HAPPY NEW YEAR! My goodness, I can't believe that it's been nearly FIVE MONTHS since I've written here! Of course, my time has indeed been in pretty short supply. I've had to spend more and more of it trying to drum-up business -- it's not easy staying afloat here in Michigan, land of the Moving Van! Just today the Detroit Free Press reported that Michigan leads the nation for the third year in a row in move-outs. No surprise to those of us who remain. Our market is shrinking and those that remain don't care to spend any money. So far we've been able to stave-off anything too dire, but the future doesn't look too rosy.
Looks like the one shining moment of 2008 is going to be the election of America's first black president, not to mention the SMARTEST one in the past eight years! I don't normally get too excited about elections, especially the presidential ones. I can count on one hand the number of presidents I actively worked to elect. The first was back in 1968. I was just shy of 11 years old. I couldn't vote, so I volunteered at the local Democratic Party HQ and went door-to-door for Hubert Humphrey, who was running against Richard Nixon. Humphrey won our school's mock election. My mother was undecided, so I got her to cast her vote for my candidate. Sadly he lost. Later on, when Watergate broke, I had the pleasure of saying "I told you so" to all of the people who chided me for my efforts. After that, I was fairly ambivalent politically, although I did vote each and every time. I just never got excited about a candidate until Bill Clinton came along. That was the year when H. Ross Perot, the crazy businessman, decided to run. While I liked the idea of having a successful businessman at the helm, Perot wasn't it. When he spoke at the debates, it became clear to me that he was a guy who had just gotten cosmically lucky: he'd won the business lotto! In many regards, he was crazy as a loon.
Clinton, though, was the real deal. A Rhodes scholar, whip smart and charismatic; a perfect Democratic response to Ronald Reagan. For the first time in decades, I was once again going door-to-door, working phones and campaigning for the Democrats. This time Clinton won.
Anyone alive and aware during the '90s knows what happened; Clinton was outstanding when it came to the economy and the military, and generally did a good job, but his detractors -- neo-conservative Republicans mostly -- hated him with a passion and looked for anything and everything to hang him with. And he gave them an opening with sexcapades. It's hysterical that, throughout his campaign, both Clinton's friends and detractors compared him to JFK, my favorite president of childhood, yet when it came to his sexual proclivities, nobody said anything. Yet he WAS much like Kennedy -- he loves the ladies and didn't mind a little fooling around on the side. Unlike the administration and government of the '60s who worked hard to keep Kennedy's indiscretions off of the public's radar screen, the Republican lead Congress spent millions hounding Clinton and mercilessly parading things like BLOW JOBS before the American public. The whole dog-n-pony show culminated in a totally partisan "impeachment" circus, making Congress look worse than Clinton! Mean-spirited, petty, anti-sex curmudgeons, they made sure that Clinton, despite his many successes, would always be remembered for his wandering ways.
As much as I might like a politician, none have always been perfect. For some reason, Clinton took an irrational, unconstitutional stance against the Second Amendment and the rights of Americans to own and use firearms. Most famously, he ordered and signed the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, which resulted in no measurable reduction of violent crime, yet created an underground of profiteering among arms dealers and making things harder for the law abiding. Of course, that's always the case with most gun controls. A famous bit of testimony was provided by Dr. Susanna Gratia-Hupp, who made an excellent argument against the ban and against restrictions on concealed carry. SO excellent that I'm posting a link to it here. It's well worth viewing.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=
-4069761537893819675&p
That was the bittersweet side of Clinton's reign. after the Clinton presidentcy, none of the candidates who followed excieted me except for those from the Libertarian Party. While I didn't actively work for them, my votes went to Harry Browne and Michael Badnarik. Their outlook was the closest match to my own. As we know, Bush ended up winning and became the worst president we've ever had, bar none. From a multi-billion-dollar surplus to trillions and trillions in debt; from a thriving economy to massive job losses and the biggest drops since the Great Depression; from the best-equipped, best trained military in the world to a depleted, ill-equipped, overworked force deployed illegally and immorally for profit, vendetta or both, Bush ruined us, maybe to the point of no return.
Early on in the election, I was excieted by two candidates: Ron Paul, a former Libertarian running as a Republican, and Barack Obama, a senator from Illinois. The former's view of the Constitution and role of government best matches my own. The latter seemed to be the most intelligent, had a well considered PLAN and hit my major issues: Jobs, the economy, shutting down the Guananamo detention facility and ending torture as a public policy (another evil gift from the Bush people) and, above all, ending the WAR. The war was and IS the biggest issue for me. American lives are being squandered, and there is little to nothing purchased with their blood. We haven't captured or killed the main terrorist responsible for 9/11, nor have we stopped his organization from mounting attacks elsewhere. We haven't liberated the Iraqi people from anything except dependable power and sanitation. We haven't even benefitted from all that OIL that the war was supposed to be for! (By outright admission by the administration, no less!)
When my neighbor's boy came home in a body bag, the whole thing became far more real for me. The war HAD to stop. At any cost. McCain said he'd keep it going for 100 years, if necessary, in order to "win." Yet the definition of "winning" wasn't mentioned and maybe never existed. Like an open-ended "war on terror," the war in Iraq could be justified in one way or another for decades. It is bankrupting us; it is unsustainable. We cannot -- and SHOULD not -- tolerate it. Obama was the only choice. Then there's jobs. McCain didn't seem to have a plan. Obama, early on, promised to end our involvement in NAFTA and GATT, which would stem the tide of outsourcing that plagues our job market. While he hasn't given voice to that idea much since, his plan at least exists. He also has better policies on energy and the environment, both of which are important to me. (And the latter to most sportsmen!)
Yet Obama seems to share many of Clinton's views when it comes to guns and the Second Amendment. This makes me wary despite the optimism and hope of everyone around me. The only thing that keeps me from distress is Obama's background as a Constitutional scholar and his support for Heller in the recent court case in Washington DC that affirmed, once and for all, that the Second Amendment supported an INDIVIDUAL right to bear arms; that the "militia" mentioned is US. Not the National Guard, which didn't exist when the amendment was written. The colonial army and the minutemen were farmers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths -- just plain volunteer citizens -- who happened to own firearms.
The audacity of MY hope is that Obama is uninterested in making any more ineffective laws or restricting the rights of the law abiding (intentionally or unintentionally) because his hands are full trying to deal with the economy, our energy problems, jobs and the environment. Yet the gun banners -- the Sara Bradys and her Million Minions, the VPC and the liars who intentionally confused the public on regular semi-auto guns vs. machine guns, the CeaseFire gang who don't really care about crime as much as taking away guns -- are all excieted and ramping-up their efforts to pass draconian laws restricting OUR rights to self-defense. Dr. Gratia-Hupp's words once again become important and worthwhile to consider once again.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=
-4069761537893819675&p
Also, I've adopted as my mission for 2009 the task of actually DOING something about violent crime! Gun owners and firearms enthusiasts know how devastating a firearm can be. One might think that groups intent on actually having an IMPACT on violent crime might want to work WITH them to come up with REAL SOLUTIONS without making things more dangerous for the law abiding. But the NRA and the Brady Campaign aren't doing it. It is up to US, people on BOTH SIDES of the issue to reach out to one another and do something effective! In that spirit, I'll be shopping my series of articles around starting with this one. I hope to see it published in as many mainstream publications as I can. (A separate series is being aimed at firearms enthusiasts and activists.) Knowledge is power, and we need to filter out the nonsense, use the true data at hand and promote strategies that WORK. So, if you've got the time, enjoy my first article, with a title my wife invented...
The Conversation We’re NOT Having
A Dialogue About Guns, Crime, Fears and Solutions
By Stu Chisholm
I’m one of those guys who aren’t really into sports. I didn’t play any in high school and took just enough gym class to meet the minimum required to pass. (Only around 1994 did my wife and I acquire an interest in hockey, just in time to see the Red Wings start winning Stanley Cups for the first time since before I was born!) My first cherished piece of sporting equipment came in the form of a .22 revolver that my mother bought me when I was about 12 or 13 and introduced me to target shooting. In those days, it not only wasn’t a crime, but never raised an eyebrow. She took the time to teach me safe gun handling habits that serve me well to this day. Shooting has been the one and only sport I’m good at. In fact, it had always been a recreational pursuit until much later on in my life when I got involved in a very high-profile line of work. As a result, have had the occasional kook crawl out of the woodwork. I decided it was time to take the necessary training and obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Thankfully, in the dozen or so years I’ve been doing so, I’ve never come anywhere near needing it.
In sharp contrast, my wife isn’t a shooter at all. She’s never had any interest and, in fact, is a bit uneasy around firearms. Beyond patiently and almost heroically learning how to clear my handguns and make them safe in case anything ever happens to me, she’s otherwise happy to ignore them. (Although she does agree with my decision to carry. I wouldn’t have pursued it without her consent.)
Besides being Red Wings fans, she and I are news junkies. We have a nightly habit of pigging-out on various cable news programs during dinner and discussing them. From time to time, as is inevitable, some horrible crime triggers a discussion about firearms and prompts my wife to ask me questions, since I’m the “gun guy” of the house. She’s thoughtful, emotional and extremely intelligent, so when she asks me a question, I make a point of answering her as completely as I can. If I don’t know something or am unsure of my facts, I’ll take the time to hit the Internet, or crack open one of the many books on firearms and firearm law that I have around the house. The conclusion of these sessions often ends with her asking, “So why don’t I hear this stuff from anyone but you?”
That question at first left me at a loss. For one thing, my wife is a cable television producer with a degree in broadcasting from Central Michigan University and I’m a professional disc jockey and part-time writer, which makes us both a part of the media. Therefore, neither of us buys into the “liberal media” myth. Sure, there are going to be plenty of liberal TV personalities and editors, yet there are arguably just as many of the conservative variety, too. (The biggest explosion in talk radio and cable news has been in the conservative sector!)
I wasn’t at a loss for long, though, since it dawned on me to ask my media-savvy wife why SHE thought this information might be scarce. It seemed to come easy for her; the national mainstream media has tough time constraints, ratings considerations and advertisers to appease. Less spectacular stories of a grandmother thwarting a carjacking with her revolver get sidelined for bigger, more attention-grabbing pieces. The old “if it bleeds, it leads” line isn’t a joke! Combine that with the fact that news people don’t generally use or carry guns and don’t understand the culture, it sets up an automatic informational deficit. In their haste to put together a story, they will often go to the wrong sources for their information. Instead of experts, they find activists.
This leads to another, more insidious reason that the general public is deprived of a better, more balanced picture of the firearms issue: it has become politicized. Somewhere in-between the time that my liberal mother, a life-long Democrat, gave me that pistol all those years ago and today, when Republicans lay sole claim to being the “pro-gun party,” gun use and ownership have become political lines in the sand for some. TV news talking heads often yell past one another and zealous lobbyists, whose job it is to gin up support for their agendas, come off sounding radical. Opinions become entrenched and activists take an “us vs. them” attitude, effectively shutting down any meaningful dialogue.
Luckily this doesn’t happen at home. My wife and I both share an important common ground: we abhor violent crime. So we can have a discussion, without any heat, and any jargon is kept to a minimum. I try to take the same approach when talking to other non-gun-owners as well. I look at it a lot like talking to people who don’t build and fly radio-controlled airplanes or don’t ride horses; they have some ideas about it, but in reality might know very little. I find that most people want to learn more and will readily ask questions. Answers prompt more questions, and soon you’ve built a dialogue that is far more edifying than any talking head cable TV show.
The first time this happened to me was one summer night when my local Representative, Sander Levin, decided to hold a “town hall meeting” close enough to my home that I couldn’t resist attending. Looking around the hall, I noticed that there were more women than men, and there were also a lot of senior citizens in the group. I decided to just sit and listen, as the biggest concern for most of the crowd was jobs, the worsening economy and Social Security. Yet unknown to me, a gun rights activist was in the front row. When it came time for Q&A, he took the Senator to task for some of his votes. While I might’ve agreed with his sentiments, he made the mistake of using the term “anti-gun,” which prompted a woman sitting next to me to say, “Well, I’M anti-gun!” This was an opening I couldn’t resist.
“Are you really anti-gun,” I asked, “meaning that you oppose a senior citizen from having protection in their own home or a divorcee with a restraining order against a bully ex-husband being able to have a gun, or would you more accurately describe yourself as anti-violence?” A few people nearby heard us and turned their heads, expectantly waiting along with me as she considered her answer. “Yes, I suppose that’s a better description. I’m just sick of all the violence.” I shook her hand and said, “So am I, and I’m an NRA member.” She and our onlookers seemed genuinely surprised, and it touched-off a friendly side-conversation after the meeting that had more people gathering around me than the Senator! There was no yelling, but some very sincere questions posed by people who, up until then, hadn’t thought much about firearms beyond the bad stuff they saw paraded by on the nightly news or in action movies. A lot of them thanked me, shook hands and uttered words that were all too familiar: “Why haven’t I heard this anywhere else?”
It was that sincerity and open-minded inquisitiveness that struck me the most. Whether you’re a member of the “Million Mom March” or the NRA, everyone wants their kids to be safe in school, their neighborhoods free of gangs and crime, and not feel like walking up to the corner store is a risk to life and limb. That’s a huge patch of common ground!
In this spirit, I write these paragraphs to begin a process of sorts; a coming-together of our collective concerns and brainpower. Political agendas must be set aside in favor of progress. To have a real impact on violent crime, while at the same time preserving our hard-won rights and freedoms, we must focus on what works and dispel any false assumptions or misinformation that is readily supplied by those with other agendas. We need to carefully distinguish between fact and opinion, and the impossible from the fanciful. We need to acknowledge that the fears of both sides of the debate have merit: we are ALL responsible for the safety of our children and our neighborhoods.
Hopefully we’re all in agreement thus far.
The big disagreements seem to come from ideas on how to combat violent crime. Let’s go through some of those ideas and consider their efficacy…
Although there are some 20,000 different laws on the books regulating firearms, from manufacture right on through shipping, advertising, sale, use and storage, there seems to be an idea among some groups that our gun laws are “lax” or lacking in some regard. They call for more laws. Yet when asked, those they suggest are either already on the books in some form making them redundant, or they might be impractical or even illegal. Even if a great new law could be created, isn’t the definition of “criminal” that of someone who BREAKS the law? Do gangs or the mentally ill stop their behavior because of what the law might say?
Obviously they do not. Good laws do have their place, of course. They can give police and prosecutors the tools they need to catch, convict and jail violent offenders. Penalties for committing a shooting or other assault should be harsh enough to both give the rational person pause and the criminal a good, long and perhaps permanent stay behind bars. Still, we need to face the fact that laws have their limitations, one of them being that they cannot prevent a crime.
Another common idea is to “get rid of the guns.” After all, there can be no shootings if there are no guns, right? It seems simple! Yes; too simple to be true. The U.S. Census bureau reports that there are about 150 million cell phone subscribers (as of 2003). The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that as of 2005, there are 62 million registered vehicles on U.S. roads, along with another 6.4 million that aren’t registered, for a grand total of just over 68 million. In comparison, it is estimated that there are some 200 million guns in circulation in the United States, or nearly one for every other American household! Not only is it very hard for the average person to truly comprehend such a number, but also reveals the immensity of the undertaking. By sheer number alone, guns would be nearly impossible to totally cleanse ourselves of!
It’s also not a completely desirable idea when all things are considered. For instance, if a new law was suddenly enacted requiring everyone to turn in their guns, those who follow the law would then be completely disarmed. Criminals, who are predisposed to ignore or flaunt the law, would keep their weapons and thus be given the upper hand -- a very dangerous unintended consequence! We have laws that outright ban illegal drugs, but those laws have had the consequence of creating an underground. Just as in the days of prohibition when alcohol created wealthy criminal empires, drugs are doing the same today for drug lords and cartels. Despite some very harsh laws, drugs are cheap and readily available. What makes anyone think that the same wouldn’t be true if guns were banned?
Hunting and the shooting sports are also a multi-billion-dollar industry. It employs thousands of people and the sale of hunting licenses pours a lot of money into state coffers. Sportsmen and women fund most of our state parks. Given the current state of our economy, such a ban would only make economic matters worse.
Another thing to consider are those guns that are in use by our police and security professionals. It would be all but impossible for them to do their jobs effectively without firearms, yet they can be (and are) stolen. Even our own FBI famously lost several fully automatic machineguns! The bottom line is that firearms do have a vital and necessary place in our society, and those very supply lines can be vulnerable to criminals.
In this light, “getting rid of all of the guns” becomes all but impossible and not at all practical if it was. (And all of this is aside from arguments about Constitutional rights and freedoms.)
From the opposite angle, there is good evidence that guns in the hands of law abiding private citizens, as well as legal concealed carry, actually reduces crime. This is why so many states have enacted concealed carry laws in recent years. The first state to enact what is known as “shall issue” concealed carry was Florida in 1987, in response to rampant crime. “Shall issue” means that a state or county gun board cannot arbitrarily deny a law-abiding citizen a permit as long as that citizen passes an FBI background check and meets all of the training requirements. This check is far more extensive than the NICS (National Instant Check System) check used for simply purchasing a gun. The result was a resounding success! Crime rates dropped with record speed. Also, in all of the news accounts of crimes involving firearms, very few involve those who are legally licensed.
Not long ago, ABC News reporter, John Stossell, interviewed prisoners who were convicted of so-called “gun crimes.” They admitted that they had little fear of police or the law. Their biggest fear was meeting an armed homeowner or victim.
One more fact that we can all be thankful for: military weapons aside, the vast majority of guns go from factory to scrap heap without ever being used to commit a crime. A good thing, considering how many there are! So unless you’re a hoplophobe (a person with an irrational fear of guns), then guns in the hands of peaceful citizens should never be viewed as a problem.
In our continued search for ideas to combat crime, another often mentioned concept is “safe storage” for firearms. That seems like good, common sense thinking at first glance. Shouldn’t people, especially parents, make sure that their guns aren’t accessible to children or thieves? Of course! I’ve never heard an argument against the spirit of this idea. What bothers many gun owners is that, when “safe storage” is codified into law and made mandatory, it often requires that all guns be unloaded and even disassembled, and then locked up with a trigger lock or inside a safe, making them inaccessible in an emergency! If a homeowner hears a window shatter in the middle of the night, he can’t ask the burglar to wait while they unlock, reassemble and load their weapon!
This is one of those things that fall under personal responsibility. Just as when you get behind the wheel of a car, owning and using a gun comes with great responsibility. Parents wouldn’t hand their eight-year-old the keys to the family car, and they should never allow their children to access their guns. I know of no state that allows children to be endangered, so as with the “more laws” idea, there seems to be sufficient legal coverage already, making so-called “safe storage” laws redundant. Further, there are many options available to home/gun owners that will allow for quick access to their firearms while keeping them secure, such as a quick access safe that can be opened in total darkness in under a second by either tapping in a special code or placing one’s finger on a fingerprint reader. With the falling price of electronics, the cost of such high-tech safes isn’t usually a barrier for most people anymore.
The fact is that the majority of responsible gun owners already do such things. Statistics show that accidents involving guns and kids are few and far between, regardless of what the number of cautionary advertisements might make you think. There has been some confusion on this point due to the definition of “children” used in some reports, sometimes deceptively. For instance, when you say “children,” the mind’s eye usually pictures kids from infants to 12, 13 or 14 years old, yet some studies include adolescents on up to everyone under age 21! In the former group, death by gunfire is extremely rare. When you add teenagers and young adults, an age group more prone to risky behavior, being involved in gangs and drugs (both buying and selling), not to mention that this is also the time where suicide rates tend to spike, the number is greatly inflated. Activists and political groups “spin” this to their advantage. A good example: the Peace Alliance, who states that 12 children die each day from gun violence, which includes “children” up to 24 years of age! So the overall truth is that, yes, parents need to do everything they can to keep their guns away from their kids, and all gun owners need to take reasonable precautions against theft, but new laws are unnecessary and the reality doesn’t merit the hype.
Continuing down the list, in the wake of the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic majority in Congress, it wasn’t long before some groups began clamoring for the renewal of the “Assault Weapons ban” that was enacted during the Clinton administration and expired in 2004. When I expressed my disgust at the idea, my wife of 23 years said, “Well, this may be one area where we part company. I don’t see why anyone needs an assault weapon.” It suddenly dawned on me that this was one more conversation we didn’t have!
So I expanded our dialogue by asking her if she knew what an assault weapon is. Just like most people, she thought it was a machine gun, or select fire weapon like those in use by our soldiers in Iraq. She was pretty surprised that the ban didn’t cover any of those! In fact, the term “assault weapon” didn’t exist within the law until the ban legislation was being crafted. The term is a variation of “assault rifle,” used by the military and has been attributed to gun control activist Josh Sugarman, who said, “The weapon’s menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to BE a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.” This is the political angle I mentioned earlier: tricks used to confuse rather than to shed light, hoping to gain public support and circumvent the losses handed to them in the courts.
Bringing some true light to the subject, I explained to my wife how my own one-and-only rifle, which I won at a chili cook-off and is a familiar sight around our home, was considered an “assault weapon” by some simply due to its cosmetic features. It is a semi-automatic version of an AK-47, a favorite boogeyman of the gun ban crowd and a design familiar to anyone watching coverage of the Iraq war. Yet it was actually “sporterized” during the Clinton years, complying with the law of the time. It’s not even considered powerful enough to hunt deer with by my friends who hunt!
Similarly, all of the banned weapons were actually no more deadly, accurate or powerful than the legal versions. Larger (harder to hide) and often more expensive than cheap handguns, they’re also rarely ever used to commit crimes. In order to get the ban passed through Congress, the “sunset” provision was built in. The Clinton administration also commissioned a study by the DOJ to document the effectiveness of the ban, so that when it came up for reauthorization, Congress would have some hard data for guidance. The ban was allowed to sunset, due in no small part to the study’s summation that there was “no clear effect” on crime.
True machine guns have been illegal for the average person to own since the 1930s, so the whole issue was obviously a ploy by gun ban groups intent on getting one step closer to their goal. It wasn’t about crime at all.
“Okay, Stu,” you might be saying at this point, “You’ve told us what doesn’t work against violent crime, but what does?”
My main answer, as I hinted at above, is to not fear guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Study after study confirms that where gun ownership is high, crime is low. Where concealed carry is permitted, assault, rape and murder are also low! The data was enough to convince the legislatures of 39 states to enact “shall issue” concealed carry and 48 states overall to have some form of legal CCW. Gun ban groups try to scare people by warning them of the “hidden guns” on the people around them, but they neglect to mention the background checks and training that these people have had, and that they’re an overall benefit to society, providing a deterrent effect that makes everyone safer. But it’s not for everyone.
One original idea that I came up with was born from another faux problem: the so-called “gun show loophole.” Whether they’re well meaning or just posturing, politicians have made a lot of noise about criminals and even terrorists buying guns at gun shows even though there’s scant evidence that this happens. Just attending a gun show once will put those fears to rest. For one thing, all of the licensed dealers at the shows have to treat each transaction as if it was done right from their store, and that means a background check – no exceptions! For this reason, criminals seldom frequent gun shows.
What’s really going on is that many of these politicians are trying to shut down private sales. Imagine, for example, that you have a gun you’d like to sell. You could take it to the show and sell it to a licensed dealer. Before the deal is closed, though, another attendee steps up and offers you more for your gun than the dealer. You’re as free to sell it to him/her in a private transaction at the show as you are to sell it out in the parking lot or in your own home. Such meetings between buyers and sellers happen at many places besides gun shows, such as online forums, classified ads, shooting clubs and bulletin boards. If reducing crime was truly their focus, it seems to me that legislators would cast a wider net! With that idea in mind, my “big idea” is to open up the NICS system to private sellers. Currently only FFLs (Federal Firearms Licensed dealers) can access the system and private citizens are barred due to privacy issues, not to mention that a ton of people accessing the system all at once would cause a collapse! I suggest making it a one-time permit process, which would require the seller to log in their information as well, to safeguard against abuse. This would let sellers know whether or not they’re selling to a prohibited person. It would have one more added benefit: identifying illegal, unlicensed, high-volume dealers. A person who sells a lot of weapons over the course of a year will stand out from someone who sells a gun here and there or even a whole collection. I see it as a total win-win situation.
Speaking of NICS, a few years back, a relative of mine who is not only a wonderful woman, but one who had once dated a police officer, was comfortable around firearms and was even an excellent shot asked me a question. As gun-savvy as she was, she was in favor of the old five-day waiting period, and her question was, “Why the hurry? What possible reason does anyone have to not wait a few days for a gun?” The logic behind the notion of a waiting period was that if, in a fit of anger, one headed off to the local gun shop intent on murder, there would be a “cooling off” period. With no real data or experience to draw from, most people thought that it was an excellent idea. So many did so that, in fact, it was the law until the computerized NICS system was unveiled.
Still, the words of Martin Luther King Jr. kept running through my mind: “A right delayed is a right denied.” Knowing that many of the old prohibitions on guns were, at one time, meant to keep black men and women disarmed and defenseless, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the notion and find out the facts; I needed hard data. Once again the Internet came to my rescue.
According to statistics from the ATF, the average age of a recovered “crime gun” is six years old. This means that people who buy a gun and instantly use it in a crime are a rarity. Even so, that didn’t strike me as a very satisfying answer to that question. Even a seasoned shooter, like my relative, is tempted to say, “It might cause a little inconvenience, but if it saves one life…” With no other supporting rationale, even I’d be tempted to agree!
So I began to consider the idea from the opposite end: could such a law actually put lives in danger? Incredibly, the answer seems to be yes! Soon after the federal waiting period was implemented, reports of women being killed during rancorous divorce proceedings began to arise. In fear of their former spouse and unable to move for one reason or another, they attempted to purchase a firearm and were murdered during the waiting period. What was even more alarming to me was the frequency with which this happened! Most of the time these women had protection orders against their soon-to-be former spouse, but they were nothing more than a piece of paper designed to give a false sense of security. I began to imagine other scenarios where one might be able to see trouble coming and be unable to avoid it, but such instances are less well documented than divorce proceedings. In an effort to make things safer, the waiting period turned out to be one more in a long line of failed safeguards with unintended consequences.
Thankfully the waiting period was replaced by NICS, as I mentioned previously, which is a computerized database of convicted felons and other people who are prohibited by law from legally owning or possessing a firearm. While it won’t stop a determined criminal from getting their hands on a weapon, it will shut them out from legal sources. Even though some extremists on both sides weren’t happy with the idea, it has shown its efficacy over time.
It hasn’t been perfect. The Virginia Tech shooting was a shocking wake-up call that revealed a big, man-made flaw in the system: a mental patient who should have failed the check was able to buy a gun because funding wasn’t included when the law was passed to include the records of dangerous mental patients. The shortcoming has since been corrected, but the maddening thing was that it was predictable and unnecessary. It was a sad side effect of people playing politics with a very serious issue. To the surprise of everyone but its members, the NRA knew that Congress was going to try to correct the error, so they stepped-in, getting together with congressional leaders to craft some improvements to correct the mistake.
In the end, though, I finally had the answer my in-law asked me for: there seems to be no basis in fact that a waiting period saves lives and, in fact, the evidence shows it to be dangerous. This aspect turned out to be satisfying to my in-law as well, since she’s a supporter of Planned Parenthood and a local women’s shelter. Scratch one more item off of our list!
Keep in mind that this list barely dents the surface and that the items that are effective against crime are only single pieces of a very big puzzle. What we as a people really need to do is to concentrate on the root causes of violent crime. (Note that I don’t normally say, “gun crime,” since any violence is horrible, and if a person is killed by someone wielding a knife or crowbar, they’re just as dead.) Many other countries have high gun ownership, yet they enjoy a much lower incidence of shooting crimes. We need to look at what they’re doing right and what we may be doing wrong. Yes, it’s a bit more nebulous, with many facets to explore and no quick fixes, but with a real discussion, absent the politricks, rhetoric and outside agendas, we can avoid the wild goose chases of the past and make our future a much brighter, safer place for all without depriving hunters and sportsmen or people concerned with self-protection of their firearms.
Discussions are two-way, so this means YOU! I didn’t set out to write just another article; I’d like it to be a continuing series and a mission all in one. So let me hear from you! Send your ideas, thoughts, comments, criticisms and other remarks to: DJStuCrew@gmail.com. I may not respond to every single one, but I promise to personally read them all and reflect your views and sentiments in upcoming installments. Until then, have a safe, happy, healthy and prosperous 2009!
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
contemplative
chipper
giddy
aggravated