In America, Anyone Can Buy (Get) a Gun!

“It’s easier for a teenager to get a gun than alcohol in this state.”

Brittany Karzen, spokesperson for the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office.

The rising generations – the ones facing the greatest consequences from climate change, who have solemnly endured a litany of active shooter drills during their primary and secondary years, individuals with friends in the LGBTQ+ community, a demographic most likely to deal with termination of pregnancy issues and the group most friendly to expanding voting rights – are watching an entire political party, red state legislatures and governors and, most of all, their federal judicial system pound away at their most important issues.

The Supreme Court has whittled away against the scope of power delegated to the Environmental Protection Agency, reversed decades of court rulings and statutory mandates that were designed to protect voting rights, have legitimized discrimination against LGBQT+ individuals, stripped away even the most common-sense gun control laws and repealed abortion rights. As of this writing, the nation has experienced approximately 800 school shootings in calendar 2023. For each of the last three years there have been more than 600 mass shootings – almost two a day on average. Drug cartels operating south of our border have purchased millions of guns, including stockpiles of semi-assault weapons, to secure their core business: selling narcotics to US drug users. Most of those weapons were purchased in the US and smuggled south.

You have to start with the first time in American history that the Supreme Court ever addressed whether the Second Amendment was simply an amendment to allow citizen soldiers (“a well regulated militia” according to the text) to keep their firearms, the plain meaning of the amendment’s language, or something darker and all encompassing. By the time of a rather distorted ruling, several hundred years after the amendment had been adopted, a strange notion of how to interpret the provisions of the Constitution came into vogue through the Court’s Associate Justice, Antonin Scalia, in Heller vs District of Columbia, as the nation’s capital tried to deal with an outbreak of gun violence.

Indeed, Scalia’s bizarre theory of judicial “originalism,” now adopted by most of the current conservatives on the Court, required judges to interpret constitutional provisions solely in light of the realities of society when the provisions were enacted. Scalia limited his review of the amendment to common gun control practices in Brittain as the historical antecedent to the amendment (which he applied by misstating the law at the time) and a world where flintlocks and muskets were the relevant weapons upon which a decision must be based. It was Scalia, addressing students at Southern Methodist University in January of 2013 night who argued the Constitution is “not a living document” and is “dead, dead, dead.” Heller now stands for a ubiquitous American right to own a gun… and as subsequent judicial decisions have reasoned, that includes unregulated open and concealed carry plus the right to own semi-automatic assault weapons.

There are thousands and thousands of “straw purchases” of guns – where someone literally buys a gun intending it to be transferred to someone else (even if they sign an affidavit that they won’t) every year. Local gun control laws, which are routinely reversed as unconstitutional these days anyway, are easily circumvented by simply driving to a state where gun control is, at best, lax. In a December 11th Los Angeles Times piece entitled Arming America, Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee and Connor Sheets note: “The Times analysis found that there’s a firearms dealer within a 10-minute drive of 88% of the U.S. population, and layers of regulations have not stemmed the flow of guns to criminals.

“When law enforcement agencies recover a gun, they can ask the ATF to track its purchase history. These traces are a key tool to understand firearms trafficking patterns. Over the last decade, the number recovered and traced annually has steadily increased, according to data The Times compiled from ATF reports, and these guns are moving more quickly from store shelves to crime scenes.

“As Michael Eberhardt, former chief of the ATF’s firearms operations division, noted, most firearms used in crimes enter the market through licensed dealers. According to the ATF, a short amount of time from purchase to recovery can be an indication of gun trafficking. In 2022, California law enforcement agencies recovered 5,540 guns within a year of their sale by a dealer, more than triple the number recovered in 2012.

“Despite the clear pipeline from straw purchases to street crime, federal authorities say it’s difficult to make any headway against the practice, or even to know how much of a problem it is. Even for agents with cutting-edge tracking tools, investigating straw purchases is a complicated and time-consuming process… ‘Trying to identify straw purchases is extremely, extremely difficult,’ said Rick Vasquez, who ran the ATF’s firearms trafficking and interdiction branch until 2014… But for a straw purchaser, buying a gun is as easy as checking a box.” And that is well beyond the ghost guns manufactured from online designs and then molded by 3-D, computer-controlled printers.

A straw purchase what happened when Kyle Rittenhouse (pictured above at age 17), too young to purchase a gun in Wisconsin, got his friend (since indicted and convicted), Dominck Black (age 18), to buy an AR-15 for him… the same one Rittenhouse used in “self-defense” to shoot and kill liberal two protestors, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, the night of Aug. 25, 2020, in Kenosha. Black pled guilty to a misdemeanor, paid a $2000 fine and walked away. Too young to buy a weapon legally? No problem. Mentally unstable and thus unable to purchase a gun? No problem. Convicted felon and wanting a gun? No problem. If a gun-seeking individual cannot purloin that weapon from a relative, buying one is absolutely NO PROBEM… except for society itself.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the US is the only country not at war where there are more guns than people, if the US Supreme Court can reverse Roe v Wade on very tenuous grounds, they sure should be able to reverse Heller vs District of Columbia vastly more easily!