Biden's Dems are Coming for Our Guns

 

My take. (Mostly from the Right)

I’ve said before and will say again that I’m to the right of most people I know on gun control issues. In my opinion, the left has some major blind spots when it comes to gun control, and their policy solutions in this field tend to have the least reliance on data and the least nuance.

First, guns are not always used for crime or by the “bad guys.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates guns are used in between 500,000 and three million self-defense cases per year, far more than the number of deaths or injuries attributed to firearm use (in 2017, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC). As most conservatives are quick to cite, more than 60% of those 39,000 deaths are suicides, which is not meant to be a comforting statistic so much as it’s meant to point out that someone doing harm to another person with a gun is less common than a glance at the numbers might suggest.

Second is that the evidence of universal background checks’ effectiveness on reducing gun violence is limited. As German Lopez noted in a Vox piece, “several studies in the past few years ‘found that universal background checks, enacted at the state level, have a limited effect’ on firearm homicide and suicide rates.” To make it effective, states need a national registry or firearm licensing system to accompany the background checks.

Third is that we have much of what we need on the books right now to reduce the rate of gun violence in the U.S. Dana Loesch’s antagonistic and intentionally divisive personality makes me hesitant to cite her, but she laid this out well in her newsletter. The short version is that, thanks to a bunch of bureaucratic red tape and bad policy, the FBI doesn’t access a valuable chunk of its criminal database to expedite searches and checks on prospective gun buyers. This is probably how Dylann Roof was able to get a gun before committing the mass murder of Black parishioners in South Carolina. Making these searches more efficient is probably more helpful than expanding the time period for them to take place from three to ten days.

The Wall Street Journal also noted that in March of 2018, Congress “tucked a provision in a spending bill signed by then-President Donald Trump to strengthen compliance with the national background check system for buying firearms. The measure added incentives for states and federal agencies, including the military, to submit criminal-conviction records to the system. Federal law requires agencies to submit relevant records, but at the state level, compliance is voluntary unless mandated by state law or federal funding requirements.”

In other words: Until 2018, and still today, we continue to lack complete data and have poor compliance with the very systems already in place that are supposed to track someone’s criminal history and liability as a gun owner. Worse, thanks in large part to the gun lobby, we also have incomplete and muddled data on the impact of legislation around guns — because collecting the data on gun violence and ownership is fought tooth and nail at every turn.

All this being said, the content of this bill is being willfully ignored by many folks on the right. In their Washington Examiner piece, Reps. Cammack and Boebert wrote that H.R. 8 “would make it illegal for a farmer to lend a rifle to a neighbor trying to protect his cattle from wolves, for a homeowner to let her neighbor borrow a firearm following a break-in, for a collector to donate a historic rifle to a museum, and for parents to gift a gun to their child.”

These assertions are all directly contradicted by the actual text of the bill, which states unequivocally that transfer prohibitions “shall not apply to… a transfer or exchange (which, for purposes of this subsection, means an in-kind transfer of a firearm of the same type or value) that is a loan or bona fide gift between spouses, between domestic partners, between parents and their children, including step-parents and their step-children, between siblings, between aunts or uncles and their nieces or nephews, or between grandparents and their grandchildren,if the transferor has no reason to believe that the transferee will use or intends to use the firearm in a crime or is prohibited from possessing firearms under State or Federal law.”

It similarly allows exemptions for transfers “to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm” or “while reasonably necessary for the purposes of hunting, trapping, pest control on a farm or ranch, or fishing,” among others. The contradiction was so stark that I did something I almost never do: I actually submitted correction requests to both The Washington Examiner and The Wall Street Journal, which published similar language in their coverage of the bill (I’ll keep you posted on how that goes -- perhaps I’m missing something!).

Furthermore, fears of the bill being used to create a national registry are directly contradicted  by the fact that “the legislation explicitly prohibits the creation of a national registry.”

All this is to say, I think both sides are overplaying their hands here. The upside of how much good this bill will do, absent other measures, looks ambiguous to me at best. What we really need is better FBI vetting and more data sharing incentives like the ones tucked into the 2018 spending bill. That being said, it is the kind of legislation polling suggests the vast majority of Americans want, and even if it would stop — say — a few of the horrific mass shootings that occur every year, that’s a net positive.

Mostly, I say that because the dangers and restrictions these bills pose to legal gun owners are minimal, especially given the explicit carve-outs I just explained above. Around 90% of background checks are completed in minutes and 97% are done within three days, so despite the facts around the Roof case, we’re really solving for a minority of gun sales that have outsized potential to be dangerous to the public. I think that’s a perfectly good thing for the government to be trying to solve, even if this may be an imperfect way of doing it. I’m encouraged by the Republican sponsors on H.R. 8 and hope that there are enough Republican senators willing to attempt to transcend the culture wars over gun rights to address this legislation thoughtfully. At the bare minimum, given the support for more expansive background checks and the horrific nature of so much of the gun violence in America, they owe it to the public to offer some changes to the bill if they don’t like the current draft.