Well, that is a joke of sorts. But here is Jim Kessler’s piece on deepening gun ownership. He writes:
There are 280 million firearms in private hands in America, and last
year there were about 300,000 gun crimes. That means that at least
279,700,000 guns did nothing wrong. We also know that in 89 percent of
crimes, the person using the gun was not the person who originally
bought it. In 34 percent of crimes, the firearm was bought in one state
and used in a crime in another. And in 32 percent of crimes, the
firearm was less than three years old.This indicates that the root of America’s gun crime problem is not
the number of guns in the hands of Americans, but an extensive web of
gun trafficking operations that funnel firearms to criminals.
…The first step is to make gun trafficking a federal crime, not a
term of art…Trafficking should be redefined as selling multiple guns out of a
home, car, street, or park that have two or more of the following
characteristics: obliterated serial numbers, are stolen, are new in the
box, or are sold to underage buyers or people with felony records. This
would still allow individuals to privately sell firearms to people they
know or trust, and it would put the onus on sellers to demand a
background check for those they don’t.
None of this seems quite right to me. It seems to confuse "how things are done now" with "how things could be done if people needed substitutes." For instance if this proposal were adopted, criminals might acquire guns at a young age and simply never give them up. (Think of the idea as raising the liquidity premium on owning a gun.) Or criminals might buy more guns from each other. I can see that it makes sense to shut off some avenues of gun flow, such as gun sale shows with no buyer verification. But once the stock of guns is high, I don’t think trying to control the flow is likely to prove an effective means of gun control. Forcing the seller to verify the quality of the buyer is one form of a tax, and yes it will raise the price, but it is in turn hard to verify how well the seller performed this responsibility. It seems less efficient than a simple and direct excise tax, for instance.
Addendum: Alternatively, you might pose a tax incidence question: how does taxing the stock of guns differ from taxing the flow of trade? Both will raise price but taxing the flow limits "the velocity" of guns. Taxing the flow should hurt "whim killers" but it won’t so much discourage regular killers. The former get all the publicity but are they really the bigger problem?
Just a technical point–there is no “gun show loophole,” despite what politicians say. People who aren’t firearms dealers can sell handguns without background checks on the buyers, whether at a gun show or anywhere else. Dealers can’t sell them without background checks, at a gun show or anywhere else. In short, the rules for sales at gun shows are the same as the rules for any other sales.
If you don’t like Kessler’s idea, what’s yours?
An excise tax won’t really help because it doesn’t create a way of increasing costs to black market sellers since they are unlikely to reveal their business. The tax would provide data on the number of guns sold by a given seller and could be compared to business license records, exposing the seller to sting operations. It would be cheaper to not pay and not report.
The proposed regulatory changes would, however, allow normal trading to continue more easily while providing law enforcement with tools to trap black market dealers with–or, rather, those most likely supplying to a crime other than tax evasion. The only way an excise tax would work effectively is if you made the punishment for not paying very disproportionate and provide a pointless payment ritual (like countersigning a tax form). In that case, any black market seller adopting the non-payment strategy would be exposed to substantial liabilities in the event he is caught as an undercover agent need only document that no tax was paid, which could be demonstrated by the lack of whatever confirming paperwork.
I think the easiest way to curtail illegal gun ownership and gun sales would be simply to put large penalties on owning or selling illegal firearms. Surely a large and enforced prison sentence (say 10-15 years or so) would easily be a large enough disincentive to deter a lot of gun crime?
I’m a firearm owner and FFL licensee, I appreciate the effort here but it’s not really necessary. It is already illegal to sell firearms which are stolen, have serial numbers altered or sell to minors. I don’t understand where his idea of NIB comes from, and think it should be disregarded. Since his suggestions are already illegal, there is nothing new for him to add here.
Interstate transfers are not difficult at all, I do about one every month. They cost about $25.00. No big deal.
But as to criminals buying illegal firearms, there is no real answer, it’s the same as asking “how do we stop crime?” If criminals don’t buy illegal firearms, then they will buy legal firearms, from law-abiding citizens. Any censure of that will affect the 279,000,000 law-abiding gun owners more than it will the 300,000 gun-using criminals. Unacceptable.
One idea for how to curtail gun crime is rather than invent more legislation is use the effective laws already in place. law-enforcement could start doing their jobs rather than the legislative branch try to do it for them. The belief is that if more laws are passed, more things are illegal and the less law-enforcement has to actually work.
Yeah, those kind of tactics worked super super well for the War on Drugs! Look at how well it reduced the illegal drug trade!
Re FL’s father and guns not more than 20 years old; you claim “There’s a lesson in there about how long it would take to solve this issue.”
Really? What is it???
jeff, be careful of citing John Lott.
http://www.whoismaryrosh.com/
Tax would probably affect legitimate owners and not criminals. If I want to commit a crime, my demand for a gun tends to be much less elastic than that of an enthusiast, so such a tax would discourage a very large number of legitimate gun buyers. Not to mention criminals will be buying guns illicitly and without tax, or are buying them second-hand where the tax would be very hard to enforce.
Adding liability to gun owners if a crime is committed with the weapon AND the offender had several well-defined warning signs (like the two of the following the author mentioned) would make it difficult to run such an illicit business, and might even substantially raise the cost of guns for would-be criminals, which could itself curtail some crime.
To the extent that otherwise law abiding or “law abiding appearing” individuals without FFLs are selling firearms to criminals there is one lesser tax with immunity we could try. We could make civil liability be strict and unlimited for any seller who sells a firearm to a person who ends up using it criminally who doesn’t get an online background check or a NICS at an FFL run on the transaction. Possession of a copy of the results of the background check/NICS would be an absolute defense to tort liability however.
This would curtail any portion that could legitimately be curtailed as anyone who wouldn’t respond to the financial incentive is likely to have enough illicit business to be punishable by existing criminal statutes.
-Gene
If all guns were outlawed and sales made totally illegal, guns would simply be imported by disguising them as kilos of cocaine.
In Maryland, where I live, gun crime has been cut by about 50% in less than a year. There are a number of improvements that helped accomplish that, but all of them were changes in law enforcement practices, not changes in laws. In my opinion the most important one was this:
The Division of Parole and Probation was reorganized so that, instead of all officers having the same case load essentially randomly assigned to them, the most senior officers have assigned to them a small caseload composed of the cases judged most likely to commit or be the victim of a violent crime. The remaining officers have slightly larger caseloads than before, composed exclusively of lower-risk cases.
Nearly all of the high-risk cases are felons. They cannot legally possess firearms. Now, their parole and probationer officers can devote enough attention to them to greatly increase the chances that if they do have firearms (or commit other violations), they will be caught. When that happens, the officer issues an arrest warrant, the warrant apprehension officers do their thing, and suddenly the prospective criminal’s estimate of the likelihood of getting away with crime looks very different.
The right to have and bare arms-period. The constitution does not even say no felons. If you crack down and make it impossible for the people to arm themselves without heinous government intrusion-see the case of David Olson-how long do you think it will be before secret gunsmiths just start making their own guns?Do you think it is a difficult skill to master? Think again. If people start making their own I suspect armor piercing ammo will be the companion to probably fully automatic weapons.Think armor piercing ammo is hard to manufacture? Think again. Consider cigarette taxes, Al Qaida is now smuggling cigarettes into the US to finance jihad. Talk about the government shooting itself in the foot. Lets try this for a change, FREEDOM. Just some food for thought.
Matthias
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