Dipping a Toe into the Gun Debate
At the age of 13, I remember looking out my bedroom window at a classmate walking pass my house with a black rifle. Brent was my age and lived just up the street. One of my earliest memories is of being told by my parents that I was never to step foot into his house. I’m guessing that they learned, probably from other parents in the neighborhood, that the guns in Brent’s house were accessible. According to a RAND study, 34 percent of children in the U.S. live in homes with at least one firearm. But that is not my story.
Growing up, none of family members—near or extended—owned a gun. So it was eye opening to have conversations with proud firearm lovers. I think of my neighbor Mr. O’Neill. Back in high school, I commented to him about the need to ban certain types of guns. Specifically, I recall being freaked out by the scary-looking AR-15.
I thought the AR-15 was an automatic weapon. I also thought that the “AR” stood for assault rifle or automatic rifle. Mr. O’Neill explained to me that the name comes from “ArmaLite rifle,” after the company that developed the weapon. Instead of being an automatic weapon, I learned that the gun was a semi-automatic, which means that it fires a single shot with every pull of the trigger and automatically reloads between shots. While I understood the AR-15 to be only a “weapon of war,” it was surprising to learn that it is one of the most popular hunting rifles on the market.
In high school, I obsessed over the “gun show loophole.” But in conversing with Mr. O’Neill, I learned how rare it was for criminals to obtain their weapons at a gun show. The most recent numbers I could fine indicate that only .8% of criminals got their firearm through this method.
I learned from Mr. O’Neill that the very first gun control laws in America were designed to prevent newly freed slaves from being able to own guns. “Black codes” existed until the the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as racist law makers sought to prevent African-Americans from being able to defend themselves. Learning this struck a nerve: true freedom involves a fundamental and inalienable right to bear arms. True freedom means being able to defend one’s self, one’s family, and one’s property.
When we debate gun policy in this country, we need to keep in mind that life in rural America is very different than life in the cities and suburbs. For example, Jackie and I just finished watching Yellowstone. Though fictional, the show about a ranching family illuminates the differences between life in rural Montana and life in a big city like New York. With access to fewer law enforcement resources and longer response times, rural residents have more of a need to rely on firearms for protection. Ranchers who own livestock also need guns to defend their animals from predators. Plus, the overall culture is very different, as hunting and shooting sports are often deeply ingrained in day-to-day life.
Just as I remember conversations with neighbors, I remember reading Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in D.C. v. Heller, which overturned D.C.’s handgun prohibition. Scalia wrote, “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment right is not unlimited…. [It is] not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” In short, Americans have a fundamental right to bear arms. But it is not a right without restrictions. We have to draw lines.
Take the example of automatic weapons. As a society, we’ve chosen to heavily regulate these guns via the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968. When the NFA was passed, the NRA president at the time, Karl Frederick, agreed that restricting civilian ownership of such firearms was the right course of action. As a result of these laws, fully automatic weapons are almost never used in homicides. Since the passage of the National Firearms Act some 86 years ago there have been four known instances of automatic weapons used in crimes where someone was killed. (In the tragic Las Vegas concert shooting a few years ago, the deranged shooter used a “bump stock” to replicate automatic fire but didn’t, in fact, have an actual automatic weapon.)
I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that, just as we highly regulate the sale of automatic weapons, we can draw the line at other, slightly less-lethal, semi-automatic weapons. But there is the issue of practicality. There are an estimated 425 million firearms in the United States, and National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that 70.1 million semi-automatic handguns and rifles. Today, one of out of every five firearms purchased in this country is an AR-style rifle and there are an estimated 15 million AR-15s out there in America. The genie is out of the bottle; there is no way to put it back in. And while a gun buyback program may have worked in Australia, it wouldn’t work in America. Any attempt to ban guns would lead to more guns getting purchased.
I’ll end with some observations by liberal writer Matt Yglesias. He observes a key tension in contemporary progressive thought. While there is strong advocacy of gun control, there is also increasing skepticism about law enforcement and incarceration. Yglesias writes, “Reducing gun violence will require more policing and incarceration, not less.” Any sweeping national gun ban would have to be paired with a tremendous expansion of police powers. As Yglesias writes, “If progressives want to make guns harder to get but don’t want to prosecute those who have guns illegally, then it’s almost as if they’re inviting a future in which only outlaws will have guns.”
It is common to hear from 2nd Amendment advocates that we should enforce the laws already on the books before we add new restrictions. They have a point. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), there were 112,000 attempts by prohibited persons to buy firearms in 2017, but there were only twelve prosecutions. Consider the numbers from New York City and Philadelphia. In 2021, the NYPD made 4,456 gun arrests, which resulted in a grand total of one—one!—conviction at trial. In Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner has deprioritized gun possession charges altogether, arguing that they fuel racial disparities and mass incarceration. According to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, only 30 percent of gun cases were dismissed or withdrawn in 2016—and by 2021, that figure had doubled, to 60 percent.
Another example of laws going unenforced relates to gun applications. The GAO reports that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms referred 13,000 NICS firearms denials to its field divisions for investigation in 2017 but only a handful of the cases resulted in prosecution.
The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was enacted on Nov. 30, 1993. One of the key Senate sponsors was Joe Biden. The bill created the AFT form 4473, on which people seeking to purchase a gun would need to acknowledge whether they are an “unlawful user of any controlled substance as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act.” Lying on the a federal firearms application is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. When President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, submitted the form in 2018, he answered “No.” We have since learned that he broke the law. In addition, the crime of being an unlawful user of drugs in possession of a firearm is another separate felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
In sum, I believe guns are too easily accessible in America. I believe in more restrictions. But if we want to convince law abiding citizens that their freedoms should be restricted, the place to start is to do a better job enforcing existing laws. It might make sense to target one of the most prominent lawbreakers.