Jan 11^th

Mona Charen is back. Her column is quite predictably an attack on President Obama’s attempt to control gun violence. Closing the gun show loophole (this she has in quotes), expanding background checks and restricting internet sales, all of which we hope will limit the carnage on our streets, Charen classifies as “moral grandstanding.” She claims that “not a word of it holds up.” This is followed by the disclaimer that she “doesn’t love guns” and “believes that the Second Amendment does not forbid all regulation of gun ownership, I am open to the idea of gun control,” she says.

She claims that, “We’ve always had plentiful guns in this country but we haven’t always had the frequency of random mass shootings in public places that have so disturbed us over the last couple of decades.” She claims that a “gun dealer must comply with federal laws that require gun sellers to  have licenses  and perform background checks without regard to whether the sale is arranged on the internet or in person.” That is nonsense. Many transactions at gun shows are done not by licensed dealers” but by collectors or hobbyists and they don’t have to conduct any checks at all. If you want to sell your pistol to your neighbor no background check is required.

Several issues should be addressed here: The typical hunting rifle or hand gun will not have a magazine capacity of more than eight or ten rounds. Now we have semi-automatic weapons that can easily be converted to fully automatic by any literate sixteen year old. Even on semi-automatic an AK-47 clip (magazine) holding 40 rounds can be bought on the internet for less than twenty-five dollars. You can easily pull a trigger 40 times and fire 40 rounds in less than one minute. The potential carnage by someone with a half dozen 40 round clips is obscene. Naturally the NRA opposes any restriction on magazine size; you never know when you might face a home invasion by multiple assailants. (Of course if everyone had semi-automatic weapons with high capacity clips who would want what was left of the home?)

Charen quotes Brian Doherty, a writer from “Reason” magazine, about the relationship between “the number of guns in circulation” and the gun murder rate. Doherty claims that as the number of guns in circulation has gone up the murder rate has gone down. Charen quotes Doherty but where does Doherty get his information? I think that the NRA would be quite surprised if there was, somewhere, a record of the “number of guns in circulation.” Another consideration is that “Reason, “ the magazine, is a Libertarian monthly. The Libertarian position on gun control is just what you might expect, there shouldn’t be any. That’s right, the Libertarian platform asserts that there should be no restriction on which persons may own guns, or on what kind of guns they may own, or on the size of gun magazines. I wonder if Mona Charen knows the Libertarian position is no gun control.