Court Decisions Aside, Scofflaws Have Long Made Gun Control Unenforceable

[eriadoc]

This is a long, but very worthwhile read. Snippet below to whet your appetite.

LINK

I doubt I ever would have gone to the black market to purchase an illegal assault weapon if it wasn’t for New York’s annoyingly restrictive gun control laws.

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Well … guilty as charged. My family (I’m descended from immigrants originating in those suspect regions of Europe) has long had a habit of owning, and often carrying, weapons in and around New York City.

But we got to this country – most of my ancestors, anyway — just about the time the Sullivan Act became law. Which means all that carrying and brandishing of weapons took place despite the law, because nobody in my family bothered to get a pistol permit through several generations of residency in New York City.

Until me.

There are downsides to owning guns illegally. The big one, from my perspective, was that I couldn’t go shooting at a range. The folks at the Westside Rifle and Pistol Range probably had as dim a view of permits and registration as I do, but they weren’t about to risk their own freedom just to let me put a few holes in paper targets.

So I applied for a permit to purchase a .45-caliber Model 1911 and keep it at home.

The sales clerk at the gun shop was helpful – he should have been. I paid a premium to have my paperwork submitted to the proper city paper-pushers by experts retained by the store. Although the term was never used, I assumed that meant the store made use of New York City’s peculiar breed of middlemen known as “expediters” to get the permit processed. Eternally controversial, expediters are known for their detailed knowledge of the city’s byzantine regulatory procedures, their working relationships with bureaucrats and their willingness to grease palms to make sure clients are given favorable consideration.

Even so, I waited. And I waited. And I finally blew my stack.

As the saying goes, I knew a guy who knew a guy. It took an email, a phone call and a friendly meeting, and for less than 300 bucks, I was the proud owner of a semi-automatic variant of an AK-47 – the famed assault rifle of the old Soviet bloc and of guerrilla fighters everywhere. It was legal in much of the United States, but strictly verboten in New York City.

And it cost me about a third of the ultimate price of that legal pistol.

As it turned out, the illicit rifle was not only cheaper and easier to obtain than the legal pistol, but the seller was much more pleasant to deal with than the cops administering the official process. The police officers at New York City’s One Police Plaza, once I actually got into the place, were flat-out rude. They weren’t abusive as much as surly in a special bureaucratic way, backed up by the implied threat that they could punish back-talk with a simple nudge of your papers into the trash can. I bit my tongue, but everybody has their own limit. A “customer” at an adjoining desk in the cramped warren stood up, announced loudly that rather than put up with this treatment he’d buy his gun on the street, then stalked from the room.

In fact, New York City’s situation with guns is mirrored in Europe, where countries with tight restrictions also find themselves awash in illegal firearms without any clear parallels for the relatively liberal laws of Virginia or South Carolina to blame. According to the Small Arms Survey (PDF) at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland:

Contrary to widely-accepted national myths, public gun ownership is commonplace in most European states. It may appear to some outside observers—especially Americans—that Europeans have blindly surrendered their gun rights (Heston, 2002). The reality is that the citizens of most European countries are better armed than they realize.

Regulations tightly control gun ownership in only a few European countries like the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom. In much of the rest of the continent, public officials readily admit that unlicensed owners and unregistered guns greatly outnumber legal ones. ……

“Greatly outnumber?” Just how greatly?

Well, says the Small Arms Survey, a research outfit established by the Swiss government, the United Kingdom, with just shy of 1.8 million legal firearms, has about four million illegal guns. Belgium, with about 458,000 legal firearms, has roughly two million illegal guns. In Germany, the number is 7.2 million legal guns and between 17 and 20 million off-the-books examples of things that go “bang” (a figure with which the German Police Union very publicly agrees). France, says the Survey, has 15-17 million unlawful firearms in a nation where 2.8 million weapons are held in compliance with the law.

That said, the underlying point of all of this evidence of extremely well-armed scofflaws around the world is this: the scofflaws’ motivations don’t matter; agreement with their reasoning doesn’t matter; sharing or even respecting their values is entirely irrelevant. All that matters is that, from one country to the next, across barriers of language and culture, government officials in even the most benign, stable democracies that have attempted to disarm their subjects, or to limit the weapons available for legal ownership, or even to do no more than track gun owners and register guns, have run into overwhelming resistance. Mass defiance has crippled registration programs, hobbled confiscations schemes and made a mockery of licensing programs.

Lots more good stuff in there.