Licensing rights
Senators Cory Booker and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, along with Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, would like to see a requirement written into federal law that gun buyers have a license to receive firearms. Their bill, introduced on the 19th of May, would have prospective law-abiding purchasers go through the usual background check done when buying from a business, but adds written and skills tests to cover firearms laws and safe handling, the submission of proof of one’s identity, of one’s fingerprints, and of the make, model, and serial number of the gun in question. Yes, the gun, singular, as the license would apply only to one. It would also have to be renewed every five years and could be revoked if law enforcement sends evidence to the Attorney General that the possessor may be a danger to self or others. This latter judgment may be appealed in one’s district court, presuming that the person has the time and money to go through that process.
The language of the bill uses both “purchase” and “receive,” and while it seems to contemplate permanent transfers of ownership as its primary interest, receiving a firearm may also mean inheriting, borrowing, holding, or whatnot, leaving me to wonder if someone on the firing line at a range who wishes to try out my new CZ 75B, for example would not be obliged under this bill to apply for a license first. Why such a license would need to be renewed every five years is not clear, since it is characterized as permission to buy the gun, but the intention appears to be to create a licensing scheme for ownership going forward—along with a registry (thus the identifying information of the particular gun) for all firearms to be bought legally from now on. All sales would in the future have to be reported to the Attorney General.
The bill says nothing about guns currently owned, which is as may be either a failure to grasp reality or a hope that current gun owners will be satisfied by being told, “you’ve got yours, so what are you worried about?” I speculate that the senators here may be clueless because of the number of guns that Americans already have. One estimate by the World Population Review puts the range between 200 and more than 350 million, though the site talks about registered guns, whatever that might mean, considering the facts that no federal registry exists and that most states have also eschewed such records. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, using data from the ATF, puts the total at an estimated 423 million, and it is worth emphasizing here that this figure comprehends primarily those guns that were legally purchased. How many have been smuggled in or have survived from periods of spotty record-keeping is anyone’s guess.
And as I pointed out, most of those guns—I would suggest the vast majority—are unregistered. Many have been transferred from their original owners. With the durability of a minimally maintained firearm and the ease of transporting it, the number of such weapons in private hands could be well in excess of half a billion. The senators may wish to refer to the adage about horses and barn doors.
But while simple ignorance is a common trait among gun control advocates, the notion that we gun owners would be willing to accept the proposed scheme on the grounds that it would only burden future transfers is more insidious. “I’ve got mine” is unfortunately a popular attitude among Americans, be it with regard to wealth, to healthcare, to marriage, to voting, or to relations with local police. Straight persons who live in well-to-do neighborhoods all too often wonder what the problem might be with securing a pleasant life. I would like to believe that we gun owners are sensitive at least to the struggles that members of minority groups face when it comes to exercising gun rights, if not to other agonies, and the hashtag, #allguncontrolisracist, that I have seen increasingly used is a good sign of that. But there is always the risk that enough of the currently not quite one third of the U.S. population who own firearms might be seduced into submitting to a divide-and-conquer strategy if we are not burdened too much for the moment to make some variation on the proposal of Booker, Menendez, and Blumenthal work.
Of course, given the current composition of the Senate, this bill is likely to be only so much campaign literature, to be yet another piece of legislation that gets offered year after year to signal the senator’s virtue to the voters at home. It is nothing new for Cory Booker. As PolitiFact confirmed, he has called for something similar in 2019 and 2020 to no effect, while during the same period expressing his opposition to voter ID laws for their disproportionate burden placed on the poor and for their use as a tool to disenfranchise minority voters.
As I have argued before, dividing rights by political party is a means of losing the exercise of them all. I add here that trotting out poorly considered bills whose only purpose is to create the appearance of being busy encourages a disparagement of Congress specifically and of government in general. A resulting political apathy would be as bad as active support for bad legislation. What we must do is to inform our elected representatives that their jobs depend on giving up these foolish proposals that can do nothing but burden the law-abiding and instead get to doing meaningful work.