular in the nation’s hinterlands, good luck prying those guns out of the cold, dead hands of hundreds of millions of gun-clinging deplorables.
Besides which, every time there is talk of expanding guncontrol laws — as there is now in the newly installed Biden administration — the chatter is music accompanying the soaring sales graphs of the firearms industry.
Sales surge by the millions when demands for “sensible” gun-control measures ring out from the progressive pews of the Democratic Party congregation. Which explains how that 393 million total was reached in the first place and why it is even now in the process of being surpassed. Colt would be wise to be funding these demands, if it isn’t already doing so on the sly.
Of course, nobody of serious standing is talking about actually banning guns. Suggestions to the contrary are, left and right, attempts to rile up yahoo hysteria.
There are, however, not a few who are determined to make gun ownership incrementally more and more inconvenient, to the dreamed-of point of eventually rendering private firearms ownership a hassle if not a near impossibility.
The “gun control” objective here, of course, bears little relationship to public safety. Guncontrol measures assume respect for the law. The criminal element strives to remain impervious to the law and to a troubling degree succeeds at it.
The unspoken aim of gun control, meanwhile, is to put the irredeemable red-neck ranks in their place — to remind them of their social standing, or, more precisely, of their lack of standing.
In any event, when guns are outlawed only the defiantly criminal will possess them, i.e., the various street gangs, the drug cartel employees, the full-time criminals. All others would be left vulnerable to their whims, especially if the insane fad of demanding the defunding of police continues.
Gun-control measures with a realistic chance of being effective might well win support on all sides. But to have a realistic chance of being effective, such measures would have to appeal to common sense, not challenge it. They would have to be sincere and logical, not merely badly disguised efforts to snub the red-state bumpkins.
Which is to say gun-control efforts might win wider support if they seemed likely to constrain the activities of the criminal cohort without unduly inconveniencing or infringing the rights of others. In gun-control measures as other areas of legislation, the devil, as it’s often said, is in the details.
In any event, much of the impulse for gun-control proposals seems to be animated by misapprehended notions, if not outright myths. Behind the guncontrol agendas are misleading suggestions, often intentionally so, that firearms are a pandemic source of lethality.
Firearms are, of course, dangerous, They are designed specifically to be so. The 14,414 firearms homicides and 23,941 firearms suicides dramatize the point (2018 data).
Yet gruesome as such numbers are, they pale next to other CDC data for that same year, namely, fatal drug overdoses, 67,367; accidental fatal poisonings (often from mishandling of prescription medicines) 65,773; accidental fatal falls, 39,433 and fatal motor vehicle accidents, 37,599.
If there are indeed 393 million firearms out there, the total 38,355 annual firearm deaths (suicides and homicides) constitute an astounding miniscule rate of lethality — nine hundred-thousandths of a percent per firearm.
The Biden administration is now eyeing the low-hanging gun-control fruit. The House already has approved two bills to close the so-called gun-show “loophole.” The loophole supposedly sidesteps purchaser background checks. But even most gun-show sales involve licensed dealers who are required to do background checks on gun buys.
It’s a matter of debate whether extending the law to cover the few exceptions would inconvenience the law-abiding more than it would deter the lawless. Many of us would say that any inconvenience is a minor concern when weighed against public safety, although the courts, obligated to take into account the Second Amendment, might say otherwise.
In either case, however, the data indicate that closing the gun-show loophole through “universal background checks” would deliver only a glancing blow to gun crime, if even that.
Various studies have found that only one in five gun-show sales involve unlicensed sellers and unchecked buyers. And a National Institute of Justice study (1997) of gun homicides in eight cities found that only 2 percent the murder weapons had been acquired at gun shows.
Therefore, if these numbers are accurate, the touted “universal background checks” would hardly make a dent in gun crime.
To many gun-control activists, the big appeal of gunshow crackdowns has little to do with public safety and much to do with their imaginationdriven stereotypes. They associate such gatherings with chawbacon yokels of the NASCAR demographic, with white guys waving the stars-and-bars flag.
“Assault” rifles, too, loom as a low-hanging gun-control fruit in the firearms demonology. Who, after all, would not favor banning a weapon that’s been saddled with the prefix “assault”?
(Who, that is, other than the 17 million Americans who own AR-15s and similar firearms, according to one survey. Other surveys say there are “only” 1012 million such weapons out there. Whatever the accurate number, 10 million or 17 million, again, lots of luck confiscating them.)
In any event, an “assault” rifle ban apparently would have only a negligible effect on firearms crime even if, as is highly unlikely, it could be effectively enforced. A Pew Research study concluded that rifles of all kinds account for only 4 percent of gun crime. Other surveys put the figure at around 7 percent, low in either case.
Such weapons — militarystyle, rapid-fire rifles with detachable magazines — are the weapon of choice in over half of mass shootings, true. But such shootings account for only around 1 percent of gun deaths, the data of the Gun Violence Archives indicate.
It is not as if there are no gun-control laws on the books. The reviled NRA estimates the existing number at around 20,000. The NRA’s detractors, using different criteria, say there are really “only” 270 to 300 gun-control laws on the books.
Even the lower estimates are far from negligible numbers. Maybe what’s needed is a thorough scrutiny of existing laws with the focus on making their enforcement more effective.
The current outcries for a crackdown on gun shows and confiscation of “assault” rifles are, really, in practical terms, little more than distracting political sideshows having, at best, only marginal relevance to pubic safety.
It would be a big boost to the gun-control cause if the guncontrol activists were more interested in actually curbing firearms fatalities and less interested in using the issue to impose their snooty class judgments.