Clearly I thought it was, otherwise I wouldn’t have posted it given the emphesis on focus given in this thread and ATMB. As such I have no choice but to leave the thread.
~Max
One frustrating area in which the “min” side could be milked for more efficacy is in enforcement of laws already on the books. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer for that (as I will explain.)
To frame the problem though, there are two fairly easy to prove types of gun crimes that get committed but are often not being prosecuted.
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Is illegally buying a firearm. When someone goes to buy a firearm, their information gets transmitted to NICS. If the person isn’t cleared within 3 days, the gun dealer is allowed to release the gun to the purchaser anyway (the so-called “Charleston loophole.”) However, legally and procedurally, that is not the end of the matter. The background check continues, and eventually finds if the person was legally allowed to purchase a gun or not–at least sometimes (more on that later.) In cases where the sale has already completed, but it took the FBI more than 3 days to find out the person was ineligible, they can actually refer the matter to the ATF, who is allowed to actually go and retrieve the gun and even pursue prosecution of the person (exactly on which crime will vary based on why they were ineligible, if they were a felon for example that is a serious crime.) Unfortunately, this is rarely done relative to the number of hits, and rarely prosecuted.
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Illegally possessing a firearm. Federal law makes this quite clear–if you are a felon barred from owning a gun (which is any felon who has not had a “rights restoration” process completed–i.e. almost all felons), and you are found in possession of a gun, that carries up to a 10 year sentence under Federal law, and basically always at least a few years custodial sentence under sentencing guidelines. It should be recognized–this is a person who likely has spent time in prison and then been released, who very well understands they are not allowed to legally have a gun. They were then caught in possession of a gun. This is someone we should have high motivation to punish.
I think most people are in agreement in seeing these crimes more frequently and robustly prosecuted. So, what are the barriers?
For the illegal purchase–one barrier is the ATF has been serially defunded, and they are responsible for doing this. They essentially lack the resources. This would be an easy fix, but there is strong political opposition to the ATF even existing. Another major barrier is after 90 days, if the background check hasn’t been completed, NICS has to delete all the data. They are not allowed to maintain a perpetual record, so after 90 days the record of the sale has to be removed. We actually do not even know, how many cases never complete the background check within 90 days, and thus never get found out as being an ineligible purchaser. Everytown For Gun Safety has noted that the individuals whose background checks take exceedingly long, are disproportionately likely to be ineligible, so that isn’t great. There are thousands of illegal purchases that we know happen every year (the number surged in 2020–75,000 total since the 1990s), but there may even be more than that because a large number (over 450,000) background checks just in the last few years never complete and the records had to be destroyed.
On the issue of felony gun possession, the reasons it is not prosecuted more vigorously are varied. Also worth noting–dating back to 2017 there has been an effort to step up prosecutions on this charge, but it is still lackluster. One issue is these persons are often also facing a number of State criminal charges, and the local U.S. Attorney may just find it expedient to not be involved, let the person get punished in the State system, and not expend Federal resources on an area of enforcement that specific U.S. Attorney isn’t that interested in. Note that typically the punishment for this sort of crime is almost always less in the State system–one reason being the Federal sentencing guidelines and lack of a parole system in the Federal system, means people are more likely to server longer carceral sentences, versus the State systems which often have a lot of reasons to want to get as many people paroled or on probation as possible.
There’s also political opposition to this being prosecuted more vigorously.
I can’t speculate on how much it would reduce gun deaths if these two gun crimes were prosecuted and punished more vigorously, but I think there is an important, if depressing, lesson. These are two fairly straight forward gun laws that are already on the books, and they are poorly enforced. There are reasons for that, and it is likely that any future gun laws that make it onto the books will run into enforcement problems for that same reason. Given that, finding some way to fix the enforcement side of it isn’t just a weak ass call to action–it actually is a pretty important thing to get right or the legislation that passes (if any can pass), will be much less valuable.
For example OP mentions universal background checks–well, how useful is it to close the loopholes in the background check system if the government doesn’t actually complete the background checks, and rarely prosecutes people it finds bought a gun when they couldn’t pass the check?
In terms of "Minmaxing’, fixing enforcement has a strong multiplicative effect because it likely would apply to any future gun laws passed as well.
These are an excellent start. It does need vigorous enforcement of the requirement to have all private sales through a FFL dealer who will do the background check and ensure the waiting period is followed. If these checks can easily be skirted, the usefulness drops pretty quick.
What are thoughts the “min-ness” of requiring registration of handguns?
A minmax policy I have always been strongly in favor of would be to require an 8 hour safety course before you are allowed to buy your first gun. This ties into one of my personal theories as to particularly how gun ownership becomes most dangerous. I take a view that “casual” gun ownership is where a significant amount of societal risk arises. When a gun is something any adult can buy for relatively cheap, for a 30 minute trip to a retail store, it is very casual. Casual ownership also leads to casual carry and casual / cavalier attitudes about guns.
The young guy who say, is 21 years old and buys a gun because he thinks they are “cool”, and later takes his life during a depressive episode, never put much thought into buying that gun, but he still had the gun and was exposed to all of the risks. That same 21 year old maybe has a party at his house and there is drinking involved, and he takes his gun out to fuck around with it, someone gets shot–again, that’s linked to his casual purchase and casual ownership. Finally, casual gun purchases massively inflate the number of guns flowing around in society. That same casual gun purchaser, maybe he makes it to 25 and realizes he never uses the gun much, never really needed it, and it cost $600. He sells it to a friend for $450 and moves on with his life–but now the gun is part of the “liquid gun market” and can end up who knows where.
If that initial decision to purchase a gun was just a little more inconvenient, I think a lot of gun sales just wouldn’t happen. How many, I can’t say, but I think it would cut into them, which would mean less casual ownership and less casual possession.
Now, does this actually minimize the impact on gun owners? I think it does for a couple reasons:
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Most States have hunting safety courses, that became mandatory for hunting licenses sometime in the last 25-40 years, they usually exempted already-adult hunters. By and large people from hunting families still hunt (even though hunting has continually declined in popularity), and my observation is the hunter safety class, which is usually about 8 hours long in most States, is not considered a major barrier to anyone who wants to hunt.
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Before the recent move to create “constitutional carry”, where you are allowed to conceal carry anywhere without a license, almost every State required a license to concealed carry. Most States required you take a safety course to get that license. A standard format course used in many States was an NRA Handgun course, taught by certified NRA instructors and it would run about 8 hours. Many, many, many millions of gun owners were content to go through this course and thus, I do not think it was a very big burden on them.
Because we already have similar courses in existence and a long history of using them, I do not think it is a big imposition on gun owners to simply have to pass such a course before they buy their first gun.
I have been a proponent of this here on these boards for quite some time. Some exclusions sure, but this is a solid idea.
Most of these things are a good idea, but as the ACLU says, they need Due process. Red Flag laws also can work, if there is Due Process.
That is not what the Dickey Ad does.
The Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1996 omnibus spending bill of the United States federal government that mandated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
It simply stops the CDC (and only the CDC) from advocating or provoting gun control, as their famous study did. That study was biased from the get-go and has been roundly criticized for being poor science.
That is not a terrible idea, as long as it is online and readily available. I don’t want it to become a course available in the State Capital on every other leap year day, at a cost of $1000.
However, the RAND study has shown that as “inconclusive” , so I think it is better to stick with the science here.
Sticking with the science and accepting a single study as the final word on a matter are not the same thing. Real science does not work that way, where a single study finds some things and then the matter is settled. Social science like studies of crime rates are even more wobbly in many respects than the natural sciences.
Edit to add: The RAND study also measures 8 metrics and what studies show for those metrics in regard to policies. For gun safety education 6 of the 8 metrics had never been studied at all, so we essentially have no information. The other two are inconclusive, which is the furthest thing from “settled” scientifically–it would suggest more study is called for in fact.
The loopholes you desrice are clearly big problems that need to be fixed. Another huge loophole, and one that has led to many deaths that can very specifically be toed to lack of enforcement of a single rule, is law enforcement’s lax attitude towards confiscating firearms from domestic abusers, or from targets of restraining order. Here in California, such laws already exist, but are very commonly not enforced, or not enforced thoroughly enough (EG a woman goes to the police and tells them how many guns her abusive husband has; the police goes to the guy’s house and takes the guns they easily find, but don’t bother to search his truck where one of the guns the wife had listed is; as soon as they leave he drives over and shoots her).
Enforcing these laws would have basically 0 impact on any gun owners who aren’t domestic abusers, and I doubt even extreme gun rights advocates would go to bad for domestic abusers and their gun rights (though I’ve definitely been surprised before).
I agree with you completely about casual attitudes towards guns, how they are directly harmful, and how they contribute to the proliferation of guns in our society. However, I don’t know if targeting that aspect of gun ownership is within the scope of the thread. As you note, the ease and simplicity of getting a gun greatly contributes to this attitude, and making it harder to buy guns would help with this. But that’s basically by definition not a “minimal” gun control method, because making getting a gun harder/more complicated is exactly the goal.
The RAND study very specifically states that more evidence is needed because not enough studies have been done.
off-guns
Would you be OK with a bill that says “the CDC is allowed to study the harmful impact of tobacco. But they cannot present their findings in a way that advocates or promotes restrictions on the sale of cigarettes”?
Maybe I missed it in reading through the thread, but one key aspect of whatever set of laws we (in a slightly more ideal world that the one we find ourselves in) would enact is that they have to be Federal, with NO exceptions carved out for individual states to opt-in or out.
I think this point is implicit in most of the statements, but wanted to make it explicit. Because some of the ongoing issues (and certainly a lot of the political debate) center around weapons and policies in permissive states affecting less permissive ones.
While I definitely agree that more studies and research are certainly warranted in many of the other areas from the RAND link (personally, mandatory gun safety training seems like a no-brainer to me) , if we’re min-max’ing actual policy decisions right now for purposes of this thread topic, we should probably stick to areas with proven effects. It’s difficult to “max” with unknowns.
Right, people often try to claim that Chicago’s high gun crime rate is proof that gun control doesn’t work. Well, of course it’s going to be hard to enforce those laws when you border Indiana, which has very lax laws.
That’s another area for increased enforcement, the whole “straw buyer” thing. My understanding is that there are many gun shops in Indiana and Wisconsin which will let you come in every week and buy several cheap handguns. These guns are not collectors items, and nobody needs dozens of handguns for self-defense, so it’s pretty obvious that these are being bought for resale in the illegal market. I remember a few years back Illinois sued one particularly negligent Wisconsin gun shop, but I don’t know how it turned out.
I think this may be too narrow a read on the Amendment, and may take us OT, but …
To remake the argument without any comparisons - how is this in any way a defense of the Dickey Amendment?
The CDC has a job, which is to protect people from threats to their health. If the CDC identifies an item or behavior as harmful to the health of Americans, informing the public and government of the danger, and making recommendations on how to act, is exactly what they should do.
Let’s grant for a moment that the CDC study is biased (which I most certainly do not do, but even if it was). That would not be a reason to ban the CDC from making any kind of guideline in the future. That’s ridiculous. Let the CDC do their job and look into the best way to protect Americans from ALL threats to their health, INCLUDING guns.
And that includes gun suicide too, by the way. Often the question of whether suicide should be included in the figures for gun control debats is a big point of contention, but protecting people’s mental health (and how they may harm themselves or others during periods of impaired mental health) is CERTAINLY part of their job.
And this is all before we even cosider the other very valid points, such as the chilling effect on what should be very important research.
Yes, absolutely, preventing suicide is a valid public health concern. A small minority of suicides may be people with incurable illness making a rational decision to preserve their dignity, but the overwhelming majority are people suffering from treatable mental illnesses, and we don’t need to “honor their right to make their own decisions”. If people really “decided” to commit suicide, then the ones who are locked up on psych wards would simply attempt again as soon as they were released, but in fact almost none of them do so, and most people who survive a first attempt never make a second one at all.
And this is hugely relevant to the gun discussion, because all other common suicide methods fail most of the time, while guns succeed almost all the time. So it is absolutely certain that reducing the availability of guns would greatly decrease the number of suicides.
The Dickey amendment seems to be a sideshow to this conversation. Can we discuss that elsewhere, if it really needs to be discussed?
Agreed, let’s make that official. The Dickey Amendment should either be dropped or spun off to another thread.
How is the Dickey Amendment not relevant to this thread? It’s a law, and it’s about guns. I personally think that expanding the amount of quality scientific research on this topic is absolutely vital, much more likely to lead to significant change than endless arguments about whether a chamber should be able to hold five or ten rounds.
Modding: an argument specifically about the Dickey Amendment is a detraction from the OP. It has been mentioned but enough. Any further interest can be argued in its own thread. We are trying hard to avoid derailments.
Also, do not argue with moderation in thread. It is a serious violation. If you want to argue with it do so in ATMB or via PM. I’ll assume you were responding to LHOD.
Here is a thread already in the ATMB on gun threads.
I hope this is okay to say: while some basic background on the Dickey Amendment may be helpful for folks in the thread, what I really don’t want–here–is a debate on what exactly the amendment says and does. This is a discussion of what policies would, if enacted, save lives without placing a huge burden on gun owners (for more detailed wording, see the OP).
One such proposal is to conduct more research on the efficacy of policies. I support that proposal. The Dickey Amendment might get in the way of it, or it might not, but my interest here is in the policies, not on the politics surrounding them.
Agreed–indeed, it’s so vital that this might be my #1 priority.