Dear Mr. President,
I heard your comments about the San Bernardino tragedy. Yes, it’s becoming a pattern in the U.S. as some people take out their rage or hatred on innocents. Whether it’s racism, revenge or jihad, it’s madness and we don’t know what causes it; what turns people into monsters.
Of course, you’re the President so you have to look like you’re doing something. Unfortunately, you have no more clue than any of us how to actually stop the evil.
So you fall back, yet once again, on your push for “commonsense” gun laws.
But if they really were common sense, shouldn’t they work?
Mr. President, all of the laws that you champion were in effect Wednesday in San Bernardino. In fact, they were in full force throughout the state of California.
Background checks? Not only does a would-be gun buyer in California have to pass the national background check, they also must the state’s background check. The state can deny a sale that the federal system allows. You can actually be turned down for having an outstanding traffic ticket.
California’s list of prohibited persons is also more extensive than the federal list. And if you can’t legally buy a gun in California, you can’t legally own a gun in California.
Waiting periods? California’s is ten days; used to be 30 days.
Gun show loophole? There never was a gun show loophole but even if there had been one it wouldn’t apply in California. All transfers of a firearm except those between natural children (stepchildren don’t count) and spouses have to go through a licensed firearms dealer who must go through all the steps required for a regular retail sale. For every transaction, the dealer must complete a Dealer Record of Sale (DROS) that goes to the state.
Assault weapons Ban? California’s had one since 1992, following an incident in a school in Stockton. It got beefed up again with an even more extensive list of firearms. In California, to own an assault rifle, you had to have owned and registered it before March 31, 1992 or, in the case of the expanded list, it had to be registered with the state by January 23, 2001. If you own one of the firearms on the list, you can’t sell it, swap it, give it away, or even leave it to your heirs. When you want to dispose of it or after you die, the only legal things to do with it are to surrender it to a law enforcement agency, ship it out of state or dismantle and destroy it.
Buying out of state? Nope. Since January 1 of this year, a person who buys a shotgun or rifle in another state must have the gun shipped to a dealer in California who will then process like any other transfer (i.e., background check, waiting period, etc.). This means that the gun one buys in Nevada or Oregon, for example, must be legal in California. So one can’t pick up an AR-15 in Las Vegas as a California resident. As for handguns, it’s been the law of the land since 1968 that a person can purchase or transfer a handgun only in the state in which that person is a resident and only to another resident of the same state. All other purchases or transfers must go through a federally licensed dealer.
All the laws you want to see passed were in full and glorious effect on Wednesday, when Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik invaded the Inland Regional Center. Almost all of them, except the new out-of-state purchase law, were also in effect when Elliot Rodger took out his frustrations on Isla Vista and when John Zawahri shot up Santa Monica.
So you’re now using a mass shooting in California to demand that Congress enact the same laws that didn’t stop mass shootings in California?
Mr. President, in your remarks on CBS, you said, “There are some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds they don’t happen as frequently.”
Sir, could you point to a single incidence in a place where the laws you want were already in effect that they “improved the odds?” We’ve got plenty of evidence that they don’t from the city in which you currently reside, the neighboring city of Baltimore and your own hometown of Chicago.
Your latest idea is to add the names on the government’s “no-fly” list to the FBI’s “no-buy” list is puzzling.
If I recall correctly, you taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. On March 30, 2007, you said "I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current President, I actually respect the Constitution."
Mr. President, if you taught constitutional law and respect the Constitution, how can you justify recommending an action that you, of all people, should know is unconstitutional?
Boarding an airliner is not a constitutional right: keeping and bearing arms is. The Fifth Amendment states quite clearly that no person shall lose their rights without due process.
The “no-fly” list is not due process by any stretch of the imagination. It presents no evidence and allows for no defense before its restrictions are imposed. Yet you would give it the same weight as the findings of a court or the judgement of a jury in an open trial.
You would do the same thing to senior citizens who have committed no offense but have assigned the handling of their Social Security payments to another person. You have no idea why they might have done this, but you assume it must be dementia or some other malady that could affect a person’s ability to safely handle a firearm. You make that assumption without the judgement of a court or the decision of a competent authority that this is so.
If I may be so bold, Mr. President, you really should get reacquainted with the Constitution of the United States.
You might also want to consider the actual threat to society posed by Social Security recipients.
Mr. President, I am concerned that you are pushing a politically expedient agenda that does nothing to achieve the solution we all seek. By focusing on “gun violence,” attention is diverted from the real problem, which is violence and the causes of the rash of mass shooting incidents we have seen. Guns may facilitate the killer’s plan, but they don’t cause the plan to be created and, as Timothy McVeigh, Dzhokhar Trasnaev, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik have demonstrated, they aren’t the only means to an end (Farook and Malik had planted a remote-controlled bomb at the party).
The truth is that you say you want to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them but you have no idea how to identify those people. People already on the prohibited list have committed serious crimes, domestic abuse, are habitual users of drugs or alcohol or have been determined to be mentally unfit. But background checks only tell us what a person has done: they tell us nothing about what a person might do in the future. Or what they might be contemplating. We already know that some of these killers, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, spent a long time creating their plan and gathering their resources.
The laws we have now are pretty tough. Even giving a dishonest answer on the federal form required with every retail firearms purchase is a federal offense with penalties of up to ten years in prison or a $250,000 fine. Straw purchases are another federal offense with the same penalties. The same is true for any citizen who sells or gives a firearm to a prohibited person in a private transaction.
If your heart really goes out to the victims of these shootings, you should want to do better than offer snake oil remedies.
Best regards,
TexasBill