I suppose it is traditional for Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot by shooting their mouths off. And they’re doing it again. Nancy Pelosi, who is the Minority Leader in the Senate, is seen on TV a lot more often than Party Chairman Governor Howard Dean, and that makes her the national face and voice of the Party. But she is from that bastion of non-moderation, San Francisco. What brings cheers from her constituents doesn’t often fly in front of Blue Dog Democrats or moderates from Ohio or Florida and they don’t really trust her. When she jumped aboard Representative John Murtha’s bandwagon calling for an early withdrawal from Iraq I think she actually hurt his credibility. And she claims to have support from half the congressional Democratic caucus.
But few Democrats from red states are in that caucus. That means the party currently leans heavily toward liberal positions and ideology. But it is precisely in the moderate and conservative Red States that Democrats must win over voters if they are to wrest control of the House, the Senate and the White House from the Right Wing Fundamentalists who have controlled the Republican Party for over a decade. With its image to the left, the Democratic Party surrenders the middle ground to the right.
Front page of the Washington Post today is the story on a memo written by Al From, President of the Democratic Leadership Council and Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster. They remind the party leadership that “…America remains a moderate to conservative country – particularly on economic and security measures.” As an example, says the memo, 54% of voters don’t like the Bush war in Iraq, but they don’t favor an early pullout. “Democrats”, they say, “need to capture the vital center and bring an abrupt halt to what voters see as the party’s drift to the left.”
And Governor Dean has been urging Democrats to let gun control slip off the national agenda, and reduce it as a litmus test for support. His spokesman, Damian LaVera was quoted in yesterday’s Washington Post as saying, “On gun rights we’ve allowed the Republicans to paint us in a way that just doesn’t represent our values” He’s talking about the values of Red state Democrats. As the Post points out, “Democrats’ ability to attract rural voters in the West is the key to their hopes in 2006. In Montana, where Democrats hope to pick up a US Senate seat next year, candidates must be pro-gun to have a chance of winning, said the state’s Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, an avid hunter….”I guess I kind of believe in gun control. You control your gun, and I’ll control mine, “Schweitzer said.
Does this mean that Democrats will be abandoning attempts to lesson gun violence? Actually, it may mean a long overdue rethink of the sixty year old Democratic legislative program of regulating guns themselves, an approach which has consistently failed to achieve any of its goals.
There are about 223 million guns in America, legally owned by approximately 44 million citizens. Every hour four citizens are shot and killed by guns – about 20,000 deaths each year. 28% of all assaults involve guns. Some 341,000 guns are stolen every year, but 4,204,800 new guns are made. Guns of all types are used in over 500,000 assaults each year. And yet, the relationship between guns and crime are one of the least studied aspects of American life. All of the statistics in this paragraph came from F.B.I. and A.T.F. studies funded during 1993 – 95 during debate over the Clinton Crime bill, which required more record keeping to support restrictions on the sale of guns to those with felony convictions and those with a history of mental and emotional disturbance. That was also the last time the Democrats controlled the House and shortly before they lost control of the rest of the government.
Those numbers seem to paint a horrible connection between guns and violence in America, at least until you take a closer look. That huge number of stolen guns actually represents thefts from only 0.9% of gun owners. Not a bad safety record. Given the two hundred twenty-three million guns in the public’s hands, less than 0.022% are used in illegal activities in any given year. That means that the vast majority of all guns are never involved in violence. How does that support further regulation of guns as an effective crime reduction measure? Even the Clinton crime bill, the last major attempt to regulate gun violence, zeroed in on people who use guns, not the guns themselves.
Partly this was because radical attempts to outlaw handguns were simply not likely to pass congress. Even a brilliant idea that cannot become law is just hot air. But one of the other reasons for the shift was a successful Massachusetts law that applied strict sentencing rules for anyone charged with using a gun in a crime – no plea bargains, no probation, no time off for good behavior and no pardons. “You carry a gun, you go to jail.” This law did not result in a reduction in assaults. But it did see a reduction in assaults using guns. It turns out criminals can learn. The Clinton Crime Bill of 1994 reduced assaults using guns by 25%, but it also did not reduce the number of assaults. Could it be that the National Rifle Association had been right all these years, that guns don’t kill people, people do?
But if the emphasis on dealing with gun violence is to shift to the people misusing guns, it should also shift to the people profiting from the misuse of guns. Only 32% of all felons admit to having stolen their last gun – which means most felons buy their guns from dealers who do not follow the law. The Washington D.C. sniper used a Bushmaster rifle he had obtained from a Washington State dealer. He must have stolen it since he had a felony record and the dealer could not have legally sold that gun to him. But the dealer did not report the gun as stolen until after law enforcement, having finally having silenced the gun, traced the serial number back to the dealer.
Knowing that gun had been stolen in Washington State might have led D.C. and Virginia and Maryland police to the suspect weeks earlier, which might have saved lives. But failure to report a stolen gun is not grounds for pulling a dealer’s license, and even after the dealer’s slip shod stock control was revealed, manufacturers continued shipping to him.
Similarly when small suburban dealers sell a large volume of a specific type of gun, profits are clearly being made selling guns to supply street gang arsenals. Gun dealers and manufactures should be our first line of defense against criminals, just as pharmacists and drug stores are our fist line of defense against meth labs. Instead gun dealers and manufacturers of guns are facilitators for the felons who use those guns illegally, and they profit from it.
They should be required to report unusual sales and all thefts promptly.
After all, guns don’t profit from the illegal use of guns, people do.
