President Obama has broken his silence on the gun issue. His opinion piece in Sunday's Arizona Daily Star is a meticulously worded effort to define a middle ground on the issue on the president's terms, and then to invite those serious about finding solutions to join him in that middle, where ultimate agreement is possible. Although one gets the distinct impression that the president would prefer not to receive a positive reaction from gun control advocates like myself, I can't do him that favor.
The president's words were clearly crafted to draw fire from both sides in the American gun debate and no doubt they will. For my part, it is difficult to accept the president's apparent pride in having opened our national parks to concealed weapons, a policy that is opposed by every law enforcement group charged with the security of those parks. But beyond the "pox on both your houses" positioning, the president's call for consensus solutions to the plague of gun violence holds out great promise for progress to save lives.
For me, the most significant sentence in the article, and one curiously overlooked by the early commentators, is this: "If we're serious about keeping guns away from someone who's made up his mind to kill, then we can't allow a situation where a responsible seller denies him a weapon at one store, but he effortlessly buys the same gun someplace else." This is an unambiguous reference to a deadly anomaly in our gun laws. Under the Brady Law background check system, if a gun is purchased from a licensed dealer, there must be a background check, but in most states, if it is purchased from an unlicensed private seller, no check is required. Often these private sales occur at gun shows -- thus legislation has been introduced to close this "gun show loophole."
But the "gun show loophole" is really part of a larger loophole: in most states private sales do not require a background check, whether they occur at a gun show or not. This means that criminals and other legally prohibited gun buyers may be turned away at a licensed dealer, only to "effortlessly" purchase guns elsewhere. Significantly, the president did not mention gun shows in particular, but rather said "we can't allow" the broader private sale loophole to persist. The president clearly articulated the rationale for extending Brady background checks to virtually all gun sales. It is a reform the Brady Campaign has been advocating for many years.
The president did speak of other needed improvements in the background check system, including improving state reporting of the records of prohibited persons to the background check system. But he did not stop there. The president seems to recognize that, as important as it is to improve the records in the existing system, the problem of incomplete records pales in significance to the reality that, according to researchers, for about 40% of gun sales, there are no background checks at all. The president wrote that we must "make sure that criminals can't escape" the system of background checks. The private sale loophole is the widest, most inviting, avenue of escape.
As recent polling has shown, the proposal to extend Brady background checks to all gun sales is solidly in the middle of public opinion on this issue, receiving strong support even from gun owners. An astounding 86% of Americans, and 81% of gun owners, support universal checks.
Poll results like this demonstrate the mistake of viewing the gun issue as representing a great cultural divide between "gun-haters" and "gun-lovers." Framing the issue in this way is of great benefit to the National Rifle Association, allowing it to keep its followers in a constant state of fear and agitation that every sensible proposal is really a plot to weaken the resistance to ultimate gun confiscation. If president Obama is looking for consensus, he will find it. A policy of "no check, no gun, no excuses" has spectacular public support and will save countless lives.
Predictably, the NRA already has rebuffed the president's invitation to discuss the gun violence problem, with a typically obnoxious letter rejecting even the idea of a national dialogue on guns. Having collected millions in donations stoking the fear of an Obama gun ban, the NRA can't very well consort with such a committed "enemy" of the Second Amendment. The NRA has now fallen neatly into the president's category of those who "aren't interested in participating" in the "new discussion" because they "will predictably cast any discussion as the opening salvo in a wild-eyed scheme to take away everybody's guns." Perhaps the NRA's absence from the discussion will allow the real voice of gun owners to be heard.
At some point soon, the president must move beyond discussion to action and leadership. Far from being part of the solution, the NRA has shown, once again, that it is the problem. If President Obama truly wants a system that no longer allows countless violent criminals to "effortlessly" avoid background checks, eventually he will have no choice but to confront the gun lobby, and defeat it.
For more information, see Dennis Henigan's Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009)
For these reasons, it ain't happening any time soon.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It means that the prez is gearing up to throw you under the bus for a second time, and you don't even see it coming.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Earp's ordinance #9 was put into effect on April 19, 1881. This regulation forbade the carrying of weapons, including knives, inside Tombstone city limits.
So it's official. American society in the 21st century is loonier than the wild, wild West.
(I'm Canadian, by the way, and to the extent that I represent the rest of the world, Obama is viewed as a truly refreshing character on the American political landscape.)
And I'm still waiting to hear Obama sneer in contempt at the "professional right.” Even once. Never going to happen. He’s both their scapegoat and their sled dog.
How hard do you think it will be for the average criminal to get his girlfriend, sister, mother, brother, friend or acquaintance to go buy the gun for him???
Straw purchases are already illegal. Detecting them is virtually impossible.
Requiring background checks for the sale of all private gun sales infringes upon me. I've probably only sold two guns in my life but I've transferred ownership of more than a dozen firearms to various family members in the form of gifts. Should I have to pay an additional fee each time I give a firearm to a family member such as my daughters, my stepsons, my nephews or my wife. I know more about their backgrounds than the government does and I don't want Uncle Sham in my business. I also don't want to pay a fee to a licensed dealer to oversee the transaction when it will, IMHO, do nothing to keep criminals from getting guns.
For the most part, it's difficult to find any law enforcement personel reporting problems that have occured since the rule change was put into place, since there havn't been any.
The claim that allowing CCW in parks would cause problems turned out to be just as wrong as the anti-gun opposition to CCW in general. No surprise there.
Not to mention that it was actually done under the Bush admin. President Obama had very little to do with it. The rule was enacted in the last few months of the Bush admin. The courts place a temproary injunction on putting it in force because of a challenge all the proper studies had not been done as required for such a rule change. Congress resoundingly over-ruled the court by making it an act of Congress, not a rule. President Obama was only involved in that he signed the bill. But then again, it was attached to a very important piece of legislature and they had the votesto over ride his veto, so he did not exactly have a lot of choice.
Criminal misuse of guns is!
We don't waste our time and effort trying to keep knives out of the hands of slashers.
We don't waste our effort trying to keep gasoline and matches out of the hands of arsonists either.
So why waste the time and expense of trying to keep guns out of the hands of criminals?
Punishment normally comes after the crime, not before it even occurs.
That's because the crime usually does not occur and a policy of pre-crime policing is just a waste of time and effort.
Let's get serious and tell potential offenders:
"If you do the crime you'll do the time!"
If they don't do the crime who cares what else they do or don't do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
It clearly demonstrates where felons get their guns,and it is not from gunshows.
Human nature tells us that just because something is banned by the law, it doesn't follow that people will just cease wanting to have the banned object or engage in the banned behavior. Basic economics tells us that if demand is strong enough then suppliers will emerge. We see this around us every day. Almost without fail, banning something like drugs or alcohol has failed to reduce its consumption or the negative effects associated with it. Instead, it surrenders a monopoly to criminals and leaves society paying for all of the effects.
But arms are far more important than drugs or anything else that we might ban. Arms are not merely something for pleasure or a vice. They are the instruments by which the populace defends itself. Unlike alcohol or drugs, banning arms, the most effective means of defense, would likely be a folly from which we could not recover, at least with a republic that we'd recognize.
The real problem; we as a society do not hold individuals accountable for their actions; the left makes something or someone else responsible. The libs and progressives in general just cannot blame people for their own bad decisions. You read it every day on HufPo. These proposed gun law changes are just one more example of using firearms as a deflection away from the real problem…..we have raised a class of dirt bags that prey upon honest citizens, the left has hours and hours of useless discussion of why the actions of these dirt bags are not their fault….they never had a chance, Moma did not love them, daddy left them, latch key kids. So they blame guns, blame an object for an individual’s failures. To do otherwise would be an admission that 50 years of liberal progressive influence on education, social welfare programs, The Great Society of LBJ and acceptable of rampant drug use has been an abject failure.
The left’s great social experiment has failed and they just can’t stand it….So blame the GUNs.
Lay blame where it belongs….firmly in the lap of the left.
A broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html
Just like if you drive, there's a higher risk you'll be in an accident than someone who doesn't leave the house. But we don't outlaw driving.
There's a higher risk of lung cancer for someone who smokes, but we don't outlaw cigarette sales.
The bottom line is giving people a choice. To make adult decisions based on their own desires.
Choice. Something the left has endorsed for decades. As in being pro-choice. As in staying out of my womb. And my bedroom. Pro-choice.
Unless it comes to guns.
Gun ownership is legal. Abortion is legal.
Take comfort in that fact that many people view the lefts position on abortion as causing more deaths in the United States per year than guns have in the past 20.
Maybe you ought to come back when your own social stance doesn't look so, so, ah, I'm sure you can come up with a word.
Not much to the report, if there is guns there is a higher chance of gun crime..DUH...I always wondered what they did a Harvard.
This is gun-grabber sophistry. What they really mean by "unlicensed dealer" is no more than "private seller." They don't want private sellers, because they would like to turn the licensed dealer system into a national gun registry by means of mining dealers' records. Private sales undercut this scheme, so private sales need to be abolished first..
No deal, Comrades. We're never going to get where the grabbers want to go, because we're stopping this up front. They are never getting to the last steps of confiscation and prohibition, because we're stopping the first steps.
This is just another lame attempt by the second and third tier individuals who comprise the modern left to ape the tactics of their hero, the Russian butcher Lenin. Marx said "history repeats itself, first as a tragedy next as a comedy ," The American people saw through this a long time ago.
Yes, 40% of gun sales have no background check. But what constitutes a gun sale? If my friend says, "Hey, I don't want this Glock anymore, I'll give it to you for a hundred bucks," that counts. Gun shows obviously should require a license, but these statistics are probably done with an accounting trick. You can't restrict all gun purchases because of the right of first purchase; you can't stop someone from doing whatever they want with their own purchased item, modifying it, or selling it to someone else.
States should stop providing drivers' licenses - and state IDs - to illegal aliens - that are used to buy weapons in the USA. If someone cannot prove US citizenship - or is on US soil legally - they should not get SPECIAL TREATMENT to receive an ID of any sort - just by choosing a new name - and going to the DMV.
As well, ILLEGAL ALIENS should face Identity theft charges - for the fraudulent use of the personal information of US citizens - and acquire prison time - thereafter deported - and banned from the USA.
That will take care of - a large portion of - illegal weapons, felons buying weapons, etc. - and CRIMES.
To say it would not - cheapens every law-abiding US citizen - and our US Constitution.