The White House Swings (and Misses) on Gun Control…for the Umpteenth Time

In my analysis of the best and worst developments of 2015, I suggested that growing resistance to gun control is something we should celebrate.

Particularly since we have a President who is relentless (though fortunately ineffective) in launching ideological attacks on the Second Amendment.

Speaking of which, Obama staged a press event yesterday and announced his latest effort to make it harder for law-abiding people to protect themselves.

John Lott is the go-to person on these issues. Here’s some of what he wrote forNational Review, starting with the fact that Obama (gee, what a surprise) is disregarding the law.

…current law is very clear. Only federally licensed gun dealers are required to conduct background checks, and only sellers whose “principal objective of livelihood and profit [is] the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms” are required to obtain a federal license. Anyone “who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms” is specifically exempted from the licensing requirement. But that doesn’t matter to Obama, whose actions today will require many sellers to get a license if they sell even a single gun.

John also explains that background checks are not a panacea.

The current federal background-check system is a mess. …Hillary Clinton claimed that, “Since [the Brady Act] was passed, more than 2 million prohibited purchases have been prevented.” In reality, there were over 2 million “initial denials”… In 2010, the Department of Justice’s annual report on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) showed that 94 percent of “initial denials” were dropped after the first internal fact check. A 2004 review by Congress found that another two percent were dropped when the cases were sent out to BATFE field offices. Many more cases were dropped during the three remaining stages of review. …If a private company’s criminal-background checks on employees failed at anything close to the same rate, they’d be sued out of business in a heartbeat.

And what about the notion of requiring sellers retain information on gun buyers?

Well, this back-door form of registration doesn’t provide seem very helpful in helping the fight against real crime.

Police can’t seem to point to a single instance in which gun registration has helped them solve a crime. During a recent deposition, D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier said she couldn’t “recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime.” Police in Hawaii, Canada, and other places have made similar admissions.

Lott explains in the article that the system could be improved in ways that would make it harder for the wrong people to get guns, but he says that productive changes aren’t feasible because of the left’s real motive.

…their real aim is to reduce gun ownership, not to stop crime.

This is spot on. Indeed, I don’t trust the left of climate issues for similar reasons. What our statist friends say and what they really want are two different things.

Moreover, their proposed “solutions” don’t even solve the problems that they say they want to address.

Remember the video from last month, which featured a White House official admitting that none of Obama’s proposed policies would have stopped a single mass shooter from getting weapons, and that not a single mass shooter has been on the Administration’s no-fly list or terrorist watch list?

Well, in the words of Yogi Berra, it’s deja vu all over again. These blurbs from an Associated Press story tell us everything we need to know about the President’s latest proposals.

The gun control measures a tearful President Barack Obama announced Tuesday would not have prevented the slaughters of 20 first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, or 14 county workers at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California. …The shooters at Sandy Hook and San Bernardino used weapons bought by others, shielding them from background checks. In other cases, the shooters legally bought guns. …In Aurora, Colorado, and at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., men undergoing mental health treatment were cleared to buy weapons because federal background checks looked to criminal histories and court-ordered commitments for signs of mental illness.

Since we’re on this topic, here’s my recent interview on gun control.

As you can see, I’m doing a bit of a victory dance. It’s great that the American people won’t go along with the left, even if it means they have to engage in civil disobedience.

By the way, I goofed in discussing the poll on banning so-called assault weapons. The actual margin of opposition is six points (50-44) rather than fourteen points (54-40). Though I guess transposing a couple of numbers is trivial compared to the $16 trillion mistake I once made in an interview.

In my humble opinion, the most important point from the interview is that (as Mark Steyn explained in amusing fashion) you can’t have effective and competent government unless it’s also small government.