the proposed laws.
Too often we see the debate about guns turn into a shouting match, tossing of counter-numbers from skewed polls/data sets/etc, and personal attacks. We see people using the same word but with different meanings.
This does not let either side explain or explore the issue and come up with possible solutions or compromises.
I have spent most of my life around firearms: 24+ years in the military, raised on the family farm when not living on military bases, work as a Paramedic in Cleveland (for now). I have many family/friends/co-workers who own firearms. I am a self described liberal christian who volunteered for the Kucinich campaigns both Congressional (he was my Congressman) and president.
I have a foot in both worlds and have been exploring the non-soundbite rational for why gun owners oppose the proposed gun laws.
Part I talked about Universal Background Checks and National Registry. In part II I talked about what i call "nit-picky-ness". This time I will try to examine their fears "this is a back door confiscation".
A long look after the fold.
The idea that "this is a backdoor move to confections" is what we hear often when laws are tightened, or there are restrictions being proposed. Lets look at the thinking from gun owners on this in the hopes that with understanding the other side, then we can find a middle ground to meet in.
Gun owners feel that owning a firearm is a right they have simply because they are humans. (as in most things in life, this is not 100% but it is well over 95% of gun owners) They feel that the Second Amendment is not the government granting a right but rather the government being told this is a right of people you (the government) can't mess with.
So, coming from that point of view, any thing that reduces, even a little bit, is harming the human right to have a firearm.
I know this sounds strange, but it is the case in most gun owners. (try this some day, ask a gun owner if the second amendment did not exist, would they have a right to own a weapon anyways?)
So what is a limit to the gun owner? Of the proposed laws this could be things such as mandatory 'smart' guns, limits on the number of guns you can buy/own/keep in one place, insurance, mandatory training, licensing, special taxes, and the like. Each of these have one stated purpose in common: reduce the number of people who have firearms. (and lower crime with guns, reduce deaths with guns, make the world safer, etc but that is not what the gun owner sees)
Take insurance and mandatory training to have a permit/licenses. Insurance for guns is an idea floated to "make gun owners cover the harm they cause". Then the price to cover the insurance is often something like $1,000 per gun per year. (and most of the laws floated prohibit pricing based off of likelihood of the gun being used wrong, so the 72 year old grandma in a rural area gets the same price as 21 year old male living in the city in a high crime area. There are other issues wrong with them as well such as not exempting guns taken from the owner by force or theft, holding the last registered owner at fault even if the sale was out of state, not exempting self defense use, etc.)
This is what the gun owner sees: $1,000 per gun per year. They say "I have 9 guns that have never ever done anything to hurt anyone ever, I don't plan on ever hurting anyone with them either." So the idea that they need to come up with $9,000 per year to keep owning the guns they currently have, have had for many years - generations in many cases, makes them see this as a way to make them give up their guns because they can't afford to pay $9,000 a year.
Is it a back door confiscation? The law would not ban owner ship or take away the "right" to own a gun, just require you carry insurance. It is not a ban even though you can't use that right because you don't have the money.
To help you see their side, lets apply this idea to free speech. (please, lets not go nuts in the comments about free speech is not going to kill someone, it is an example of the thinking.) Lets say a law is passed that says you have to carry libel insurance for each device your family has that can connect to the internet. To cover the cost of people committing libel on the daily kos comment section. It would cost $1,000 per device per year. In my home I have a desktop, a laptop, iPad, and smart phone, the spouse has a laptop, smart phone and a kindle. The oldest kid has an old iPhone. So $8,000 a year to keep the devices we have. What would happen? Well on our income, we would get rid of the computers, smart phones and iPad and kindle. Nothing stops me from having computers, just pay the cost. (with my income even at $50 per device we might end up with one and that would be tight)
Remember, in the gun owners mind, the 'right' to a firearm is as much a human right as free speech. This is why they call it a back door confiscation.
90's permits were easier to get, this one only took six months and cost $75. Much harder today, $150+ and almost a year. (No that is not a mullet, it is shadows. Note the staples holding the photo to the ID.)
Same goes for licensing and mandatory training but not on an economic level, as much. Mandatory training does have cost, as does licensing, but not to the level as the example above. In these cases it is the legal hoops and efforts required that prevent them from access to guns.
Right now, in most states, it does not take much to buy a gun. Most states require some form of license to carry a gun in public, but not to own. Enlightened states require a permit to own as well. I am no expert on gun laws nation wide, but I am very aquatinted with New York, Maryland, Ohio and Kentucky's. It has been shown that the more steps someone has to take to get a permit/license the lower the gun ownership is. (and the lower the number of gun deaths from suicide). So a state like New York which requires a permit to own a handgun that takes several months to a year to get, and then has a process to buy a gun that takes a week or more, has a lower rate of people making the effort to own a gun. (likely because the impulse buy is taken away and they don't buy it and put it in a closet and forget about it till a kid finds it and "oops".)
With this knowledge, that requiring training to own a gun, license to own, permit to carry in public (concealed or open) the gun owner fears this. They see it as a restriction on access to guns, that new gun users won't be able to get guns and make their ownership seem publicly acceptable. Then see anything that limits access as a way to keep people from joining the ranks. Anything that makes it harder, more costly to own a gun is just a way of limiting the ability to get a gun.
Take NY for example. Average cost to get a permit is $150, takes several hours of your time to get finger printed, back ground check, find character references, get the FBI check, get the photo taken, signing the documents in front of the Sheriff, etc. Then to buy a gun you have to go and pay the dealer for the gun, he runs a background check, gives you the receipt. You go to the sheriff's office when they have public times to issue an amendment to your permit. Most counties have a four to eight hour window during normal business hours. The Sheriff notes the information from the dealer on your permit and you pay for a purchase coupon, about $20 in most places. You then go back to the dealer, give the coupon, buy a gun lock (has to be bought separately and not part of the sale of the gun), the dealer then gives you the gun.
So to own a $150 .380 ACP, you will spend $170 for the permit, $40 for the gun lock, and use 20 to 30 hours of your time in normal work hours. And you have to do the permit process every five years. Now each gun after the first lowers the cost of ownership but the real 'burden' is the time spent not at work.
This does have one side-effect of note: New York gun owners are the most committed to "gun rights" on the east coast. The 'causal' gun owner does not exist because to go through the process takes effort. The gun owner sees lots of people start the process but not finish it. Sees people with permits, get tired of going through the steps to renew their permit or buy a new gun that they just stop and sell off their guns. They see this and then hear that a proposed law would add "mandatory training" to the renewal process (more cost, time and the potential of being denied because of poor aim) and they know even fewer will keep their guns.
They see this as another effort to make owning a gun so expensive, time consuming, and such a bureaucratic process that few new people will buy guns and those that have them will get tired of all this and give them up. Or worse, forget to mail out a form and have their permit revoked and be forced to give up their guns.
Mandatory safety tech, aka smart guns, micro-stamping, micro-chips, etc raise the cost partly by being technology that does not exist or currently work reliably. (simple rule of thumb here - if the cops won't use it, don't expect the citizen to use it) What does exist is very expensive and raises the cost of a firearm over $300. Which in my income bracket is serious money.
Same goes for special taxes. The Chris Rock tax ($1,000 per bullet), the Concealed tax (25% tax on small handguns), Dealer tax ($100 per gun sold), and many other variations are floated with the stated goal of making it too expensive to own or use a firearm. Again, jumping to the first example.
Most gun owners don't oppose some limited rules on the owning and keeping of weapons. They just want to be able to buy a gun or two with out all the legal paperwork and time. Remember that most gun owners (83%) are not high income professionals, but working class people most have annual incomes of less than $35,000 a year. So they see a tax or requirement that costs $100 per year per gun as oppressive. They already invested 1.5% of their annual income into a $500 gun and now "they" want to take another 0.2% every year? Or make them give up 20 hours of work?
This hurts the gun owner and they can see that their friends won't be able to be gun owners either if they are not now. If the rules get more expensive or time consuming they can't see how they can keep their guns.
So what to do? Here is where the compromise is hard. The goal of all gun control laws IS to make it harder for people to get guns. Gun owners have a desire to not spend lots of money on things that don't help their guns go boom. Add in the gun owners view that guns are a human right and the middle ground is hard to find here.
Some suggestions: Make any fee for permits or licenses graduated by income of the requestor. That way the truck driver making a take home pay of $25,000 is paying less than the Wall Street banker for the permit.
Forget any per bullet "ammo" tax. I know that does not sound like a compromise, but it is. Instead, have a 1% sales tax on all gun accessories in addition to the normal sales tax. This would collect the tax on all sales in the state, including the internet, and would cover reloading components. You can gain support by having the tax funds dedicated to 'gun safety' classes or hunter safety.
Mandatory training should be open to civilian instructors, not just police. Civilian instructors such as the NRA hunter safety trainers, will do weekend and evening classes. Police tend to be a 9 to 5 M to F. Also allow the training to happen over several sessions. KY use to mandate 20 hours back to back over two days. Missed one, you had to redo it. This would allow the working person to be able to take the training with out missing work, makes the gun owner feel better getting trained by their "friend" the NRA vs a Cop who might come and take their gun some day.
Mandatory tech: Already addressed that one. It is a non-starter for now. Until the police feel safe using "smart" gun tech, no citizen is going to. (smart gun tech is some system that only allows the owner of the gun use it. Police would love to have this as the fear that the bad guy they are trying to arrest who starts wrestling with might get their gun. It happens and cops die every year because of that. But existing tech is not used because it is unreliable.) Micro-stamping, the imprinting of a small number on the bullet casing, does exist but requires a national registry of gun (see part I), is not very accurate as the stamping part wears down quickly, gets unreliable with reloading (using the same bullet casing over and over), and the current paten holder is a gun rights group that won't license the product.
If law makers would consider the economic status of gun owners, middle to low income, they would be able to come up with better ideas that could pass. Insurance for every gun? Great idea, but not at current prices. Tax on ammo at 5 cents per bullet? That means a 20% tax on some smaller boxes of ammo. That is something the gun owner can see and feel. A 1% tax on the sale of gun accessories add to the sales tax? Small enough to not be noted and mixed in with an existing tax they pay everywhere now.
Yes, the goal with these proposed laws is less guns. But the main goal should be less gun crime and gun deaths. Focusing on universal non-regisrty background checks, safety training, and harsher punishment for use of guns in crimes will do more to lower gun crimes and deaths than massive tax proposals that never get passed because of the gun owners push back.