Nicholas Johnson quoted in a Carteret County News-Times article about President Barack Obama’s executive actions on gun control.
“Prudent hobbyists and collectors,” says Nicholas Johnson, a Fordham University law professor, “fearing they might face prosecution under the new, broader definition of 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, he continues, “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.” For example, asked whether any recent mass shooting might have been stopped by the Obama administration’s gun proposals, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest couldn’t name one.
Arguing Mr. Obama 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,” Mr. Johnson, author of Firearms Law and the Second Amendment and Negroes and The Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms in the Journal, says, “That is pure snake oil.
“The important policy issues are never even discussed,” he continues, “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?”
Saying Mr. Obama’s “recycled proposals are a glittery distraction,” he adds, “The truly unfortunate thing is 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.”
Read the entire Carteret County News Times article.