Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Far be it from me to accuse the Old Gray Lady of posting clickbait, but when I saw the headline of an op-ed today that read “Gun Control that Actually Works,” I was naturally intrigued and had to click on it. I don’t know what I was expecting, but honestly it wasn’t a reasoned and intelligent piece on how wonderfully constitutional carry is working in the states that have adopted it. No, quite the opposite, op-ed contributor Alan Berlow wrote something that will appeal mightily to anyone unfamiliar with the “post hoc, ergo proctor hoc” logical fallacy.
Berlow praises the National Firearms Act of 1934, saying it is a model that should be followed today, because he’s adorable and naïve. He opens with the contention that most Americans have never heard of NFA 34, which may be true, but he asserts it’s because “Leaders of the National Rifle Association rarely talk about the firearms act, and that’s probably because it imposes precisely the kinds of practical – and constitutional – limits on gun ownership, such as registration and background checks, that the NRA regularly insists will lead to the demise of the Second Amendment.”
Again Berlow is writing for a target audience of completely uncritical thinkers who won’t bother fact-checking what they already want desperately to believe. Firstly, the NRA discusses the NFA 34 as need be, efforts have been made, successfully, to weaken the restrictions of the law, which despite Berlow’s assurances, is totally unconstitutional on its face. Naturally, he simply asserts it is constitutional, likely because it hasn’t been found unconstitutional by SCOTUS since it was passed, which proves exactly nothing.
Berlow, in expounding upon the “practical” limit to gun ownership, soon gets hilarious. He says the NRA “rails against gun registration and gun owner databases,” adding that the NRA claims they will be used for confiscation. Berlow chides the NRA for that contention and uses the fact that the registry created by NFA 34 has never been used for confiscation.
Well, no kidding. The government would have a hard time making the case to confiscate a bunch of guns owned by wealthy people who don’t commit crimes. Ever.
The guns required to be registered by NFA 34, in addition to short-barreled rifles and noise suppressors are actual military machine guns, not semi-auto rifles the media likes to call “Assault weapons.” When NFA 34 was enacted, the first practical fully-automatic machine gun, the Maxim, had just blown the candles out on its 51st birthday. The first great sub-machinegun, the Thompson .45 caliber, was less than 20 years old at the time NFA was enacted and wasn’t a big commercial success initially. To legally own one of those today, or any day since 1934 under the NFA, one must pass a background check, and pay a $200 tax. Stolen NFA-registered firearms are to be reported to the BATF immediately.
“The National Firearms Act includes much of what the NRA fights against, but the lobbying group hasn’t directly challenged it. That may be because the firearms database, which includes weapons owned by both private citizens and law enforcement agencies, accounts for only a small percentage of the 300 million firearms estimated to be in private hands. Perhaps it should fight against it though, because the 1934 law makes a good case against the NRA. The more than four million weapons inventoried, including machine guns, missiles, hand grenades and mortars, are the best example we have of gun control that works.”
When I read that ‘graph, I immediately had to scroll back to the top to make sure I was reading something published by NYT and not Mother Jones, or perhaps even The Onion. In the space of one paragraph, Berlow shows both his complete ignorance of reality while making a strong case against that which he is arguing for.
Let’s break his idiotic assertions down. The NRA hasn’t challenged the NFA because the average NRA member isn’t all that interested in the hassle of owning fully-automatic firearms, because, in addition to the hassle and the $200 stamp is the staggering price of the NFA-covered guns themselves. These are rare antiques in many cases and in others, their rarity is imposed by law. Regardless, prices for NFA-covered guns start in the single-thousands of dollars and escalate very quickly from there. The average NRA member simply cannot afford a gun that costs more than a luxury car. The average NRA member also doesn’t want the hassle attendant to owning an NFA-controlled arm expanded to more pedestrian guns. As for the case that NFA supposedly makes against the NRA, let’s look at those numbers again. Berlow asserts that because some four million weapons, many of which are in the hands of law enforcement and not private citizens, were registered at the time of purchase with the government via the NFA, that it’s the best example of gun control that works.
“Millions of firearms now in private hands, including assault rifles designed for use by the military, are just as lethal as weapons covered by the NFA. They should be brought under the act.”
Here we see how dangerous it is to be a theistic statist and hoplophobe at the same time.
Firstly, actual assault rifles, which by definition are capable of full-automatic fire, are already covered by NFA 34. Semi-automatic sporting rifles that aren’t used by militaries but look militaristic in nature are not covered by NFA 34 and are not called “assault rifles” by people who know what the hell they are talking about.
“They should be brought under the act,” he says. Which ones, the millions already in private hands, or new purchases going forward? The former is impossible, the latter pointless. Here’s why.
To bring those guns “under the act,” the BATF would first have to find them. As there is no federal registry of gun purchases, how would they accomplish this? Maybe they’d send out a letter to every American household, stating that anyone who owns such a gun must now bring it in to be registered and pay a $200 tax for owning it. Maybe three people who got such a letter would actually follow what it says; the rest would put it in the circular file.
Sure, the government could impose a $200 tax on all new firearm purchases from FFL dealers. But, as Berlow acknowledges, there are 300-some million (actually, that number is probably very low) guns in private hands already. There isn’t much need to go buy new when there’s a lot of used stock out there and private sellers don’t need to run background checks or collect tax money for the IRS.
Berlow then continues to unravel his own narrative in speaking with Jeff Folloder, the executive director of the NFA Trade and Collectors Association. Mr. Folloder lobbied successfully to have the requirement that a local law enforcement officer approve the purchase of an NFA gun stripped from the decades-old act.
“People with registered weapons who can pay $40,000 for a machinegun ‘bend over backwards to obey the law,’” Berlow quoted Folloder as saying. “If you’re going to spend that much money and put that much effort into obtaining one of these, you’re not going to be holding up the liquor store.”
Indeed, the doctors and lawyers and CEOs and other very well-heeled people who can afford the NFA-classified firearm to begin with, never mind the $200 tax for owning it, have no need to commit violent crimes. Poverty tends to drive criminality, and the inverse tends to be true to.
“NFA-classified weapons do show up at crime scenes. But nearly all of them were unregistered, so the simple act of possession was a crime.”
In other words, criminals sometimes get their hands on guns that should have been registered under NFA and have had a $200 tax paid on them, but didn’t. And then, said criminal used the gun in a crime; because that’s what criminals do, with all sorts of guns, not just ones that would normally require an NFA tax-stamp.
“According to ATF analysis, among NFA weapon owners there were only 12 felony convictions between 2006 and 2014, and those crimes didn’t involve an NFA weapon. If that conviction rate were applied to the owners of the other privately owned firearms in the United States, gun crime would virtually disappear.”
So, only a dozen of the small number of uber-wealthy people who can afford NFA guns were convicted of a felony at all in the last eight years, and none of those convictions involved an NFA gun – I’m guessing “white-collar crime.” Where the logical connection between that thought and the last sentence of that paragraph is, however, I cannot begin to guess. If the economic situation of the average NFA gun owner were imposed on all human beings in America via some Marxist magic, crime in general would virtually disappear as millionaires don’t commit crimes generally, particularly not violent ones. There is no logical reason at all to assume it is the registry itself that prevents NFA-covered gun-owners from committing crimes with those guns; and yet that assertion is the entire basis of Berlow’s hilarious op-ed.
Berlow then goes on to excoriate the NRA for fighting against all efforts to make all firearm purchases like purchases of NFA weapons.
“The case for licensing and registration is stronger now than ever. Yet to today’s NRA, such measures are an existential threat to the Second Amendment. If that is true, why hasn’t the government used the NFA database to confiscate weapons? Why has it failed to move against the holders of hunting licenses and concealed carry permits who readily submit to milder forms of gun licensing and registration?”
So adorable, so naïve and so wrong.
First, there is no registration of a firearm required when obtaining a hunting license anywhere. The purpose of the hunting license is to recoup money the state spent in preserving the habitats of game species. Most states that issue concealed carry permits don’t include any sort of registration of a firearm with it. In fact, Michigan’s concealed carry permit excuses the holder from having to get a separate handgun purchase permit under an ancient state law enacted at the behest of the Ku Klux Klan.
Whatever case the left wants to make for licensing and registration ignores reality. Here, Berlow is hanging his hat on the “success” of the registry created by the NFA 34 without really accepting the fact that the NFA’s registry includes about one percent of all firearms in the country and much of what is on said registry is not in private hands, but under government control. Theoretically, the government should be able to keep track of its own firearms, but as the FBI has repeatedly demonstrated, such isn’t always the case.
Nowhere in his spleen-venting piece against the NRA does Berlow explain how to scale up the NFA registry a hundred-fold. This is either because he’s a coward, or he knows his audience doesn’t care about the details, they just need to have their prejudices against the NRA confirmed.
He has essentially concluded that the NFA registry itself is why doctors, lawyers, business executives and other very wealthy people don’t commit crimes with their expensive, bulky, and heavy machine guns.
Let me explain how silly this is by way of analogy.
Let’s pretend the federal government suddenly, for some reason, became very interested in preserving the small handful of truly classic cars left in the country, the Duesenbergs, Packards, the Pierce Arrows and the like. So, they pass a law mandating that every one of them be fitted with an ignition interlock device, to prevent drunk driving, and the car be put on a registry maintained by the federal government. Years pass. Later, MADD argues that all cars should be required to be fitted with an ignition interlock device and points to the “success” of the program the government mandated years ago for a tiny number of very expensive and rare cars; cars, that since the passage of the law have been involved in no drunk-driving accidents. This would be yet another example of the post hoc ergo proctor hoc logical fallacy, or after, therefore because of. In reality, people who own gorgeous works of irreplaceable rolling art aren’t likely to drive them around while inebriated any more than a millionaire is likely to hold up a liquor store with a 50-pound, water-cooled machinegun.
It’s not hard to keep track of a small number of things, particularly when one starts keeping track early on, as the NFA did coming in 1934. Trying to create a similar registry today is pointless. Either, you begin with new purchases, leaving 300+-million firearms unregistered making for a very incomplete registry that is nearly useless. Or, the government tries to register that massive backlog, which is impossible and will still lead to a registry that is incomplete, and therefore useless.
Gun owners and the NRA oppose these calls for registration and licensing not necessarily because we fear confiscation, though a registry does lay the groundwork for one. And, obviously we don’t oppose those ideas because we want life to be easier for violent criminals – an imbecilic accusation non-hoplophobes hear all the time from Berlow’s ilk.
No, we oppose these ideas because they’re dumb, pointless, unworkable, and unenforceable and would be just another waste of taxpayer money by a government that already wastes tons of it.
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