Who Owns the Piece that Killed?

We’ve got lots of laws and practices that help folks with guns who kill. My December 22^nd blog – Crazy About Guns – described how the majority of states simply don’t provide the FBI with lists of those found to be mentally ill as required by the 1993 Brady gun control act. Since there are plethora of guns out there – the Sandy Hook shooter (with a history of mental issues) simply helped himself to his mom’s legally-acquired weapons stash – if some mental case has killing on his/her mind, there’s always a place to go to get whatever level of guns you want… Most murders by gun are committed with legally-acquired weapons. The shooters from Aurora, Sandy Hook and Webster firefighters are pictured above.

But there are other roadblocks placed before government officials in tracing killing guns. Television suggests that a cop at murder scene simply types (or calls in) the serial number of the suspect’s gun into a computer, and the tracing information instantly provides the requested information. Easy and efficient. And totally fictional, because the average TV viewer really wouldn’t understand why, in a modern era, we have absolutely no centralized files on guns sales.

In real life, the gun lobby has actually precluded the government agency charged with tracking such weapons used in a crime – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF) – from maintaining a registry of gun transactions. Instead, inquiries go to a windowless ATF facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia where tracing is done the old fashioned way. A bureaucrat contacts the manufacturer to begin a step-by-step effort (by phone mostly) to find how the gun went from maker to user. If any of the intervening steps is no longer around – from bankruptcy, death, etc. – sometimes that tracing fails. If sales are made through the private-seller exception (40% of all gun sales), where ID and background checks are not required, well too bad.

The ATF is clearly the focus of the National Rifle Association. “In an age when data is often available with a few keystrokes, the A.T.F. is forced to follow this manual routine because the idea of establishing a central database of gun transactions has been rejected by lawmakers in Congress, who have sided with the National Rifle Association, which argues that such a database poses a threat to the Second Amendment. In other countries, gun rights groups argue, governments have used gun registries to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens… Advocates for increased gun regulation, however, contend that in a country plagued by gun violence, a central registry could help keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and allow law enforcement officials to act more effectively to prevent gun crime.” New York Times, December 25^th.

The NRA has also convinced Congress that the appointment of the director of the ATF is such an important post that requires the approval of the Senate. Senators who fear the political power of the NRA. They have also made sure that whoever gets that job is prepared to follow the NRA’s party line on all gun issues. “In 2010, Mr. Obama nominated Andrew Traver, who is now the head of the bureau’s Denver division, for the post. But Mr. Traver, whose candidacy is opposed by the N.R.A., has yet to have a hearing, and his nomination has languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee.” NY Times. Every ATF move is scrutinized and monitored by the NRA. Morale at the agency is non-existent. One would think that the ATF should be at the forefront of recommending and implementing laws and regulations that might just stem the rising tide of violence that kills Americans and kills jobs – a perception that Americans are “gun crazy” that makes vacationers from all over the world take the United States off their travel list. Instead, the President has to set up a separate task force – led by Vice President Joe Biden – to do this job.

The NRA has convinced too many Americans that if we curtailed assault weapons and oversized magazines, only criminals would have them… instead of militia who increasingly speak for a decreasing segment of our nation. That none the mass murderers of late were hardened gangbangers, rather nut-jobs with easy and usually legal access to sophisticated weapons, seems to be too logical to deny.  As I pointed out the effectiveness of laws taking sophisticated weapons out of a society that once condoned them, one of my conservative friends made up a statistic that murders only increase in those circumstances because criminals do not comply with the gun removal statute. Australia was discussed. He really didn’t want to hear the facts, but here they are.

Australia, responding to a madman on a mass-killing spree back in 1996, did pass a law resulting in the surrender of 640,381 personal firearms. If the NRA’s logic is correct, that event should have resulted in a dramatic increase of criminal shootings and a lack of civilians with the ability to defend themselves. Since the NRA is all about mythology and fear, they probably don’t want you to know that their dire predictions failed to materialize.

Here’s the way it happened. According to the August 12^th Washington Post: “John Howard, who served as prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007, is no one’s idea of a lefty. He was one of George W. Bush’s closest allies, enthusiastically backing the Iraq intervention, and took a hard line domestically against increased immigration and union organizing (pdf)… But one of Howard’s other lasting legacies is Australia’s gun control regime, first passed in 1996 in response to a massacre in Tasmania that left 35 dead. The law banned semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns. It also instituted a mandatory buy-back program for newly banned weapons.

“So what have the Australian laws actually done for homicide and suicide rates? Howard cites a study (pdf) by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University finding that the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent, in the decade after the law was introduced, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides. That provides strong circumstantial evidence for the law’s effectiveness… The paper also estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people results in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the homicide rate…” America seems to a nation fueled by slogans, nurtured on mythology, easily manipulated with fear tactics with a chronic aversion to facts and common sense. What’s wrong with truth?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we repeatedly convince ourselves that we are correct even with a litany of hard facts to the contrary.