{"id":2959,"date":"2016-02-02T08:28:21","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T16:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=2959"},"modified":"2016-02-02T08:28:21","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T16:28:21","slug":"oh-no-the-dreaded-gun-show-loophole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=2959","title":{"rendered":"Oh, no! The dreaded \u2018Gun Show Loophole\u2019!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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(A version of this column appears in the Feb. 10 edition of \u201cFirearms News,\u201d formerly \u201cShotgun News.\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n

Having shown a jaw-dropping inability to understand what would happen if sick people were allowed to buy \u201cYou\u2019re not allowed to ask me about pre-existing conditions\u201d health insurance, pile their medical bills on the insurance companies till said sick people are cured, and then drop their coverage (or did the clever politicians actually mean<\/em> to bankrupt this entire industry?), Barack Obama and his faithful companions leapt into their saddles, declared \u201cOur work here is done!\u201d and rode off into the sunset.<\/p>\n

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Unfortunately, though — very much as was the case with the Adventures of the Lone Ranger — another Saturday morning always rolls around, the booming strains of the William Tell Overture beckon us once again to revisit those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, and it turns out Barack Obama and gang aren\u2019t really gone, at all. No, they\u2019re back, looking for something else to Mess Up Real Good.<\/p>\n

Public opinion polls show the American public is starting to see through the hysterical drum-beating and fake \u201cgun death\u201d statistics. (Hint: subtract the gun suicides of sick and lonely senior citizens, and then compare our homicide rates to those of countries with far harsher \u201cgun control\u201d laws, including Mexico and Venezuela.) In an America where more law-abiding people than ever own guns -\u2013 and violent crime rates have thus been dropping for years -\u2013 polls show dwindling support for \u201cweapons bans\u201d of any kind.<\/p>\n

So, racing to the head of the parade, Barack Obama started out the year calling for restored marksmanship classes in the public high schools, while ordering the ATF to again allow the re-importation of surplus military firearms including Browning Automatic Rifles for sale at cost to law-abiding American \u201ccivilians,\u201d right?<\/p>\n

No, no, of course not. Just joking. You thought these guys swore some kind of oath to protect and defend the Constitution, which informs us that a well-armed citizen militia, more powerful than any force that can be raised, on any pretext, by the central government, is \u201cnecessary to the security of a free state\u201d?<\/p>\n

No, by the time this issue sees print, it\u2019s been reliably predicted that -\u2013 fed up with a do-nothing Congress that declines to further violate the Second and Fourteenth amendments with \u201cgun control\u201d schemes that have zero chance of reducing violent crime — Barack Obama will have sternly denounced and called for an end to the \u201cgun show loophole.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can own it, but you can\u2019t sell it<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is the \u201cgun show loophole\u201d? It\u2019s very simple. Firearms dealers with Federal Firearms Licenses -\u2013 that is to say, anybody who sells more than a few guns a year and is thus judged to be \u201cin the business\u201d -\u2013 are required to conduct a background check on any gun buyer without a special concealed-carry license (which they can only acquire by undergoing, yep, a “background check”), no matter where the sale takes place -\u2013 including at gun shows.<\/p>\n

How is this justified? Because such dealers have \u201capplied for a federal license\u201d (\u201cvoluntarily,\u201d you understand, since if they don\u2019t \u201cvolunteer\u201d they can be sent to prison), this is simply made a condition of retaining their license . . . and not going to prison.<\/p>\n

But if an average citizen with no such \u201cFFL\u201d -\u2013 a police officer\u2019s widow, say -\u2013 wants to sell off her late husband\u2019s old hunting rifle, she\u2019s allowed to do so without conducting a \u201cbackground check.\u201d (In fact, up till now she\u2019d probably have had a hard time even accessing the \u201cbackground check\u201d system.)<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s true, fewer and fewer such \u201cprivate sellers\u201d who merely wish to get some cash out of their small, private collections can afford the table rents at big gun shows. But a few such sellers could<\/em> sell a firearm -\u2013 usually a big hunting rifle or a clunky, 20-pound military surplus turn-bolt rifle, also suitable for use as a club -\u2013 at a gun show, and the buyer theoretically could <\/em>walk out the door without having undergone a \u201cbackground check\u201d (the same as if they\u2019d bought that firearm on the owner\u2019s front porch.) So Barack Obama apparently plans to simply declare such widow-ladies must obey the same rules as a full-time \u201cFFL\u201d dealer . . . or go to prison.<\/p>\n

Which should immediately stop all these violent crimes in which people rob convenience stores and shoot each other with scoped hunting rifles or 20-pound World War One surplus Enfield rifles, of which last year alone we had . . . wait a minute, I\u2019m sure I had that statistic here, somewhere. Well, I\u2019ll just have to get back to you on that.<\/p>\n

Will the courts rule that such an \u201cexecutive order\u201d -\u2013 designed to bypass Congress — somehow fails to \u201cinfringe\u201d our right to keep and bear arms, even though it\u2019s designed to make it harder to sell a firearm, thus making firearms a less attractive investment?<\/p>\n

I would no longer dare to guess, the Constitution being a document now likely to be consulted by the courts only on those rare days when the wind blows southerly, and the justices can tell a hawk from a handsaw.<\/p>\n

Which branch should violate the Constitution?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Speaking of \u201cthe polls,\u201d an anti-gun outfit called \u201cRasmussen Reports\u201d conducted a public opinion poll last fall, asking the following four questions:<\/p>\n

1) Does the United States need stricter gun control laws?<\/p>\n

2) Should there be a ban on the purchase of semi-automatic and assault type weapons?<\/p>\n

3) Suppose that only government officials such as the police and military personnel were allowed to have guns. Would that be good for America or bad for America?<\/p>\n

4) Should laws regarding the ownership of guns be the responsibility of the federal government, state governments or local governments?<\/p>\n

What was the result? Who cares? Look at the QUESTIONS.<\/p>\n

In response to the question asking which level of government should take the lead in restricting gun ownership, where\u2019s the opportunity for a respondent to say \u201cNo laws regarding or restricting the ownership of guns are permitted by the U.S. Constitution with its Second Amendment, and the 14th Amendment extends this restriction to the states. So isn\u2019t this kind of a trick question, like asking whether laws requiring the imprisonment of mixed-race couples, or laws requiring the internment of religious minorities in concentration camps, should be \u2018the responsibility of the federal government, state governments, or local governments\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n

If a respondent answers Question One by saying \u201cAll current gun laws should be repealed,\u201d will that be reported? Highly unlikely. There won\u2019t be any appropriate box for the poll-taker to check, will there? So that respondent will merely be cited as someone who says we don\u2019t need stricter<\/em> gun-control laws, implying all current laws are fine.<\/p>\n

In this way, such \u201cpolls\u201d slant the results, not merely discouraging but disallowing and refusing to report accurate, knowledgeable, common-sense replies.<\/p>\n

\u201cShould there be a ban on semi-automatic and assault-type weapons?\u201d the pollsters ask. What happens if the person being interviewed replies \u201cWhich do you mean? Assault-type weapons are select-fire; they\u2019re classified as fully automatic machine guns and are hard as heck for the average citizen to acquire, right now. Hasn\u2019t the BATF\u2019s unconstitutional ban on the new manufacture of machine guns for \u2018civilian\u2019 use in this country raised the price of most such weapons up into the tens of thousands of dollars? Am I being asked whether only rich collectors willing to be fingerprinted and pay a $200 tax per firearm should have fully automatic or select-fire \u2018assault\u2019 weapons? Isn\u2019t that already the case?<\/p>\n

\u201cOr am I being asked whether the self-reloading, one-round-per-trigger-pull M-1 carbine or M-1 Garand that grandpa carried in Normandy or the Ardennes in 1944 should be banned? If so, why throw \u201cand assault type weapons\u201d into the question — just to encourage the uninformed to think you\u2019re only asking about AK-47s and M-16s and British Bren guns that \u201cspray lead like a garden hose\u201d?<\/p>\n

Vin Suprynowicz was for 20 years an award-winning syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal. He\u2019s the author of \u201cSend in the Waco Killers\u201d and a new novel about the War on Drugs, \u201cThe Miskatonic Manuscript.\u201d He blogs at www.vinsuprynowicz.com .<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(A version of this column appears in the Feb. 10 edition of \u201cFirearms News,\u201d formerly \u201cShotgun News.\u201d) Having shown a jaw-dropping inability to understand what would happen if sick people were allowed to buy \u201cYou\u2019re not allowed to ask me about pre-existing conditions\u201d health insurance, pile their medical bills on the insurance companies till said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,12,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2nd-amendment","category-common-defense","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-LJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2959"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2962,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2959\/revisions\/2962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}