Category: Gun Rights

Professor Tim Smith has calculated “The Social Costs of Guns.”  Apparently if you use “market approaches” to artificially drive up the cost of gun ownership, it’s not really gun control, even though his proposal would cost me thousands of dollars each year. He does a calculation on the social cost of gun ownership. To Prof. Smith’s credit, he admits that the social costs of rifles are actually very low, because they are so rarely used in crime. But at the end he proposes an annual registration fee of $140 per firearm, to cover the social cost they impose.

A lot of people would give up on gun ownership under this scheme, so it’s a political non-starter. It would gut our political power to resist further encroachments, and the registration scheme it would involve would result in massive non-compliance by gun owners. So this is not something that would ever become reality even if it could be passed.

I’m not entirely certain what kind of games the Republicans are playing here, but it’s looking like there’s going to be a vote on a House equivalent of the Cornyn bill, which would put a hold on people who are on the watch list for up to 72 hours (the current period allowed by the Brady Act). There’s virtually no chance this is going to end up passing since the Dems are pretty much universal in rejecting this proposal, so it’s dead in the Senate even if the House passes it. I think both sides are playing games trying to make a campaign issue.

As I’ve said before, the problem we have is that this does not fall along traditional party lines. The Republican Party has a healthy co-hort of “law and order” types who fall along the authoritarian side of the political spectrum. This part of the GOP coalition has never had much respect for civil liberties.

I don’t believe the NRA should be supporting this type of bill, since it looks to me like there can’t be any agreement, which means nothing passes. Why not let the Cornyn plan die in that case? What are we going to get in return for having a vote on this? What is the strategy here? Is it just disaster mitigation? Can we not hold the GOP together on this, or is there a real risk of losing GOP votes to a worse bill that might pick up Dem support?

The NRA believes that terrorists should not be allowed to purchase or possess firearms, period. Anyone on a terror watchlist who tries to buy a gun should be thoroughly investigated by the FBI and the sale delayed while the investigation is ongoing.

I get that it’s bad optics to support “guns for terrorists,” and that half of the country, more than half of the GOP, and probably an uncomfortable portion of the NRA membership care not a whit about the due process rights and civil liberties of people on the terror watch list. The ACLU opposes using these secret watch lists removing rights from people, as they should, but that’s because your typical ACLU type might be a raging liberal, but they aren’t authoritarians. There’s plenty of authoritarianism on both sides of the aisle, and that’s why I worry about this issue. It’s great for channeling the worst civil liberties instincts of both parties. The Republicans don’t care about civil liberties if it stops terrorists (or at least offers good theater for the public that it does) and Democrats don’t view there are any civil liberties issues when it comes to firearms. In their view it’s not a right: you may only possess arms as a privilege granted by the state.

This article at Forbes titled, “Gun Policy Is Hard,” gets it right, mostly. I would encourage you to go read it. I’ll wait….

One of the authors assertions is that we shouldn’t so quickly dismiss the suicide argument. I’m not sure what the author thinks can be done to prevent someone who is suicidal from using a firearm without seriously restricting firearms generally. We can’t read people’s minds, and I don’t see any solution that doesn’t involve making firearms generally difficult to obtain, which is a non-starter with us for good reasons. That brings me to the argument I want to address:

Gun-rights supporters often argue every increase in gun regulation, no matter how tiny, is just one step on the path to the ultimate goal: prohibition. The NRA, in particular, has resisted nearly any gun-control proposal, partially because it warns against the boogey man of prohibition.

I think Eugene Volokh pretty successfully and decisively destroyed the notion that slippery slope arguments are a fallacy. The reason we make slippery slope arguments is because we’ve seen it happen. New Jersey and New York both started with licensing, and in New York’s case licensing and registration. Massachusetts also passed licensing and registration. California implemented bans on carrying firearms and enacted stringent waiting periods (15 days). With the sole exception of New York (who’s licensing law dates back to the early 20th century) all these restrictions were passed during the first wave of gun control in the 60s and 70s. All of those states have successfully passed numerous more onerous restrictions since. California’s long slide, which is continuing as we speak, started with the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Ban in 1990.

The reason that has been successful is because each incremental restriction reduced the number of gun owners over time, and thus reduced our political power to fight new restrictions. During the second gun control wave in the 1990s, a lot of gun owners left these restrictive states for greener pastures, and the ones that remained tended to be either politically inactive and/or naive, further reducing our political power in those states.

The biggest predictor of whether or not you support gun control is “Do you own a gun?” If the answer is “yes,” you’re statistically unlikely to support very much gun control. If the answer is “no,” then you’re statistically likely to support more sweeping gun control. We’ve seen in history that even very minor restrictions, like California’s 15-day waiting period dating back to 1976, and the 5-day waiting period dating back to 1965, and the three-day waiting period dating back to 1956….. see where I’m going with this? Each incremental restriction reduces our political power, and over time that has added up to a rout. California is reaching the end. We are facing utter defeat there. An entire state of 38 million people is about to become like New York City, where firearms are not technically banned, but effectively very difficult to obtain and use.

So no, gun owners are not committing a logical fallacy worrying about the slippery slope. It’s real. Ask any state where these “reasonable common sense” measures have taken hold. All of them have only gotten worse over time. There no states that enacted gun control legislation during the first (60s & 70s) or second (90s) wave of gun control that have not gone on to enact more.

It never ends. House Bill 1770, sponsored by “Ban Them All” Rep. Steve Santarsiero, has been bottled up in committee to suffer the fate such an affront to civil liberties deserves. However, Santarsiero has filed a discharge petition to get it to the House Floor, so we could be seeing a vote. One thing I would be sure to stress in any correspondence with Republican lawmakers is that the FBI director does not want this legislation. This will play to many lawmaker’s “law and order” instincts, and perhaps offer them some cover to vote no. Follow NRA’s link and use their “contact your legislators” feature. Change the default message to your liking. It’ll help if they aren’t all the same.

It’s worth noting that Santarsiero is running for Congress in this district.