Team 26 on its March 9-12 right to Washington,
highlight the slaughter of 26 students and educators
in Newtown, Connecticut, to boost support for
gun-control laws. Read more details
here.
According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, at the state level
there are more than 600 proposals for laws that would add new gun-control restrictions to the books. And some 540 that would broaden gun rights. All are working their way through whatever process each state has, and most of them will never actually become law. You can compare your state's existing laws with other states'
here.
Two states, New York and Colorado, have recently passed stricter new laws.
The New York law bans assault weapons and limits the capacity of gun magazines. The Colorado laws limit magazine capacity, bar from gun ownership people who have been convicted of certain domestic violence crimes, require anyone seeking a permit to carry a concealed firearm to get in-person training instead of merely watching a video and extends required background checks to all private sales. Gun purchasers will also be required to pay a small fee for their background check. Maryland is considering a proposal from Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley that would impose an assault weapons ban and magazine-capacity limit.
Meanwhile, nearly three months after the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school slaughter, only one federal measure has been voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It would stiffen penalties for individuals who make "straw purchases" for individuals prohibited from owning firearms. The committee will continue its review of gun-control proposals Tuesday.
On the docket is a bill from Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California to reinstate an assault weapons ban and limit on the capacity of gun magazines. The previous ban expired after 10 years in 2004. Although the ban will almost certainly be approved by committee, many people in the know do not think it will pass the full Senate. That's not just because of the expected opposition from Republicans but also because many Democrats, particularly in Western states, don't think much of the idea. House Speaker John Boehner has indicated that anything that doesn't get passed in the Senate won't even be considered in the House.
Even a proposal that clearly has the most support among Americans, a background check of anyone who purchases a firearm from any source, may be in trouble. Negotiations in an ad hoc group of two Democratic and two Republican senators collapsed last week because Sen. Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, refused to sign off on any bill that included a requirement for records to be kept.
Currently, only people who buy their guns from a federally licensed dealer are covered by mandated background checks. Dealers must keep records of their gun sales for 20 years but there are no federal records. Backers of extending background checks to all private sales want someone to keep records of those sales, too. But that's where Coburn wouldn't budge. One approach, requiring all private sales to be handled through a licensed dealer for a fee, would solve the records problem with minimal fuss. Please continue reading about the difficulties of getting gun-control legislation passed below the fold.
Because of pressure from the National Rifle Association, the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System is required by law to destroy within 24 hours any records of its checks that show a buyer is not barred from gun ownership. The logic behind this, if it can be called that, is that keeping these records on file creates a gun registry that, some time in the future, the government might use to confiscate certain kinds of guns, say, military-style assault weapons, or even all guns.
Some gun-rights advocates go so far to say that the existing background check system should be done away on the grounds that, even though it has blocked 1.7 million gun purchases since 1999, criminals will get guns some other way, theft or private sale. Most lawmakers aren't willing to go that far, however, and both they and advocates argue that the lack of checks on private sales is one of the reasons the system is less effective than it should be. But complaints about a gun registry and other problems with the background check system have muddied the waters.
Even the strongest backers of the background check system as it currently operates concede it has problems. For instance, Mike Lillis is the most recent journalist to report on the problem of getting states to provide the federal government with data that would keep guns out of the hands of the dangerously mentally ill. Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina is looking at legislation that would require states to provide this information:
"In Arizona, there are more than 120,000 mental health records—these are records of people who have been adjudicated at the state level—and these are not part of the NICS system," Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a co-sponsor of Graham's mental health bill, said Wednesday. "There's something wrong when that is the case."
And it's not just the Grand Canyon State. Nineteen states passed laws in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre to do a better job of providing relevant mental health records to the feds. But 13 states have provided fewer than five records and Rhode Island has provided none.
The problem? Supreme Court precedent means no mandate on the states to provide this information would probably succeed. That should push local gun-control advocates to make it a priority to lobby for state laws to require this information be provided to the feds, thus eliminating the need for a federal mandate that would probably be unconstitutional anyway.
The truth of the situation is that the powerful NRA and even more extreme groups like Gun Owners of America have succeeded for decades in loosening gun laws, getting restrictions attached to the restrictions and turns what would be good laws into less effective ones, limiting information about the impact of guns on society, gutting the budget of the federal enforcement of gun laws and persuading or intimidating lawmakers into following their bidding.
To some extent, reactions to the Aurora theater massacre last summer and, most especially, the pro-active reaction to the Newtown school slaughter in December have changed attitudes, built new gun-control coalitions and slightly weakened the NRA's stranglehold on the gun debate. But so far, as is clear from the opposition poised against even the most obvious and sensible new proposals, we are nowhere near freeing the nation from that organization's lethal grip.