By John R. Lott Jr. for RealClearPolitics
President Biden traveled to Monterey Park, California, the site of a mass public shooting that left 11 dead in January, to announce new executive gun control measures. He touts the proposals as needed”to reduce gun violence and make our communities safer.” But California already has all the gun control laws Biden has proposed, and yet it has a rate of mass public shootings per capita higher than the rest of the country.
Measures already in place include background checks of all gun transfers, “red flag” gun confiscation laws and a ban on assault weapons. Even if Biden’s ideal background check law had been in effect and perfectly enforced, it wouldn’t have prevented a mass public shooting this century.
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Biden overstated support for his background check proposals. The surveys he cites compress long and complicated proposals Inone-sentence summaries. But when people are told that these laws would turn someone into a criminal simply for temporarily lending a handgun to a woman threatened by a stalker, survey respondents respond that they object to the settlement.
A proposal would require people who sell or transfer only a few firearms to obtain a federal firearms license. But even authorized dealers face an uphill regulatory battle. Biden’s zero tolerance policy (zero tolerance for what?) is pushing authorized dealers out of business. The end effect is to stop gun sales.
But Biden has another goal. Despite federal law explicitly prohibiting a national gun registry, the president has begun building a national gun ownership database. At the beginning of last year, there was almost a billion entries.
Forcing firearm transfers to go through authorized dealers will help create a more comprehensive registry. And that’s about all he’ll do, since gun licensing and registration solves no crime. The main thing is to driving up the price of guns for law abiding citizens and therefore completely stop arms sales. In other countries, and even in parts of the United States, registration is routinely used to eventually get people’s guns out, and given Biden’s constant call to ban all semi-automatic weaponswhich make up about 85% of all guns sold in the United States, that’s a real concern here.
Biden wantsimprove public awareness and increase” use of red flag laws (Extreme Risk Protection Orders). But that distracts from better laws already in place in all 50 states. Involuntary commitment laws provide for assessments by mental health experts, an emergency hearing and an attorney. These laws give judges more options, such as mandatory outpatient mental health care, driver’s license suspensions or confiscation of their weapons.
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In contrast, red flag laws only remove a person’s weapons. If a person is truly suicidal – nearly all scare cases involve concern about suicide – there are so many other methods that are just as likely to be successful (hang oneself, walk in front of a train, jump from a height). Simply taking away someone’s legally owned guns is not a serious solution.
Gun control advocates say California’s 1990 assault weapons ban is responsible for its 55% drop in gun deaths from 1993 to 2017. But California’s murder rate peaked in 1993 at 13.1 per 100,000 people, rising from 10.9 in 1989, the year before the state enacted its assault weapons ban. So why the murder rate 10% drop in 1994 and not in 1990, and continue to fall by 53% by 2000? California’s three-strike criminal penalty law began on March 7, 1994.
Biden says we need national gun control laws to protect states like California, but that ignores the fact that the guns used in California’s mass public shootings came from California. In fact, firearms in all but two public mass shootings in the past 25 years were from the state where the attack occurred.
Gun control measures are not only ineffective against mass public shootings – they actually encourage attacks. Shootings continue to happen in places where people cannot conceal handguns. In Los Angeles County, where two mass public shootings took place in January, there are one license for 5,660 adults. In San Mateo County, where another attack took place, there is a permit for 24,630 adults. For comparison, there is one license holder for every nine people in the 43 states licensed to carry.
Concealed handgun license holders are making a difference in these 43 states. In effect, people with legal guns have stopped at least 37 public mass shootings since 2020. And when Americans are allowed to legally carry concealed handguns, they stop about half of active shootings in the United States.
Mass public shooters deliberately choose targets where they know their victims cannot protect themselves. The perpetrator of a mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, last year wrote in his manifesto: “Areas where CCW [carrying a concealed weapon] are outlawed or prohibited can be good attack areas ... Areas with strict gun laws are also great places to attack.” Other mass murderers have made similar claims.
These killers may be crazy, but most aren’t stupid. Yet states like California, New York and New Jersey are turning to create more weapon-free zoneswhere mass murderers won’t have to worry about protecting victims.
Unfortunately, the gun control Biden is pushing will not stop the mass public shootings and will only make the problems worse. Gun control failures are used to push for more gun control laws. Solutions that would actually work are not discussed.
John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on suffrage and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the wall street journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA todayAnd Chicago Grandstand. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
Syndicated with permission by RealClearWire.
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