The New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013 (born to be an acronym—the NY SAFE Act), was enacted in January. In February, resolutions opposing it popped up all over the state. The one in Ulster County was introduced by Ken Ronk, the Republican majority leader. The Daily Freeman, Kingston’s valiantly still-in-print daily paper, described Ronk’s resolution thusly: “five pages long and offers 32 separate reasons.”*
It does, indeed, have 32 Whereasses in it. But not 32 reasons.
The first four Whereasses refer to the Second Amendment. The resolution doesn’t quote it, why bother, all gun lovers know it by heart, but you may not, so here it is: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Seven are complaints that it was passed too fast, given that (one more whereas) the bill was controversial. Three claim that only law-abiding citizens will be impacted, it will turn them into criminals, and real criminals don’t obey laws anyway! Which sounds like a pretty good argument against any criminal laws. Six say that it’s too burdensome. Two quote the local sheriff, one says regulating guns will hurt the economy, another that since a previous bill hasn’t worked this one won’t either, one says that these Whereasses had to be proclaimed because that’s what legislators do, one actually likes part of the bill, the part that goes after crazy people who are not members of the legislature.
You may wonder what the SAFE Act actually does. Many guns have detachable magazines. Current law allows 10 shots in a clip; SAFE cuts it to seven. It requires background checks are for all gun sales, unless you sell it to your sister or another member of your immediate family. Ammunition dealers now have to do background checks too. If you buy ammunition over the Internet it has to be delivered through a dealer in New York State. If your gun is stolen, you have to report it within 24 hours. If you have a felon in the family, living at home, your guns have to be safely stored. If a judge gives you an order of protection, he can make the person threatening you give up their guns. It makes it a felony to bring a gun on school grounds or a school bus. It narrows the definition of assault weapons. If you have one, you can keep it, but you can only sell it out of state. It increases the penalty for gun crimes, especially shooting cops, firemen, and EMTs.
Naturally, the one provision that Mr. Ronk and his colleagues like is the one that’s actually disturbing. If a therapist thinks a patient is really threatening to harm someone, he is required to report it to a mental health director, who reports it the Department of Criminal Justice, which can have the patient’s guns taken away. Also, law enforcement officials can take your guns, without a warrant, if they have probable cause to believe you’re about to use them for a crime or that you’re a nut.
The law was passed because a young man walked into an elementary school with two handguns plus a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle with 30-round clips. He fired off about 150 shots. He killed 20 children, plus six teachers and staff.
How bad is gun violence? How many people get shot? Can it be curbed? Should it be curbed? How can it be done most effectively? Good questions.
There are no good answers. Since the days when it became obvious that cigarettes cause cancer, corporate interests have been battling science. They’ve gained a lot of experience. They spend a lot of money. They buy researchers who will write reports that favor their businesses. They bury information they don’t like. They drag, delay, and muddy the waters. The Republican Right has embraced their causes, adopted their methodology, and staked out the fight against science as their ideology. Yes, it sounds weird, that anyone since the days when the Catholic Church was busy banning Galileo and Copernicus would take up antiscience as their banner, but that’s what’s happened.
The Centers for Disease Control were studying gun violence. First, the Republicans tried to shut down that division of the CDC entirely. When that failed, according to reporting by Michael Lou in the New York Times, Republicans “stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before. Language was also inserted into the centers’ appropriations bill that remains in place today: ‘None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.'” Since any examination of gun violence is likely to lead to gun control, it was taken to mean that such studies were forbidden.
What we do know is that every day since the children were killed at Sandy Hook, on average, 18 people have been killed by guns. (How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown? Chris Kirk and Dan Kois, Wednesday, February 20, 2013, Slate.) There have also been five more shootings on school grounds, with one of the fatalities a 12-year-old girl.
Governor Cuomo was right to pass a bill before the revulsion against murdering children had a chance to fade. Given a chance, gun industry money, the NRA, and folks like Ken Ronk would have done all they could to make any change impossible. As for the Second Amendment, SAFE lets everyone keep their guns. Yes, you can defend your home against invaders. Many of the Whereasses falsely believe that tyrants took away the people’s guns in order to rise to power, and they have the valiant, Mel Gibson fantasy they will be tomorrow’s Bravehearts when the United Nations takeover comes. I doubt that 10 rounds per clip, rather than the meager seven, will make the difference in those battles. Will the secret militias that train in our hills but stay in our B&Bs go elsewhere because of the background checks on ammo sales? Are there really enough of them to affect our economy? For those of you who have dangerous felons in your house, won’t it be nice to say, “Joey, I gotta lock up the guns, that’s the law.” Sheriff Van Blarcum, who made the curious argument, quoted in the Freeman, that “anybody wants to do anything, they will find a way to do it,” noting that laws against drugs haven’t stopped the drug problem, should be grateful. In spite of his realization about drug laws, his department has pursued drug arrests with particular zeal. This will give him something to do when marijuana is legalized.
* The full text of the resolution can be found at Co.ulster.ny.us/resolutions/0154-13.
This article appears in March 2013.
“Three claim that only law-abiding citizens will be impacted, it will turn them into criminals, and real criminals don’t obey laws anyway! Which sounds like a pretty good argument against any criminal laws.”
Not at all. It’s a question of “malum in se” vs. “malum prohibitum.” If firearms possession is undesirable in and of itself, we wouldn’t let police have them. The notion that restricting the behavior of non-criminals will have an impact on the behavior of criminals is ludicrous. Surely someone as astute as Mr. Beinhart can see this.
Hi, Starmawn, Larry Beinhart here.
You said it’s not a question of bad in itself, only bad because the law says so.
Like rape vs. the prohibition of alcohol.
Yes, I think the first is horrific and the second, as demonstrated by our history, excessive and vain.
Still, it is a fuzzy distinction.
Malum in se is taken to mean naturally evil, needing no explanation. Yet even the basics, like murder, rape, theft, and blasphemy are culturally defined and change over time. We quite recently held that there was no such thing as marital rape. The Bible implicitly endorses a variety of rapes of defeated foes. We now have statutory rape, with sliding scales of age and condition of consent.
Murder essentially means killings that are unauthorized by law, or, if there is no written code, by custom. Vengeance killings have been accepted. Self-defense has been recently redefined to the point where you can shoot a kid in a costume on your lawn at Halloween, or coming to ask to use your phone because their car is broken down, provided you claim you were scared.
I included blasphemy because it was once a universal sort of prohibition, so that it could well have been considered malum in se seven or eight hundred years ago. Now it’s rare, so we consider it bizarre and outrageous.
Anyway, here’s your argument:
If firearms possession is undesirable in and of itself, we wouldn’t let police have them. (And therefore we shouldn’t have laws restricting them in anyway, since it is ludicrous to think that criminals would obey them.)
Part one is:
If X is undesirable in and of itself, we wouldn’t let Y have them.
If pain killers are undesirable in and of themselves, we wouldn’t let doctors prescribe them
If killing is undesirable in and of itself, we wouldn’t have armies or the death penalty.
If driving is undesirable in and of itself, we wouldn’t let licensed people drive.
If sex was undesirable in and of itself, we wouldn’t have laws that restrict it in many situations but allow it in others.
If marijuana were undesirable in and of itself, medical marijuana would not be legal in multiple states.
So on, infinitum. We have many such laws. We deprive people of their freedom and property for their violations. An argument that claims such laws should not exist as a class is sweeping indeed.
Part two is: “The notion that restricting the behavior of non-criminals will have an impact on the behavior of criminals is ludicrous.”
This presumes that the only people who commit gun crimes, or crimes with guns, or who shoot other people come from a very special class of people: professional, career criminals who see themselves as such.
It does not include other possibilities such as: drunk guy gets into an argument that he would normally laugh off or get into a punch-up, but he’s got a gun; spouse discovers infidelity, upon reflection would call an attorney, but has a gun; child brings gun to playground to show off, but shoots it; paranoid private crime fighter sees kid walking home from a convenience store, attacks and shoots him; even thieves who would prefer to work unarmed, but have grown frightened of armed civilians and therefore now carry guns; spouse thinks burglar has broken in, shoots partner. The possibilities are endless.
Non-criminal actions can be elevated to crimes by easy access to guns. Crimes can become more severe. This happens in the hands of all sorts of people.
Finally, the matter at hand is about regulation, and quite limited regulation, not about prohibition. There is nothing in the law that approaches prohibition or even has a significant impact on any of the real world purposes claimed for firearms (even over-throwing a tyrant).
Well, I don’t see quite the same amount of fuzz as you do. I’ll go out on a limb and proclaim rape and murder to be “malum in se,” sliding scales notwithstanding. You’re talking greater and degrees of wrong, but in my estimation the possession of a firearm by a law-abiding person with no malicious intent is zero degrees of wrong.
Prohibitions against things like alcohol, soft drugs, and firearms are attempts to forestall real “evil” acts by removing some of the preconditions that lead up to and ostensibly “cause” them. I believe this to be a fundamental error in both logic and philosophy. First, it ignores the fact that for the vast majority of people, the preconditions don’t lead to evil acts. Second, it presupposes that we are all ticking time bombs that need only the right juxtaposition of conditions to explode or melt down or whatever, and that our behavior must therefore be strictly circumscribed in order to protect society from us and us from ourselves. This Hobbesian view of humanity is not one that I share, and not one that I expect from people who consider themselves progressives.
I’m afraid you missed my point about “malum in se.” Clearly there are people who should not be allowed access to firearms. The fault lies in their behavior, not in the firearms. There is no justification for keeping firearms away from those who have not exhibited that behavior — unless you’re the Hobbesian described above. This kind of preventive prohibitionism gives rise to all kinds of abuses of rights in the name of the greater good, from Mayor Bloomberg’s Big-Gulp bans to some of the zero-tolerance follies in our public schools.
The real gun violence problem in this country does in fact stem from career criminals engaged in the gang and drug wars that some of our other prohibitions foster. Factor out these crimes and the suicides — which aren’t tool-dependent — and our gun-death statistics would more closely resemble those of our supposedly more enlightened European cousins. Crimes of passion have always been with us, even before firearms. The possibilities are indeed endless, but the raw numbers are not large.
I believe you are fundamentally in error re this not being about prohibition. The seven-round limit is not just about three rounds fewer — it is a de facto ban on approximately 80% of the semi-auto handguns on the market today. The one-feature definition of an “assault weapon” is a ban on the most popular configuration of modern semi-auto rifles. Real-time tracking of ammunition purchases is deliberate harassment when the state could achieve the same result by issuing firearms-owner ID cards, as Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey do, causing much less of a burden on the retailers and consumers of ammunition. Again, this does nothing to prevent crimes of violence. It just makes the ownership of firearms increasingly difficult for the average citizen, which would appear to be the whole point. The gun-traffickers will just add ammo to their product line, making even more money, while Joe Duckhunter waits in line at Wal-Mart to get his background check and shotgun shells.
One does not have to be paranoid to believe that this whole effort is driven by people who would welcome an end to the civilian ownership of firearms — not when NY State representatives are declaring from the floor of the Assembly that “there’s much more to come” after passing the strictest laws in the Union.