Yes, this is known, but it always bears repeating.<\/p>\n
BLUF: Gun-Control Laws Aren\u2019t about Preventing Crimes<\/a><\/p>\n In<\/span>\u00a0the latest issue of\u00a0National Review<\/span>, I write about the\u00a0lax enforcement of our gun laws<\/a>\u00a0and touch on a theme that is worth exploring a little more: Gun control is not about gun\u00a0crime\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 gun control is about gun\u00a0culture<\/em>.<\/p>\n If we cared about keeping guns out of the hands of felons, we\u2019d be locking up straw buyers. We\u2019d be prosecuting prohibited \u201clie and try\u201d buyers who falsify their ATF paperwork. And we\u2019d be confiscating guns sold in retail transactions that were wrongly approved because of defects in the background-check system. But, for the most part, we don\u2019t do much of any of that.<\/p>\n Instead of doing the hard work of enforcing the law on people committed to breaking it, we focus almost all of our efforts on the most law-abiding group of Americans there is: People who legally buy firearms from licensed firearms dealers, a group that, by definition, has a felony-conviction rate of approximately 0.0 percent. These are law-abiding people, but they also are, in no small part, the type of people who mash the cultural buttons of the big-city progressives who dominate the Democratic Party both culturally and financially. From that point of view, what matters is not that retail gun dealers and their clients are dangerous \u2014 which they certainly are not \u2014 but that they are\u00a0icky<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That culture-war mentality produces a great deal of sloppy thinking and ignorant commentary. Consider the case of Gail Collins in Thursday\u2019s\u00a0New York Times<\/em>.\u00a0Collins is hopping mad<\/a>\u00a0about gun shows, about which she seems to know . . . not a whole lot. \u201cYeah,\u201d she writes \u2014 really, \u201cyeah<\/em>\u201d \u2014 \u201cright now one easy way to buy a gun without having anyone check to see if you have a history of criminal convictions, mental illness or a domestic violence restraining order is to just plunk down some cash at a gun show.\u201d<\/p>\n This is \u2014 and this part still matters! \u2014\u00a0not true<\/em>.<\/p>\n There is no special legal exemption for gun shows, no matter how many times\u00a0New York Times<\/em> columnists insist there is. The laws that apply everywhere else in the world apply in the same way, to the same degree, to the same people, at gun shows. If you are a felon or other prohibited buyer, it is a serious federal crime to buy a gun at a gun show; in most states, including the allegedly Wild West state of Texas, it is a crime to sell a felon a firearm, at a gun show or anywhere else. If you are a licensed firearms dealer, then you have to run background checks at a gun show, just as you would if you were selling at your shop or anywhere else. If you live in a state in which background checks are required for private sales (New York, California, etc.), those rules apply at gun shows the same as anywhere else. Some gun-show operators mandate background checks on private sales even where they are not legally required. The worst that can be said of gun shows is that they provide a convenient venue for sales that could be made in precisely the same way, by and to the same people, anywhere else.<\/p>\n Because this is a culture-war issue rather than a crime-reduction issue, Collins apparently has not bothered thinking much about the most obvious and most relevant question: Are guns bought at gun shows a significant contributor to crime? Fortunately, we have a whole federal office \u2014 the Bureau of Justice Statistics \u2014 that keeps track of these things. Its finding? \u201cAmong prisoners who possessed a firearm during their offense, 0.8% obtained it at a gun show.\u201d<\/p>\n Imagine me putting on my Sheriff Buford T. Justice accent: \u201cZero<\/em>-point-eight percent!\u201d<\/p>\n Now, given that only 20 percent of prisoners in the BJS survey were in possession of a firearm of any sort at the time of their offense, my English-major math puts those gun-show guns at the scene of 0.16 percent of those crimes. That number rounds down to squat.<\/p>\n When I hear Democrats protesting voter-ID laws, they habitually insist that \u201cthere is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.\u201d That is true. But there is\u00a0some<\/em>\u00a0voter fraud \u2014 there are people in jail for it, and people headed there for it \u2014 and we should take reasonable steps to prevent and discourage it, because the social effects of even a little bit of election fraud are very corrosive. There are lots of things that are not widespread that nonetheless deserve our attention. Are there people at gun shows profiting by intentionally providing criminals with weapons? Maybe, though gun shows aren\u2019t really where the black-marketeers hang out their shingles. We do occasionally\u00a0prosecute people acting as unlicensed commercial dealers<\/a>\u00a0(as opposed to occasional private sellers) at gun shows, which is appropriate. But, again, that offense is a crime whether those sales happen at a gun show, in a garage, or out of the trunk of a car \u2014 or at a gun shop, for that matter.<\/p>\n The same BJS study contains one of the least surprising findings in the literature: The vast majority of criminals \u2014 90 percent \u2014 do not get their firearms from any sort of retail operation. The share that acquired them\u00a0legally<\/em> in a retail setting (sporting-goods store, pawnshop, etc.) is even smaller.<\/p>\n Collins goes on to spend five paragraphs excoriating Texas for its new \u201cconstitutional carry\u201d law. I myself preferred the old concealed-carry regime, with the required classwork, shooting test, and background check. But what Collins does not mention is that this is not some new innovation unique to the redneck states \u2014 Texas now has the same law as radical, right-wing . . .\u00a0Vermont<\/em>, which has had constitutional carry for as long as we have had the Constitution. Texas joins Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming in this arrangement. Some of those states have relatively high rates of murder and other violent crimes (Alaska, Arkansas) \u2014 though not a single one of them has a murder rate as much as\u00a0half<\/em>\u00a0that of the District of Columbia \u2014 while others (Maine, Vermont, Idaho) are among the safest states in the Union. The obvious conclusion is that whatever the important variable is in murder rates, it isn\u2019t this.<\/p>\n Like many gun-controllers, Collins can\u2019t be bothered with the facts or data: \u201cI\u2019m going to go out on a limb and say that eliminating the sale of semiautomatic rifles would make the country more . . . gun safe,\u201d she writes. I hope for the sake of her bones that the limb is not too far up: As anybody who follows this issue knows, all \u201clong guns\u201d combined \u2014 meaning all shotguns and rifles, not just the semiautomatic ones \u2014 account for a tiny share of murders, and by tiny\u00a0I mean fewer murders than are committed with bare hands or blunt objects<\/a>. So-called assault rifles as a class are so rarely used in violent crimes that the feds don\u2019t even bother to break them out statistically. But as near as we can tell, they account for around 2 percent of violent crimes, maybe less.<\/p>\n There are good reasons for that, having nothing to do with gun laws \u2014 it is easier to buy a long gun than it is to buy a handgun, but it is hard to stick an AK-47 down your pants or jam it into your glove box. You can go out and buy a .50-caliber Barrett semiautomatic rifle and do some real damage \u2014 if you are the kind of criminal who has $12,000 burning a hole in his pocket and a propensity for committing crimes in which it is convenient to use a 30-pound, five-foot-long rifle. As it turns out, that is not how most American criminals operate. But .50-caliber rifles are, for some reason, a target of the gun-control movement.<\/p>\n Instead of such exotic weapons, criminals generally use handguns. Traditionally, the most common kind of firearm to be used in a crime in the United States is whatever the most common kind of handgun is at that time. For a long time, it was .38-caliber revolvers; now, it is 9mm and .40-caliber semiautomatic pistols. Criminals don\u2019t get them from gun shows \u2014 when they don\u2019t steal them,\u00a0they get them from their girlfriends<\/a>. We can and should enforce straw-buyer laws, but, if we are going to do so, we should go into that knowing that we will be locking up a lot of young women and, almost certainly, a disproportionate share of them will be black or Hispanic and low-income.<\/p>\n Collins gives away the game, writing that a proposed gun-show regulation won\u2019t actually do much, \u201cbut if it passes, we can at least savor the thought that the weapons lobby finally had a bad day.\u201d<\/p>\n Giving people you hate a bad day is a pretty poor basis for public policy. Collins\u2019s contribution here is useless to the policy debate, and as journalism, it is somewhere between incompetent and dishonest, dwelling in that no-man\u2019s land of mediocrity that stretches across so many op-ed pages.<\/p>\n But that is really what\u00a0Kulturkampf<\/em>\u00a0politics is all about: fortifying one\u2019s own social status by exercising ritual domination over cultural rivals. That\u2019s how you get punitive tax policies that don\u2019t raise much revenue, \u201cinclusiveness\u201d policies based on exclusion, and gun-control proposals that don\u2019t have anything to do with gun crime. It just feels good to exercise power over people you loathe or envy. That is the beginning and the end of it.<\/p>\n And, if that\u2019s what gets your pistons pumping \u2014 well, then, you need Jesus, or at least therapy.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if you are interested in reducing violent crime, then you might want to consider policies that have at least a little something to do with violent criminals and the ways in which they actually arm themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, this is known, but it always bears repeating. BLUF: But that is really what\u00a0Kulturkampf\u00a0politics is all about: fortifying one\u2019s own social status by exercising ritual domination over cultural rivals. That\u2019s how you get punitive tax policies that don\u2019t raise much revenue, \u201cinclusiveness\u201d policies based on exclusion, and gun-control proposals that don\u2019t have anything to … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72264"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72266,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72264\/revisions\/72266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBut that is really what\u00a0Kulturkampf\u00a0politics is all about: fortifying one\u2019s own social status by exercising ritual domination over cultural rivals. That\u2019s how you get punitive tax policies that don\u2019t raise much revenue, \u201cinclusiveness\u201d policies based on exclusion, and gun-control proposals that don\u2019t have anything to do with gun crime. It just feels good to exercise power over people you loathe or envy. That is the beginning and the end of it.<\/em><\/p>\n