Gun Guys

While there’s a lot of talk lately about closing loopholes, the biggest loophole in American gun law today remains open: while gun sales at a licensed dealer require any number of background checks and paperwork, private gun sales (at gun shows and through newspapers) require no such checks– private gun dealers can sell weapons to anyone, completely legally, and must answer to no one. Unbelievable? It is, but it’s true. As one researcher in California found, almost every gun law on the books can be easily ducked by simply buying weapons at the gun show in states where this loophole is not closed.

California’s stringent weapons laws go a long way toward reducing illegal purchases at gun shows without alienating potential customers, finds a leading researcher in the prevention of firearm violence.

Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, Davis, covertly observed and documented illegal gun sales at 28 gun shows; eight were in California, where shows are tightly regulated, and the rest were in Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Florida.

California requires that gun show promoters be licensed, while the other four states (the leading sources of guns used in crimes in California) don’t regulate shows at all.

Gun shows have long been suspected to be source of guns for criminals, but “before this no one, to my knowledge, has actually gone to these shows and observed what guns were being sold and to whom, or checked whether laws were being adhered to,” said Stephen Teret, director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who was not involved in this research.

“Now, for the first time, the public policy discussion on gun shows can be based on data rather than speculation,” Teret added.

And the data ain’t good. Wintemute found all kinds of problems at these gun shows, including gun dealers selling weapons directly to people that they even knew would give them away to criminals, and lots and lots of straw purchases

. Those are actually illegal when performed by licensed dealers, but considering that no one checks on private gun dealers, even licensed dealers can apparently get away with them at gun shows.

Wintemute saw far more “straw purchases” (where someone with a clean record buys a gun for someone with a criminal record) in unregulated states.

Though these transactions are banned by federal law, most of the straw purchases Wintemute saw were “out in the open, with no evidence that buyer or seller felt the need to hide their conduct,” he said. “So I infer from that that there’s no substantial effort to enforce [the federal law banning straw purchases] at gun shows.”

The sale of assault weapons and undocumented private party gun transactions (which don’t require a background check) were far less common at the California shows, where they are regulated and require background checks.

Private party purchases are another suspected source of guns for criminals. After one such transaction that Wintemute witnessed in which four young men bought eight handguns, a gang unit officer commented, “They’ll just take ‘em out on the street and sell ‘em.”

So what’s the gun lobby’s answer to information like this? Whenever regulation of these gun shows is suggested, the gun lobby blows it off, and claims it will “inconvenience law-abiding gun owners” more than stop any criminals from buying weapons.

Gun-show promoter Bert Guy, who stages events in Arizona and Nevada, said in an earlier interview that Wintemute’s fears are exaggerated.

Most sellers at gun shows, he said, are licensed and conduct background checks on prospective customers, adhering to federal law. Adding regulations at gun shows, he said, will only punish law-abiding citizens.

“Do you think these laws are really going to do anything to slow (criminals) down?” Guy asked.

Um, actually– yes. They will.

“Gun shows can be regulated so as to diminish their importance as sources of crime guns without greatly diminishing attendance or commercial activity,” he said.

The bottom line, according to Wintemute: “Regulation works.”

It’s as simple as that. If laws were useless, we wouldn’t regulate the act or murder or theft. But the fact is that criminals commit crimes based not on some inner moral instinct that makes them different from the NRA’s mythical “law-abiding gun owners.” No, criminals commit crimes based on the opportunity they get to do so. If criminals have a loophole to buy guns at gun shows, they’ll do so. If we close that loophole, they won’t be able to buy guns at gun shows. It’s as simple as that.

As for the “inconvenience” of taking two minutes to fill out a piece of paperwork, it’s nonexistent. Any responsible gun owner should be more than happy to fill out the paperwork, especially if it means (and it does) that his own community will be safer because of it. In the end, if we don’t require background checks at gun shows, just who are we making things easier for? It’s not the “law-abiding gun owner.” It’s the criminal.

But gun show regulation somehow hurts the “law abiding”? While no law ever stands in the way of America’s brilliant criminal class?? The truth is that laws which help us sort out the criminals from the law abiding (through background checks) also keep firearms out of the hands of the latter. Who would oppose that?

Unlicensed gun dealers. Unscrupulous gun manufacturers. Second Amendment extremists?

At its heart, the argument against background checks at gun shows is a financial one, driven by gun dealers and the gun lobby. With background checks, gun dealers can’t sell as many guns, because criminals can’t buy guns from them. They’re putting their own profits ahead of our safety. And while the gun lobby is more than content to let them do so (because they are funded by the gun industry that in turn funds them), we are not. Every gun sale, everywhere, should require a background check. If we’re going to start closing loopholes, let’s start with the biggest one, and close the gun show loophole for good.