The Chicago Tribune’s Steven Chapman has offered a number of sensible, concrete proposals that would reduce gun related violence in the US. Contrary to accepted wisdom, these do not include items such as an “Assault weapon” ban or “universal” background checks. And while what he proposes would, he’s really missing the point.
Gun control isn’t about crime control.
Chapman points out that the measures championed by the Obama Administration would only affect the law abiding and not the criminals they claim to target.
The problem with most gun control laws is that they impose a burden on the law-abiding that lawbreakers can usually evade. What is needed is an approach that focuses tightly on altering the behavior of criminals. There are proven steps that can hobble the dangerous without penalizing the harmless.
The point of these laws, however, is to target the law abiding. Crime control is not the intended purpose of the Feinstein’s “assault weapon” ban. Nor is it the intended purpose of Chuck Schumer’s “universal” background check law. These laws won’t affect the criminal class in this country and they know it. They also don’t care. Their real target is you.
The truth is that criminals don’t use rifles all that often. They use scary looking semi-auto rifles even less. (“All rifles” account for only about 3% of gun related crimes in the US.) Dianne Feinstein is not an idiot; she knows these facts as well as anyone. She will put on a lovely display of doublethink for the cameras, but she knows the truth: Her ban won’t save a single life. In fact, it will cost lives. But the entire point of her ban is to disarm the law abiding. Why? Because the law abiding actually believe in the rule of law. She and her political allies have far too much to accomplish to be bothered with a bunch of armed, Constitution-quoting Puritans. Those guns will have to go!
The same is true for Chuck Schumer. He knows that his background checks won’t apply to criminals. Even if a criminal is caught lying on a Federal form 4473, the odds of getting prosecuted and convicted are .27%. Like his colleague Sen. Feinstein, he’s not an idiot. He knows that his law won’t slow down a single criminal. But that’s not the point. The real point it to construct a database of those pesky “law abiding” types.
So the only way that gun control could be called crime control is if “criminal” is redefined to mean people like you.
Which is precisely how people like Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, and Barack Obama define the word.