Lethal Passage (32 page)

Most important, toughening the process will staunch the free flow of weapons to the bad guys and others who simply should not own guns. Sure, some will acquire guns through burglary just as they do now. Others will drive trucks through the front walls of gun dealerships. And no matter how strict dealer licensing is, there will always be renegade dealers willing to sell guns into the black market. Likewise, there will always be gun manufacturers who tailor their designs deliberately to the demands of felons. But street crime typically is a crime of opportunity. So too is juvenile homicide. Kids have always fought and will forever do so, but the ready acquisition of guns by kids is a new phenomenon. Even our increasing suicide rate, according to the studies I cited earlier, may be associated with too-ready access to guns, allowing the despondent to blow their brains out upon the least dark whim.

The firearms industry has resisted regulation, disavowing any responsibility for the widespread costs and harm produced by its wares. But then, it has always been adept at ignoring the paradoxes inherent in the production and marketing of weapons. It develops
ever more lethal weapons while at the same time insisting that guns are not inherently dangerous. It claims the moral high ground by describing its wares as tools of salvation for those afraid to leave their homes, but somehow deftly manages to sidestep the fact that one reason most of us are afraid to venture forth is that someone with the same gun is going to leap out from behind a bush and shove the barrel down our throats. And that’s if we are lucky enough to encounter the old-fashioned crook who merely wants our money, not the snappy new model who likes to sneak up behind us and put a bullet in our brains so he can use our credit cards for a couple of hours without fear of interception.

The NRA’s greatest coup has been in constantly bleating that gun controls cannot and will not work, while working feverishly to ensure that indeed whatever regulations are enacted are so full of exceptions and gifts to the downtrodden dealers and manufacturers that they could not possibly have an impact. Notice, please, that wherever possible in this book I have avoided using the phrase
gun control
, a term the NRA has conflated with paranoid visions of jack-booted agents kicking down the doors of honest gun owners.

If one parts the curtain hung by the NRA, one sees that in fact firearms regulations can and do work, when given half a chance.

South Carolina, as I mentioned earlier, was a primary source of crime guns seized in the Northeast until it passed the nation’s first law limiting sales of handguns to one a month. It quickly fell to the bottom of ATF’s list of states feeding firearms to New York. The National Firearms Act of 1934 sharply reduced criminal use of machine guns. The bad guys undoubtedly turned to other, more readily available guns, but at least when they used the guns, they fired one shot at a time. If still able to acquire machine guns from hardware stores and pawnshops, our felons and gang members would undoubtedly have done so, and the drive-by shootings we read so much about today would have taken far more innocent lives. Patrick Purdy’s attack on the Stockton schoolyard, for example, might have killed even more children had he used a true, fully
automatic AK-47, rather than its semiautomatic equivalent. Machine guns made a comeback in the 1980s, but only because such manufacturers as RPB and S.W. Daniel placed guns on the market that could readily, if illegally, be converted from semiautomatic to fully automatic operation.

The Gun Control Act of 1968, however much reviled by the NRA, succeeded in establishing the national tracing network that law-enforcement agencies now take for granted.
Strict gun controls in Washington, D.C., helped reduce gunshot homicides in the city by 25 percent from 1976 through 1987, but did not alter the rate of homicide involving other kinds of weapons or the homicide rate in neighboring Virginia and Maryland. This improvement, of course, was erased by the 1990s, when Washington experienced a wild surge of homicides that caused the city to be dubbed the murder capital of America. Although the National Rifle Association likes to point to this as one example of how gun controls cannot work, the real lesson is rather different. Gun controls in a single city cannot possibly succeed when that city is surrounded by regions with few or no controls.

Existing federal laws contain gaping loopholes that allow the free flow of guns from legitimate channels to the bad guys. We have seen, for example, that a consumer who makes a false statement in filling out form 4473 commits a felony; a dealer who does likewise commits only a misdemeanor. Dealers must keep detailed records of their sales of guns from their stores, but a private citizen can sell a gun to a friend with no restriction. A dealer operating at a gun show must follow all federal regulations, but a private citizen at an adjacent table can sell guns from his personal collection without so much as a signature. Federal law prohibits certain classes of individuals such as convicted murderers and dope peddlers from buying guns, then relies on those same individuals to exclude themselves by giving honest answers on form 4473. This last curiosity would be comical if not for its lethal effect.

These gaps in existing federal law, and the utter lack of uniform
regulations governing most other aspects of firearms transactions, create insane juxtapositions of regulation and deregulation at those points where federal and state laws intersect. Guns Unlimited, as I’ve shown, played regional variations in the law to its advantage, selling customers a handgun in one jurisdiction, but completing the paperwork and delivering the weapon in another, less-regulated locale. In Maryland, state law requires that anyone who buys a handgun from a legitimate dealer must wait seven days before he can actually take possession of the gun; yet, as per federal law, if he buys that same gun from a private seller, say after seeing it advertised in the classified ads of his local newspaper, he can receive the gun immediately.

On December 14, 1992, Wayne Lo, a Montana boy attending Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bought a semiautomatic Chinese ancestor of the AK-47, called an SKS, simply by presenting his Montana driver’s license and plunking down $150. Before the McClure-Volkmer Act, he could not have bought the gun so readily. The Gun Control Act of 1968 had banned interstate sales. Even if Lo had established residency in Massachusetts, he still could not have walked away with the gun. Under Massachusetts law, he would have had to apply for a firearms identification card and wait thirty days for a background check. The McClure-Volkmer Act, however, allowed sales of rifles and shotguns to out-of-state buyers if the sale is conducted in accord with the laws of the buyer’s home state. Regulations in Montana are notoriously lax. Lo used the gun that night to kill a professor and a student, and to wound four others at the college. He had acquired the ammunition by mail directly from a North Carolina ammunition supplier. This transaction too was a dividend of the McClure-Volkmer Act, which repealed the Gun Control Act’s ban on interstate and mail-order sales of ammunition directly to consumers.

The lack of a uniform system of federal regulations allows traffickers to shop jurisdictions for the easiest commercial conditions.
When South Carolina instituted its one-gun-a-month law, for example, Virginia became the number one source of crime guns found in the Northeast. Early in 1993, Virginia passed its own one-a-month law. Although the new law’s impact was not immediately apparent, it seemed certain to reduce the traffickers’ interest in Virginia. The trafficking will not stop, however. Just as many guns will make their way to the bad guys as ever before. The East Coast buyers will simply spend their money elsewhere, most likely Georgia, Ohio, and West Virginia.

That the nation needs a detailed, uniform code of firearms regulations ought to be, by now, beyond rational dispute. The fact is, many states have already passed firearms regulations far stricter than anything Congress has ever seriously debated. As of 1989, for example, twenty states already required that consumers first get some kind of license or purchase permit before acquiring a handgun; nineteen had a handgun waiting period ranging from forty-eight hours to up to six months.

The Second Amendment certainly poses no obstacle, despite the NRA’s rhetoric. As written in the Constitution, the full amendment reads: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The amendment may indeed guarantee individuals the right to bear arms. Then again, it may not. At this point, only a definitive ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court can resolve the matter. I for one remain intrigued by the “well-regulated” portion, which the NRA omitted when it displayed the rest of the amendment on the front of its Washington, D.C., headquarters. One gun-camp scholar has gone so far as to suggest that “well-regulated” means equipped with rifles that shoot straight.
In his book,
The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies?
David Kopel argues that “in firearms parlance ‘regulating’ a gun means adjusting it so that successive shots hit as close together as possible.” He writes that “ ‘regulated’ was an exhortation to competence,
not an invitation to bureaucracy.” His conclusion, one he describes as “plausible,” is that a “well-regulated militia” meant “an effective citizen militia whose members hit their targets.” Kopel presents this notion three hundred pages into a detailed, heavily footnoted volume published by the Cato Institute that on first read may seem unbiased and almost scholarly. It is always important, however, to read anything on the gun debate carefully with an eye to capturing distortion and undisclosed bias. Kopel raises his true flag on page 152 where he cites research by “criminologist Paul Blackman.” Blackman may indeed be considered a criminologist in some circles, but he is also the NRA’s director of research. And Kopel, as I later found, is an NRA activist: and gun columnist. Nowhere, I might add, did the book divulge Kopel’s true identity.

I happen to side with established constitutional scholars who believe the document was designed to be applied at any time in the future with full relevance and authority to accommodate even such once-inconceivable developments as women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. I cannot help but wonder how James Madison would react upon reading a week’s worth of the Metro section of the
New York Times
, especially at year-end when the
Times
and most other big-city papers present their running tallies of the year’s homicides.

All the noise and dust generated by the debate over the true meaning of the Second Amendment obscures a fundamental question: Who cares? I recognize: that here I am inviting the NRA to do a little joyful editing and display this sentence in one of its ads or better yet in one of its emergency Minuteman mailings. (I say now, it’s okay, boys, you have my permission.) In fact, the Second Amendment does not, and never has, prohibited robust regulation of firearms, not even the NRA-conjured bogey, national registration of firearms.

Rather than viewing federal firearms regulation as the first step toward tyranny, as the NRA propagandists propose, we should see
it as a means of ensuring that we can still enjoy the liberty we do have. We live now under the increasing restrictions of a particularly pernicious kind of tyranny that has sharply proscribed the contours of our lives. We do not go out at night without first considering the risks involved in doing so. Already many of us consider vast portions of America off-limits to us because of the potential for gun violence. We run red lights at lonely intersections. We choose our gas stations with care. We park as closely as possible to the entrances of our favorite malls. We avoid certa
in automated teller machines. When we pull up at our neighborhood 7-Eleven store, we look carefully through the display windows to see if the place is being held up. We do not intercede when we encounter an altercation among teenage boys because one or both may have a gun. We don’t dare yell at drivers who drive too fast through our neighborhoods. When our cars are hit from behind, we keep driving until we reach the nearest police station. In happier times this was called leaving the scene of an accident; now even my insurance company advises the practice.

Today when we send our kids off to school, we experience a brand-new kind of anxiety, the fear not that some bully will rough them up and steal their lunch money, but that they will be shot dead. What are we to advise our children today when they come home complaining of harassment by the school bully? Do we teach them how to fight, as Ward Cleaver might have taught “the Beave,” or do we buy them Kevlar vests and tell them to stay low? Should we buy our kids Raven pocket semiautomatics?
A 1993 survey by Louis Harris found that four out of ten students said the fear of violence had sharply altered what they did with their free time and whom they picked to be their friends. These students lived in rural, suburban, and urban neighborhoods.
Fifty-five percent said they wished their schools had metal detectors. In a related survey, Harris found that 59 percent of adults saw the dangers from guns as “serious” as or “more serious” than car crashes. Even the NRA’s rank and file seem troubled.
Thirty-four percent of the NRA members captured in Harris’s survey agreed “young people’s safety is endangered by there being so many guns around these days.”

I read with rueful delight a 1993 cartoon by Mike Luckovich of the
Atlanta Constitution
, which showed an Arab terrorist squad in a bomb-packed car receiving some last-minute advice before heading for America. “Remember, carry a map. If you get lost, you may end up in a bad neighborhood. If someone rear-ends you, don’t get out. They may be armed carjackers. Keep your doors locked.…”

In 1975, a congressional subcommittee asked the NRA’s Harlon Carter if he felt it was preferable to allow felons, drug addicts, and the mentally ill to acquire guns, rather than to establish a means of checking the backgrounds of all buyers. Yes, Carter responded, it was “a price we pay for freedom.”