By: Kevin D. Williamson – nationalreview.com – May 31, 2022

On Sunday, I answered as briefly as I could – which in many cases was not very briefly at all – some common questions about the gun-control debate. I have a few even-less-brief observations for Tuesday, but I think you will find them useful.

I begin with what seems to be a mystifying paradox at the center of our gun-control efforts: We only want to enforce the law on the law-abiding, while we ignore the law-breakers almost entirely in our gun-control debate.

Almost every single substantive gun-control proposal put forward by our progressive friends is oriented toward adding new restrictions and regulatory burdens to federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them: what they can sell and what they cannot sell, to whom they can sell, under what conditions they may sell, etc. But, as I often remark, gun-store customers are just about the most law-abiding demographic in the United States, even accounting for situations such as that of the Uvalde killer, who was able to purchase his firearms legally because he had no prior criminal record. The best information we have comes from the Department of Justice, which found in 2019 that less than 2 percent of all prisoners had a firearm obtained from a retail source at the time they committed their crimes. A different 2013 study by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins found that only 13 percent of the offenders in the state prison population obtained their firearms from a retail source.

Criminals mostly don’t get their guns at gun stores — because they mostly can’t.

In contrast to those modest figures of 2 percent or 13 percent, the great majority of murders committed in the United States — upwards of 80 percent — are committed by people with prior arrest records, often by people with prior convictions for violent crimes or prior weapons offenses — and almost none of our gun-control proposals is targeted at this group.

If you have not bought a gun from a gun dealer, then you might not appreciate just exactly how law-abiding and how i-dotting and t-crossing you have to be to make the purchase: Not only are you excluded for a felony conviction, you also are excluded for misdemeanor convictions involving domestic violence or any other misdemeanor for which you could have been sentenced to more than one year in jail, irrespective of the sentence you actually received; you are excluded if you are a “fugitive from justice,” meaning someone with an active arrest warrant who has left the state to avoid arrest; you are excluded if you have been dishonorably discharged from the military; you are excluded if you are a drug addict or a user of illegal drugs; you are excluded if you are an illegal alien or an alien legally present on a nonimmigrant visa; you are excluded if you have been judged mentally deficient by a court of law or committed to a mental institution; you are excluded if you are subject to a restraining order; you are excluded from purchasing a handgun if you are not a resident of the state in which the purchase is being made; you are excluded if you are buying a gun for anyone other than yourself; you are excluded if the information on your government-issued identification does not match current records and the information on your application, a provision that is enforced with such exactitude that an application may be rejected if it says “111 Main St.” instead of “111 Main Street.”

Democrats who complain that it easier to buy a gun than it is to vote are lying for partisan political purposes and should be dismissed with contempt.

That being said, there are some deficiencies in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that should be part of the conversation. One is that NICS depends on a variety of agencies for reporting, and these agencies are not always reliable. For example, the shooter in the Sutherland Springs church attack should have been excluded from buying firearms, but the U.S. Air Force neglected to report his criminal history to the FBI, which manages NICS. (A judge has held the Air Force partially responsible for the deaths in that case.) Other problems: Non-federal fugitives are not often reported as such, and in the majority of cases the state with the warrant does not know whether the fugitive has left the state; some localities are slow or negligent in reporting restraining orders or misdemeanor convictions, and some apparently don’t even know what needs to be reported; mental-health reporting has long been slow and desultory — the number of mental-health records in the NICS database jumped from 234,628 in 2005 to 3.8 million in 2014 not because of some sudden spike in mental illness in the United States but because the feds made a priority out of it and put money into helping states and municipalities meet their reporting obligations; the United States does a notoriously poor job of tracking illegal aliens and enforcing immigration law; the process basically relies on self-reporting for illegal drug use.

That lattermost issue is dramatically illustrated by the case of Hunter Biden, who almost certainly violated federal law by lying about his longstanding drug problems when purchasing a handgun in 2018, but was never charged — and, let’s be frank, never will be charged and knew he was never going to be charged, even if caught — under the very law his father boasts of having “shepherded through Congress.”

These are real shortcomings in the system. But, even with that being the case, I should reiterate here that the data very strongly suggest that people who buy firearms from firearms dealers very rarely commit crimes of any kind with those firearms — less than 2 percent of the prisoners in the federal system and about 13 percent of those in the state systems had a firearm obtained from a retail source when they committed their crimes. (And even those figures may overstate the prevalence of retail-sourced firearms in that they probably include some straw purchases and firearms stolen from retailers.) Given the very weak statistical relationship between buying a gun from a gun dealer and committing a crime with that gun, why is there so much focus on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them?

The answer is that this conversation has almost nothing to do with violent crime, and almost nothing to do with policies aimed at reducing violent crime.

The gun-control debate is first and foremost a culture-war issue for Democrats. There is a great deal of violent crime in the United States, and that crime is concentrated in big cities over which Democrats enjoy an effective monopoly of political power. The people who commit most of the murders in the United States — and the people who most often die in those murders — check a lot of Democratic-voter demographic boxes: They are very disproportionately low-income African Americans in urban areas. Democrats are desperate to put a more Republican-looking face on the violent-crime problem, preferably one that is older, white, middle-aged, rural, southern, and Evangelical. That is the reason for the focus on the National Rifle Association in particular and on gun dealers and “gun culture” in general. As is so often the case in our contemporary politics, what we are talking about matters mostly because it is a way of not talking about something else.

I am not particularly an admirer of the National Rifle Association. The NRA once was a very effective — and notably bipartisan — single-issue advocacy organization, focused on the legal rights and interests of U.S. gun owners. Contrary to the myth that has grown up around it, the NRA has never been powerful because it throws around a great deal of money — which it doesn’t do: In the 2020 cycle, the NRA was not among the top 1,000 political donors or among the top 250 in lobbying outlays. It is true that the NRA is currently in a weakened condition after a series of self-inflicted wounds, but even back in 2012 it was No. 301 among campaign contributors and only No. 181 on lobbying outlays. The NRA’s strength has never been its pocketbook — it has always been the fact that it represents millions and millions of American gun owners who prioritize Second Amendment issues when they go to the polls. The NRA’s political clout has always been of the most genuine kind — the kind you cannot purchase. If you think clout like that can be bought, ask Mike Bloomberg about his efforts on the gun-control front.

The NRA went wrong when it made itself into a subsidiary of the Republican Party and allowed itself to be taken over by people who wanted to be Fox News pundits — a textbook example of Yuval Levin’s observation about self-interested people who use institutions as platforms. (I do not and never have given a fig about Wayne LaPierre’s million-dollar salary and his natty Zegna suits — frankly, I am surprised that he isn’t paid more: Very effective nonprofit executives do pretty well.) The NRA was better off — and Americans’ gun rights were more secure — when the group still had a few high-ranking Democrats on its side, and when its employees were not famous. You probably can’t name one employee of Squire Patton Boggs, a Washington lobbying powerhouse, and that suits the firm and its clients just fine. It is true that the NRA’s position as culture-war lightning rod was not entirely a matter of the organization’s own choosing, but it has leaned into the role more than it had to.

If this were a matter of public policy, the thousands of people who were standing outside the convention center in Houston to shout obscenities at the NRA would be standing outside the office of the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Chicago and raising absolute hell about the failure — about the refusal – of the federal government and most big-city DAs to prosecute straw-buyer cases. If this were about policy, Joe Biden would be in New York with Kathy Hochul in a headlock demanding to know why career criminals arrested on murder charges are being released — without bail! — into the streets of our largest city. Or, short of that, President Biden could take a brief walk down the street to the ATF headquarters and find out why the agency won’t even bother to go around and pick up guns in sales that it knows were wrongly approved. But none of that happens.

The reason none of that happens is that this is not about crime — it is about culture war and cultural enemies.

Don’t take my word for it: Ask Charles Blow of the New York Times, who demands that “Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear,” as the headline puts it — not what is effective, not what is reasonable or prudent, but whatever it is that Republicans don’t want. Blow is unusual only in that he is relatively open about the fact that this is a culture issue for him: “Gun culture,” he writes, “is a canard and a corruption.”

(Set aside, for the moment, that a marquee columnist for the New York Times apparently does not know what the word “canard” means.)

The Democratic Party and the progressive movement more generally are dominated culturally and financially by college-educated, affluent, white metropolitan professionals, mostly living in those two-thirds of U.S. households in which there is no firearm present. They present themselves as the champions of poor, black, urban communities about which they know almost nothing, and understand themselves as the enemies of lower-income, aging, white, rural communities — the stereotypical NASCAR crowd — about which they also know almost nothing. Never mind that much of the increase in gun ownership in recent years has been driven by women, African Americans, and recreational shooters in urban areas — the eggbound snake-handling hayseeds and would-be militiamen of Georgia and Alabama, whose cultural prominence is almost exclusively a matter of the progressive imagination, simply must be the face of gun ownership, at least for the purposes of culture war. Never mind that most of the violent crime involving guns in this country is carried out in zip codes where the voters elect Democrats almost exclusively, and never mind that the reason we do not act on those “common sense” gun-control measures on which almost all of us notionally agree — such as prosecuting straw-buying and other everyday weapons offenses — is the fact that doing this would irritate important Democratic constituencies in the big cities and among unionized government workers.

Even if we read the data in the way that is most generous to the gun-control cause, fewer than one in five criminals uses a gun acquired from a gun dealer, while more than four out of five murderers have prior arrest records. If we go by the DOJ findings, the share of criminals who use guns from gun dealers is more like 2 percent. And yet almost all of the new proposals from Democrats are new regulations and restrictions on firearms dealers, while almost none is focused on the relatively small body of prior offenders who carry out most murder and other violent crime. The progressives are protesting the NRA in Houston and not in front of city hall in Philadelphia or St. Louis.

Among the few proposals that are targeted at someone other than licensed gun dealers and their customers is the idea of so-called universal background checks, also known as “closing the gun-show loophole.”

According to the DOJ, the share of prisoners who obtained guns through gun shows was — commit this figure to memory — 0.8 percent.

Like I said, this isn’t about crime — it is about Kulturkampf.

A Few More Thoughts about This . . .

After nearly 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nobody — nobody sane, anyway — said: “But the real killer is heart disease!” Terrorist attacks are consequential not only because of the numbers killed but also because they change the nature of public life — that is, after all, what they are intended to do. Likewise, the number of Americans who die in massacres such as the ones recently carried out in Buffalo and Uvalde represents a tiny share of the total number of Americans who die in homicides, most of those deaths being the result of ordinary, quotidian crime. An American public-school student is considerably more likely to die in a school-bus accident than in a mass shooting. But those homicidal spectaculars change the nature of school life, and of public life in general.

It is for this reason that they deserve our attention, not because they tell us anything about the lethality of any particular class of firearms or the prudence of changing the regulation of such firearms. The killer in Uvalde was armed with a semiautomatic 5.56mm rifle, not exactly a “weapon of war” (that phrase itself presents a complicated question; see below) but a very effective firearm, and, not coincidentally, the most common rifle sold in the United States. But the killer was barricaded in a room full of fourth-graders for an hour — he could have been armed with a revolver, a kitchen knife, or a brick and achieved the same results. Most of the victims at Sandy Hook were six or seven years old — it is difficult to imagine how magazine-size restrictions would make much of a difference in such a situation. The worst school massacre in American history was carried out nearly a century ago by a killer who used bombs rather than firearms. These kinds of crimes are not going to be prevented by the sorts of measures being put forward.

But surely it is the case that we could, if we were serious about this — which, as I argue above, we really aren’t — walk and chew gum at the same time, using straightforward law-enforcement methods to reduce the numbers of ordinary criminal murders while also working on new data-driven techniques to try to identify mass killers and prevent their crimes before they happen, while also taking commonsense measures to improve security at schools and in other public places.

One thing we are going to have to do is decide whether we still think 18-year-olds are adults. Some gun-control advocates would like to see all firearms sales restricted to those who are at least 21 years of age. This is not an isolated idea: Increasingly, our colleges are organized around the belief that students as old as 22 years of age are, in effect, children who require “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and other measures by which school staff members act in loco parentis. In certain situations, a person can be charged with a felony sexual crime for having consensual sexual relations with an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old, even in places where the formal age of sexual consent is less than 18 years of age. And, of course, we generally forbid alcohol sales to legal adults younger than 21 years of age.

I am not what Michael Oakeshott would have called a rationalist, in that I am perfectly comfortable with some measure of organic inconsistency in the law, but I do not think that it probably is tenable in the long run to have an explicitly guaranteed constitutional right denied to people who are old enough to vote. Nor do I think that it is tenable to have people who otherwise enjoy the full rights of adulthood treated as though they were children in the context of higher education. What this means — although the notion is practically taboo — is that it is time to reconsider not the Second Amendment but the 26th Amendment, which forces the states to enfranchise 18-year-olds. If we are going to proceed as though adulthood starts at 21, then we need to raise the voting age to 21, too — because we don’t give children the vote.

Of course, we’ll have to do something about all those child soldiers in our military, with the median age of new Marines hovering around 19.

‘Weapons of War’

As I have pointed out many times, the 5.56mm semiautomatic rifles that progressives like to call “weapons of war” are not really that, inasmuch as they are not generally issued to troops in the United States or elsewhere. But do you know what is a weapon of war? Granddad’s deer rifle. The ubiquitous Remington 700 bolt-action rifle has long been a favorite of hunters, and it also is the go-to sniper rifle for military services around the world. Earlier American wars were fought with bolt-action .30-06 rifles functionally identical to what most American hunters used for generations.

Gun-control activists insist that AR-style rifles are not hunting rifles. A typical tirade found on the Internet: “An AR-15 is not a hunting rifle. Do you really need a high-powered rifle round and high-capacity magazine to take down Bambi? Last time I checked, Bambi wasn’t wearing a bullet proof vest or hiding behind cement barriers.” That isn’t Joe Biden, but it could be.

This is, of course, wrong on every count: The rifles in question not only are hunting rifles; they are today the most common hunting rifle in the United States. But they are not rifles that typically fire a “high-powered” round — in fact, the standard 5.56mm round has long been considered insufficiently powerful for humane deer hunting and has been prohibited at various times in various places for that purpose for that reason. Hog-hunting is one of the most popular kinds of pursuit in the United States, and many outfitters will not allow a hunter to use a 5.56mm rifle for hogs — because it is not powerful enough. The idea of shooting through concrete (Not cement! See below) barriers and body armor with that round is an uncertain proposal at best. You’d be better off with a traditional big-game hunting rifle, which is four or five times as powerful as the “higher-powered” 5.56mm. But, in any case, most of the popular hunter cartridges either began as military rounds (such as the .30-06) or still are military rounds (such as the .308 Winchester). As a practical matter, you aren’t going to find a rifle that is good for killing elk that isn’t also good for killing people.

And that fact matters . . . almost not at all, since rifles are almost never used in murders in the United States, accounting for only 2.5 percent of homicides. What murders in 2022 have in common with murders in 1922 is that the gun most commonly used in a murder is the most common handgun. Once upon a time, it was the Colt Single-Action Army revolver, and then it was the .38 Special, and now it is the 9mm pistol. In 20 years, it may be something else — but the shooters probably will be the same people, i.e., habitual criminals with prior records.

And gun-control advocates will still be focused on the 2 percent of criminals who buy guns from gun dealers, or possibly the 0.8 percent who get them from gun shows.

 Words About Words

In a recent New York Times article about quantum computers, Cade Metz writes:

This means that two qubits can hold four values at once, three qubits can hold eight, four can hold 16 and so on. As the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful.

Metz should get some kind of medal for being the only person writing for a major American newspaper who can use the word exponentially correctly.

That which increases exponentially is that which increases either in a way that is expressed by an exponent or in a way in which the rate of absolute growth increases as the series proceeds. This is in contrast to linear growth.

For example, a city that is experiencing linear growth and which grows from 100,000 to 200,000 in ten years would grow to 300,000 ten years after that and to 400,000 in the next ten years; a city experiencing exponential growth that grows from 100,000 to 200,000 in ten years would grow to 400,000 ten years after that and to 800,000 in the next ten years — the city experiencing linear growth adds 100,000 residents every ten years, while the city experiencing exponential growth doubles (in this case) every ten years. Metz’s quantum-computer example illustrates a case in which the number of values that can be held at once doubles with every qubit added.

A series that is increasing exponentially in the most literal sense would look like (for example) 2; 4; 16; 256; 65,536; 4,294,967,296; etc., in that case the exponent being 2 and each figure being the square of the previous figure. The most literal sense of exponential is rarely used in nontechnical writing.

An exponent is, in the words of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a symbol written above and to the right of a mathematical expression to indicate the operation of raising to a power.” The more common and casual exponent, meaning one who expounds, seems to have evolved independently from the mathematical term, along with its cousin, proponent.

Rampant Prescriptivism

The hard grey stuff a sidewalk is made out of is not cement — it is concrete. Cement is an ingredient in concrete, as well as in mortar and some stuccos. The most common kind of cement is Portland cement, which is made mostly from powdered limestone and gypsum. The “Portland” in the name refers not to the beleaguered and misgoverned city in Oregon but to Portland stone, which comes from the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England.

The Isle of Portland is what is known as a tied island, meaning an island connected to the shore by a narrow spit of land that forms naturally because of the way the island affects wave patterns and, hence, how sediment is deposited. The word for such a spit of land is tombolo, from an Italian word for cushion.

Exception: You may refer to a swimming pool as a cement pond if you happen to be, formerly, a poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed.

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Source: Gun Debate: What’s Missing | National Review