Arm Fratboys -or- Curb Straw Purchases?

So here we go again – I posted the following at Control Congress on 3/19/07:

Straw Purchases – The second amendment allows for rednecks to open up gun depots in states allowing on demand background checks and firearms to criminals who use locals with clean records for the buys, and from there the guns head north to cities like DC, Philly, Baltimore and NYC. Once having arrived, they are sold to criminals in the drug trade, used for murders and promptly thrown down storm drains or gotten rid of some other way. If you’ve got the cash, there is a straw-purchase waiting for payoff…but let’s not get bogged down in reality here, because the Pace Picante sauce folks out there have a problem with the mayor of NYC pointing fingers at his neighbors down south. Sure, folks in Virginia make a healthy profit off of murder in cities up north, but that’s “market forces” doing their thing more often than not. Truth is, if you handed a gun to every person in America, we’d be more safe. As it stands now, we’ve got plenty of guns, but we’re not safe…

For a blogger like me, there’s nothing else out there really, besides having written about a problem, seen everyone ignore it as well as the logic you based the words on, only to have the obvious take place and then the equally obvious knee-jerk reaction from political opponents be so easy to telegraph. “Truth is, if you handed a gun to every person in America, we’d be more safe”…wasn’t it something like half a nanosecond after the shooting hit the wire, that right-wing talkers and writers were all saying the same thing? If only the students had been allowed to carry guns, this would have never happened.

Arm the frat boys! All those young adults away from home for the first time, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, apparently constitute the right-wing’s version of when the state knows better than the college, and should pass a law allowing students to pack heat in the classroom. When the rates of successful homicides and suicides spike, they’ll be the ones blaming the media and secular society, but the guns won’t have anything to do with it.

Clearly, for the NRA and their Republican concubines, the ONLY point that needs making following a mass murder like the one at Michael Vick’s alma mater, is “we need to sell more guns”. Break it down however you want, but the bottom line is still the bottom line, whether the body count is 32, 50 or 150. In this instance it is even more simple than others, as the school can be blamed, the students themselves can be blamed for cowardice, and in the midst of all that rabble, the sales pitch slips right in there.

And if you ever wanted a clear-cut reason why Republicans constantly go with the line a bout government not being the answer for anything, it is for times like this when the system fails on their account, they can point at the failure and say, “that’s government for you.” Indeed, the systems that should have worked to prevent this guy from purchasing his guns legally, either weren’t part of the law or were and the government either failed or looked the other way. Difficult to pin down, this anti-government “Chewbacca defense“, but since it was a failure of computer systems to update and report correctly on data pertaining to citizens and gun sales, in this instance we have a very good place to start.

I present to you language from the Tiahrt Amendment, proposed by a Republican Congressman, passed by a Republican House and Senate, and signed into law by our Republican President in 2006:

…no funds appropriated under this or any other Act with respect to any fiscal year may be used to disclose part or all of the contents of the Firearms Trace System database maintained by the National Trace Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or any information required to be kept by licensees…or required to be reported…to anyone other than a Federal, State, or local law enforcement agency or a prosecutor solely in connection with and for use in a bona fide criminal investigation or prosecution and then only such information as pertains to the geographic jurisdiction of the law enforcement agency requesting the disclosure and not for use in any civil action or proceeding…and all such data shall be immune from legal process and shall not be subject to subpoena or other discovery, shall be inadmissible in evidence, and shall not be used, relied on, or disclosed in any manner, nor shall testimony or other evidence be permitted based upon such data, in any civil action pending on or filed after the effective date of this act in any State (including the District of Columbia) or Federal court or in any administrative proceeding other than a proceeding commenced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives…

This takes the publics’ database of gun sales, confiscation, use in crimes, origin…the history of this firearm that was used in a murder, and it makes it illegal for the public to compare the data on that firearm with that of others that have been used to commit crimes. Why this is necessary for the gun manufacturers is the fact that out of all the gun sellers in the country, a 2000 study showed that approximately 1% of them provided 57% of the guns that are used in crimes. To the police these particular gun dealers are a cancer, but to the gun manufacturers they are an asset.

The Tiahrt Amendment makes it impossible for law enforcement to identify these dealers and run sting operations to prove they are operating illegally. The murder rates in cities across the country are rising, and what can law enforcement do to combat it? In this instance, Republicans purposely made it more difficult for them to answer that question. The chief of police in a city cannot send ATF a spreadsheet with every murder weapon confiscated as evidence in the past couple years, and receive data back on each one. If the gun was purchased out of state, the chief cannot have it, and even when the dealer is local, this amendment makes it illegal for them to the use that data to go after them.

It’s a deadissue, whether or not Republicans actually believe in the idea of a government agency like the ATF…they don’t. Since it would be political suicide to disband an agency that the public perceives as vital, what they do instead is create legislative subsidies for business, while cutting authority and resources. If you think I’m wrong, then be my guest and attempt to match up the effect of the Tiahrt Amendment with the ATF’s mission statement:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is a principal law enforcement agency within the United States Department of Justice dedicated to preventing terrorism, reducing violent crime, and protecting our Nation. The men and women of ATF perform the dual responsibilities of enforcing Federal criminal laws and regulating the firearms and explosives industries. We are committed to working directly, and through partnerships, to investigate and reduce crime involving firearms and explosives, acts of arson, and illegal trafficking of alcohol and tobacco products.

What makes the Virginia Tech massacre so critically poignant in regards to all of this, is that the state of Virginia is the “Straw Purchase Capitol of the East Coast”…literally, the gun dealers just past the northern state line are the primary suppliers of guns used by drug dealers on the streets of Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC and many others. A gun smuggler has people who live locally in Virginia who will make the purchase using their information, in exchange for money or drugs. Often times the dealer can sniff out quite easily what is happening, as the smuggler will even provide the cash and walk out of the store with the weapon that was just purchased on this other person’s record. The gun dealers don’t think twice about it, and with laws like the Tiahrt Amendment being passed, why should they?

I pointed out last week that the death toll at Virginia Tech was dwarfed by that of civilians in Iraq just about every day, but the same could be said about the murders that take place in American cities that wouldn’t have been possible without an outlet like Virginia to stock up the gangs with as much firepower as they can afford. Those lives lost, as well as those Iraqis who are dying every day, aren’t white. When taken into account along with the education, health care and investment to infrastructure, the areas of these cities that end up being left behind are predominantly African American, and so it must be a coincidence that the guns end up there as well…right?

Truth is, we have Columbine every single day here in America. There’s a dead child, teen or citizen that should be alive today, but isn’t, on account of a system that cares more about the interests of a single industry than it does the safety of its own people, its own police. Categorized as an issue pertaining to the second amendment (none of what I’ve discussed here has anything to do with that basic right), there’s a flip side to that coin, where we as a society have deemed certain people and certain areas to be too dangerous or important to allow for that second amendment right to take precedence.

A person with prior convictions and no reported taxable income shouldn’t be allowed to walk into a store and walk out with a gun. A person with mental issues that make them dangerous to themselves and others, shouldn’t be allowed to purchase them either. If you walk into an airport, courthouse or a school, you cannot be allowed to carry a firearm inside. These are simple-stupid aspects of what we as Americans have believed to be wrong and right for a long time now.

I advocate for fully funding the ATF and allowing it to do its job, hand in hand with law enforcement from around the country. I want to see straw purchases become very difficult to carry out, and a database that local law enforcement can use to build cases, free of restrictions enacted by politicians on behalf of the NRA. They advocate the public purchasing more guns to deal with what happened at Virginia Tech, without a word about whether or not a more sensible gun policy might have prevented him from obtaining them in the first place!

Keep the heat on when it comes to this issue, or else we’ll be saying the same exact things after it happens again…and the next time.