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It has been widely held that the United States possesses over 20,000 gun laws, leaving many questioning why we don’t enforce our current gun laws as members of Congress and the Obama administration grapple over new legislation.
The simple answer: we don’t have 20,000 gun laws, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — the very agency tasked with policing the firearm industry — is understaffed and underfunded.
The Brookings Institute debunked this gun myth over a decade ago, concluding that the U.S. possesses “about 300 major state and federal laws, and an unknown, but shrinking, number of local laws,” relating directly to the control of the manufacture, design, sale, purchase and possession of guns.
It also concluded that even if interrelated subparts of laws were treated as separate laws, the actual number of gun laws in the U.S. would still remain substantially lower than the 20,000-law myth purports.
Although there are actually fewer gun laws than people believe there are, we still confront the problem of having no means of efficiently enforcing the laws we do have. The solution does not require new legislation, but rather making sure the current regulatory apparatus can effectively enforce the laws already in place.
Gun lobbyists and legislatures have targeted the ATF for years, and the end result has been nothing short of destructive.
The ATF operates with roughly a $1.4 billion budget and possesses only 2,500 agents, fewer than it possessed four decades ago, according to The Washington Post.
The agency also lacks a full-time acting director, as the Senate has blocked both former-President Bush’s and President Obama’s nominations to the position. The current interim acting director, B. Todd Jones, a U.S. attorney from Minnesota, is only working part-time at the agency.
Of its agents, the bureau has only about 600 inspectors to police over 115,000 firearm dealers. In 2009, it was reported that the ATF managed to only inspect roughly 11,000 of those gun dealers.
Current legislation has constricted the agency, favoring reckless gun practices and lobbyist groups. The NRA has long lobbied against a computerized database of gun sales as well as any kind of national registry, according to The Washington Post.
Due to this, the ATF must go through a laborious system to trace guns, by hand, back to the original store that sold them. The Tiahrt Amendment, which was reviewed by the NRA, also hid the public record government database for tracing guns from the ATF.
More problems arise because dealers are not required by law to keep records of their inventory. Since 2005, well over 113,642 guns have gone missing from gun dealers around the country.
In 1995, Professor Glenn Pierce of Northeastern University analyzed ATF tracing data and discovered roughly 57 percent of all guns used in crimes could be traced back to only one percent of dealers. But this is no longer possible because of the destructive legislation hampering the ATF.
Fixing our gun problems in the U.S. does not necessarily involve creating new legislation. It involves funding and empowering the government agencies such as the ATF so that our current regulatory laws can be efficiently enforced.
We must eliminate useless and utterly absurd anti-regulatory legislation, as well as reform current laws to eliminate loopholes and further flaws.
We need universal background checks in every state for both private and retail transactions, and we need databases to aid in the tracing of firearms and shutting down of the dealers that refuse to abide by the law.
But we will not get anywhere until we transform rational discourse and embrace the fact that the current state of affairs will not allow us to enforce what is already in place.
A version of this article appeared in the Feb 27 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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To say that there aren't 20K gun laws on the books, but only 300 'major' and 'an unknown, but shrinking, number of local laws' is laughable. One could define 'major' to be anything they want, to the point that there are only a dozen 'major' gun laws. Also, since when are the number of laws 'shrinking'? Were existing laws repealed? Hardly. There might be new laws allowing citizens to exercise more of their rights, but that doesn't repeal existing laws in any way.
The fact remains that people like David Gregory are cut a break when it comes to existing gun laws, so yes, existing laws are not enforced across the board -and if the ATF has enough manpower to illegally run thousands of guns to Mexico, I think they are, if anything, over-staffed. If you want to prove that existing laws are being enforced, then may I suggest lobbying the D.C. prosecutor to file charges against David Gregory.
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Obama can't get a nominee through the Senate? His own party controls the Senate.
With a budget of $5M per agent, I think they can afford to hire more agents.
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Former Astronaut Captain Mark Kelly continually talked about the 1.7 million criminals who were rejected when they tried to purchase a firearm because of the instant background check [having a criminal arrest or mental health problem disqualified each from the purchase]. By simply trying to buy a firearm these people committed a crime [a felony]; yet there were no arrests and convictions. In these instances, law enforcement [whether local, state, or Federal] not only knew the name of the person committing the crime; but had the person’s address, phone number, and other information.
Could making an arrest be any easier? Why doesn’t our police arrest these criminals and our courts put them in jail.
Don’t talk to me about more laws nor about underfunded agencies. This is easy – if someone tries to buy a gun and it’s illegal – arrest and convict!
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Check your facts pal. ATF did not "run" guns to Mexico. They identified straw purchasers and due to weak laws and standard of proof issues they did not stop them. It was not "running" guns. Watch something other than Fox News and actualy get informed. If you bought 10 AK's at a gun store and were stopped and questioned by ATF on the way out I'm sure you'd be calling your Congressman.
As far as David Gregory, get over it. It's called prosecutorial discretion. DC rarely charges people for being soley in possession of a magazine and if they did the person would have to have a substantial criminal history.
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The ATF encouraged gun stores to sell to straw purchasers, that were identified by the ATF as gun runners for the mexican drug cartels. The supposed premise was to track the guns to the cartels and shut down the trafficing mechanisms... Except, the ATF never tracked any of the guns, and never coordinated the program with Mexico. Then the Obama administration tried to blame the american gun stores for providing guns to the mexican cartels...
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The NICS database -- like many others -- is far from perfect and produces a lot of “false positives”. Remember how Sen. Ted Kennedy turned up on the “no-fly list” 5 times? The same sort of thing happens with NICS checks. Prof. John Lott illustrates the situation as follows.
Take the figures for 2009 e.g. :
…... There were 71,010 initial denials from NICS
…... Of that number, only 4,681, or 6.6 percent, were referred to the BATF for further investigation
…... The rest were errors resolved after review by the FBI that needed no further investigation,
…... the initial review didn’t find these individuals had a record that prevented buying a gun.
Upon further review, another 572 of these referrals were found “not [to be] a prohibited person,” leaving about 4,154 cases.
But of these 4,154 cases, only 140 cases involving banned individuals trying to purchase guns were referred to prosecutors, just 60 of which involved providing false information when buying a firearm.
Of those 140 cases, prosecutors thought the evidence was strong enough to bring a case only 77 times.
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