The Part about Gun Control We Don’t Discuss

The news is rife with:

• bold Parkland high school students actively confronting officials, from executives from the National Rifle Association to folks like Florida Senator, Marco Rubio, who has collected over $3 million in NRA campaign contributions and who refused to renounce slorpping at the NRA trough in the future
• newscasters and celebrities joining forces and raising money/consciousness against private ownership of assault weapons
• right wing and NRA conspiracy theories on why the Florida students are unwary pawns in a liberal conspiracy to deprive freedom-loving Americans of their individual liberties
• sleight of hand shifting of NRA efforts to focus solely on mental health issues without referencing semi-automatic weapons
•  the failure of a “good guy with a gun” (an armed uniformed officer posted at the school) to defend the very students he was charged to protect 
• a Trumpian vision – which would generate new guns sales by the millions – to train and arm legions of teachers as gun-toting defenders of their students without explaining how police would know whether or not an armed teacher just might be the shooter, foisting a “more guns” approach to reduce mass shootings in our nation’s schools
• the President’s token gesture/edict to ban bumpstocks – add-ons to semi-automatic weapons to increase their effective rate of fire – given to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to supervise and implement

But now for the subtext and why, no matter what happens and no matter what token gun control legislation might accidentally pass through a GOP-controlled Congress (read: very unlikely), nothing realistically is going to reduce gun violence in the United States, at least at a federal level. What would you say if federal gun control were delegated to the National Rifle Association? You might laugh, knowing that they would – wink-wink – make sure that there would never be an enforcement effort.

So if direct delegation to the NRA would be too obvious, what would be the next best thing from the NRA perspective? How about telling the world that there is federal agency already charged with gun control (the ATF) but rather quietly making sure that that agency is profoundly understaffed and that it was so severely legally restricted in what it could and could not do that it could never mount a serious challenge even to the most egregious explosion of gun violence anywhere in the United States. Indeed, it is the ATF that is precisely that federal gun control agency, an organization that remains leaderless, underfunded and hampered by NRA-lobbied laws that insure it can never implement its chartered mandate. But because it exists, virtually anything directly or indirectly related to the notion of gun control is relegated to the ATF. And that makes NRA officials get all warm and fuzzy inside, even knowing that 70% of Americans actually support a much stricter gun control policy than anything proposed in Congress or any red state legislature.

‘‘We support enforcement of the laws on the books and A.T.F. efforts to apprehend and prosecute violent criminals,’ said Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the N.R.A. ‘We have and will continue to oppose political appointees looking to enact an anti-gun agenda through the regulatory process making it more difficult for law abiding citizens to exercise their constitutional rights while criminals continue to break the law.’” New York Times, February 22nd. Wink-wink.

The modern ATF is little more than an emasculated shell of its original mandate, a very effective NRA pawn, shackled by NRA-lobbied limitations passed since 1977. Federal agencies are, for example, denied the right to spend any money to generate death-by-gun statistics, NRA-lobbied provisions… because they know what the results would show. The Dickey amendment passed by Congress in 1996 and buried in an appropriations bill, for example, precludes the Centers for Disease Control from gathering firearm death and injury statistics.

Here are more of the troubling realities that completely gut the ATF, rendering it effectively useless. “[The] A.T.F. is on the verge of a crisis. The agency, which has not grown significantly since its founding in 1973, is about to confront a staffing shortage and is set to lose its tobacco and alcohol enforcement authorities. President Trump has yet to nominate a director to oversee the agency, which has been without permanent leadership for eight of the past 12 years.

“Amid the dearth of leadership and resources, the White House is pushing the A.T.F. to the forefront of its fight against violent crime. In response to the mass shooting at a Florida high school last week, Mr. Trump, who promised to fight violent criminal gangs and illegal guns — two of the A.T.F.’s key missions — announced that he would be relying on the bureau to regulate so-called bump stock accessories.

“But it is all but politically impossible for Mr. Trump, who counts the powerful gun lobby among his most ardent supporters, to strengthen the A.T.F. The National Rifle Association has long sought to hobble the agency in an effort to curb its ability to regulate guns, which the gun lobby has traditionally opposed.

“‘Most people in law enforcement know why A.T.F. can’t get a director,’ said Michael Bouchard, a former agent and the president of the A.T.F. Association, an independent group that supports current and former bureau officials. ‘It’s not because of the people. It’s because of the politics.’…

“For decades, the N.R.A. has used its sway in Washington to preserve the A.T.F. in its limited capacity. It has aggressively lobbied against nominated directors and pushed Congress to enact restrictions on how the bureau spends money to curtail its ability to regulate firearms and track gun crimes. One funding provision, for example, forbids the A.T.F. from using electronic databases to trace guns to owners. Instead, the agency relies on a warehouse full of paper records….

“In describing its own shortages, the A.T.F. says it remains unable to fulfill even basic regulatory responsibilities, including inspections of firearms dealers — something the bureau says presents a ‘significant risk to public safety.’

“The A.T.F. is also bracing for the departure of nearly a fifth of its roughly 2,500 special agents. Of them, 499 are at least 50 years old, according to the budget proposal, and face mandatory retirement at 57.” NY Times. So how you tell America that you are doing something about the assault weapon outrage knowing that nothing will happen? You make sure all those efforts are channeled into an agency that is completely unable to implement much of anything that would challenge the current gun-ownership status quo.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the NRA appears to be more powerful than 70% of the entire American voting public.