Nicholas Johnson wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about President Obama’s recent announcement of new gun-control measures.
On Tuesday President Obama announced that he would take executive action to expand the definition of a “firearms dealer.” The intent is to require more people who sell guns to first obtain a federal license—which obliges them to perform background checks on buyers. Unnoticed is that this action, taken under the banner of “common sense” gun control to make Americans safer, reverses a Clinton administration gun-control policy that also was supposed to make us safer.
The story begins with the 1968 Gun Control Act, which is the foundation of the current federal gun regulation. It requires, among other things, that commercial sellers of firearms obtain a federal firearms license or “FFL.” Regulators in the early 1970s, like the Obama administration today, pressed the gun-control agenda through aggressive interpretations of the 1968 law.
Those prosecutions targeted hobbyists and collectors who sold a few guns at gun shows. One collector who sold three firearms over a period of two years had his gun collection seized and was prosecuted in 1972 for dealing without license. Many prudent and fearful gun owners responded by obtaining federal firearm licenses, even though they did not have storefronts or retail operations.
By the 1990s, the gun control mantra had changed. The claim became that it was a problem to have so many federally licensed gun dealers around, and that “kitchen table gun dealers” constituted a hazard. A claim often heard was that the U.S. had more gun dealers than gas stations. No one explained why the laws and penalties against illegal trading might work differently for “kitchen table dealers,” and there was no empirical support for the idea that these individuals were less trustworthy than the people who ran gun stores. But that did not get in the way.
As a plum to gun-control groups, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms under Bill Clinton responded in 1994. The ATF changed the requirements for who could obtain a federal license for the retail sale of firearms (by, for instance, mandating actual storefront operations). The antigun Violence Policy Center celebrated the results in a 2007 policy paper that said the number of licensed dealers “has dropped 79 percent—from 245,628 in 1994 to 50,630.”
Now President Obama proposes moving the furniture around again. The ATF’s new guidance on the matter says that storefronts are irrelevant: “it does not matter if sales are conducted out of your home, at gun shows, flea markets, through the internet, or by other means.” The agency also emphasizes that “courts have upheld convictions for dealing without a license when as few as two firearms were sold.”
We’re coming full circle, back around to the policies of 1972. Prudent hobbyists and collectors, fearing that they might face prosecution under the new, broader definition of a gun dealer, will apply for federal firearms licenses. The impact on gun crime, which is already dramatically down since the 1970s, will be negligible.
Like the Clinton policy that it reverses, Mr. Obama’s action mainly demonstrates how so much “common sense” gun control is long on show but short on substantive answers to the core problems of gun crime. Case in point: When a reporter asked White House spokesman Josh Earnest at a news conference last month whether any of the recent mass shootings would have been stopped by the administration’s gun-control proposals, Mr. Earnest couldn’t name one.
As policy-making, the administration’s move this week is a vivid illustration of the thing that so flummoxed Mr. Earnest. The president and many others have oversold gun control with glib claims that government really can fix this, if only Americans will give bureaucrats a little more power. That is pure snake oil.
The important policy issues are never even discussed because they are so hard and do not yield easy answers: What about the hundreds of thousands of guns that are stolen in the U.S. every year, which pile up in the black market? What about shared-access guns, where a family has firearms stored in a mutually accessible place? (The shooter in Newtown, Conn., used his mother’s guns.) What can government actually do to protect people in those crucial first seconds when violence sparks?
Measured against those sorts of tough questions, the president’s recycled proposals are a glittery distraction. The truly unfortunate thing is that Americans are at each other’s throats over this sort of marginalia. It leaves those who know better to wonder whether the politicians who make such a show of things are deluded, desperate or simply pandering.
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