Why don’t we actually prosecute gun crimes? The Democrats say they want commonsense gun-control measures. People on all sides say they want pragmatic, bipartisan solutions to our national problems. So, what can conservatives support?

The Democrats’ opening bid this time around is, regardless of how Republicans receive it, a dead letter, inasmuch as their proposal — having police agencies compile secret lists of possible subversives and revoking their legal rights with nothing resembling due process — is plainly unconstitutional, and wouldn’t withstand five minutes’ legal examination. When the Democrats talk about the so-called terror gap, that’s what they’re talking about: keeping a list of people who have been identified by police agencies as possible threats, but who never have been charged with, much less convicted of, any crime, and rescinding their ordinary constitutional rights without so much as a court hearing. We cannot prohibit people from buying guns with no due process for the same reason we cannot subject them to arbitrary incarceration or hunt them for sport.

Other ideas are being kicked around that have been kicked around, and some of them even have been tried, such as the ban on so-called assault weapons. Study after study after study has shown that the assault-weapon ban had zero effect on violent crime when it was in effect, and it almost certainly wouldn’t have one now, either. And, given that the archetypal “assault rifle” — which is an ordinary sporting rifle following the old Armalite design — is the most popular rifle in the United States, a ban that had any hope of having any effect would have to be accompanied by a national confiscation policy. The Democrats keep saying that they don’t want to take away our guns, but that is, in fact, what this policy would demand.

Republicans often demand that we “enforce the laws we have,” but what does that mean?

There are a few avenues that we could pursue along those lines.

Several years ago, the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois — the federal prosecutor responsible for Chicago — announced that, as a matter of policy, his office would not be pursuing prosecutions in most cases involving “straw buyers,” the clean faces who use their unblemished records to purchase firearms on behalf of convicted criminals and others prohibited from legally purchasing firearms. These cases are lots of work and generally don’t ensnare big-time criminals, but rather the idiot nephews, girlfriends, and grandmothers of big-time criminals. Putting those people in federal penitentiaries for ten years isn’t going to win anybody any friends. But they are the people who render our current background-check laws ineffective against the criminals who have turned parts of Chicago into a free-fire zone. Putting a few dozen of them away for a few dozen years might provide a strong disincentive for other would-be straw buyers, particularly those who (as is not uncommon) engage in straw buying as a commercial endeavor.

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Source: Kevin D. Williamson, nationalreview.com