An Open Letter to Advocates for More Gun Laws

Dear Gun-Control Advocates,

All of your ideas are stupid and won’t work. Allow me to elaborate.

Some of you want there to be “universal background checks” for all gun purchases, including those between private buyers and sellers. As it is now, when one buys a gun from a licensed dealer, they are subjected to a background check based on the FBI’s NICS system. Upon completion of the sale, the firearm is removed from the dealer’s inventory sheet – but to whom it is sold is never recorded, not at the shop and not by the FBI or BATF. All the government knows is that the gun dealer no longer has it in stock, they don’t have a record of who bought it.

As such, should that person later decide to sell it to someone else, there is no way for the government to track the sale. A person is selling a gun the government doesn’t know he owns to someone else the government doesn’t know is buying it. So, rather obviously, simply passing a law that requires all gun sales be made subject to a background check is pointless as it is unenforceable and will be ignored by all. Nobody is going to bother with taking the gun and prospective buyer to a dealer’s shop, and then pay the dealer to have the buyer put through a background check.

Now, of course some of you are thinking that this could be remedied by having the government pass a law that requires the FBI to simply start logging the buyer’s identity when a background check is performed. This would, in effect, create a government registry of the first private owner of each individual gun sold after the law was enacted. This still doesn’t pave a path to “universal background checks” for a variety of reasons. One is that the FBI has no way of following up to make sure that same person still owns that same gun a year or two, or five, down the road. If he does sell that gun to someone who ends up using it in a crime and it gets traced back to him, he could just as easily say it was stolen and leave the government to prove otherwise.

The other reason such a plan wouldn’t accomplish anything is even more obvious: said “registry” would start with something like the 526,374,784th privately-owned firearm in the USA. There are already more than a half-billion guns and a few trillion rounds of ammunition in the hands of 80+-million Americans – that starting a registry which will always be woefully incomplete is pointless should go without saying. Passing a law that requires Americans to come in and register the half-billion guns the government doesn’t know they have is also pointless as everyone will ignore it. Americans aren’t Australians.

And, while we’re on the subject of things that are pointless and the sheer number of guns in the USA; can we please stop trying to look at European countries as some sort of model for America to follow? Europeans suffer from centuries of serfdom whereas the USA was born a free country rather recently. As such, Europe never had a chance to become awash in the aforementioned half-billion guns that Americans own. According to this Wikipedia page, there were just .06 firearm homicides per capita in the United Kingdom in 2011, compared to a lot more in the USA (3.60 per capita in 2014). Here’s the rub: in the UK, there are an estimated 6.6 firearms per 100 people in the entire nation. In the USA, there are an estimated 112.6 firearms for every 100 people in the country. Comparing firearm homicide rates between the USA and any European nation is just foolishness and intellectually disingenuous – like most of the anti-gun side’s arguments.

How disingenuous? Anti-gun groups like The Brady Campaign, etc., love to float the number of 30,000+ deaths by “gun violence” every year. In that number, however, are included deaths by accident and suicide. Take those out, and you’re left with 9-11K firearm homicides each year.

There have been numerous studies done that try to compute the number of times each year that Americans use a gun in self defense to prevent a violent crime. Since most of these events aren’t reported to police, in the vast majority of cases a shot is never fired, it’s hard to get a firm tally. The most reliable, the Kleck study, puts that number at roughly 2.2 million defensive gun uses per year. The very much anti-gun Violence Policy Center tried to refute Kleck and in the process inadvertently proved there are at a bare minimum more than 65,000 defensive gun uses per year – against 9-11K homicides, it becomes impossible to argue that gun control makes anyone safer.

Because it doesn’t.

Given that some 80+-million Americans understand the above-described reality, it becomes easy for an objectively-minded person to now understand why we rankle so much at the imbecilic suggestions and “ideas” floated by people who know literally nothing about firearms. We are not responsible for the criminal misuse of a product by miscreants. Sturm Ruger and Company didn’t send that AR-pattern rifle out into the world to be used to shoot up a church any more than Home Depot rented out a truck to used as a deadly weapon in New York City. Owners of similar firearms bear no more responsibility for Texas than owners of large, chassis-cab trucks do for New York City. Sorry, not sorry.

We, like you, mourn for the dead and are shocked and horrified by these attacks. Unlike you, however, we do not reflexively seek to spread the blame only the shooter bears onto others in some bizarre attempt to assuage our hurt feelings or bring about some sort of “social” justice.

We, or at least I, realize that the only way to stop mass-shootings, or individual shootings for that matter, is for humans to get better at being human. One sure way to forestall that process is to continuously look for reasons to hate other humans and to wish the violence of state oppression upon them for engaging in hobbies or interests that harm no one else’s person or property. My guns have only ever shot the bespoke backstops of shooting ranges and assorted earthen berms. That I own them and use them for this purpose is exactly no one else’s business and I, like most of the other 80+-million gun-owners in this nation, aren’t interested in anyone’s opinions to the contrary.

Very truly yours,

Kyle A. Lohmeier

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