Lex Anteinternet: Playing Games with Names and Burying Heads in the Sand. The "Gun Safety" Edition.

Recently I posted this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Playing Games with Names and Burying Heads in the ...: Quite some time ago I published this thread, and then later came in to update it: Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American s...

The post turned out to be surprisingly popular for a couple of weeks, entering our top ten posts of all time list pretty quickly.  I suspect it got picked up on an email list somewhere or maybe was linked into another forum.

Or its just possible that people were interested in the topic and stumbled across it.  Who knows.  At any rate, the title of that thread was fairly self explanatory, even if perhaps the content is not obvious from the title.

One of the things, but only one of them, addressed by that thread is crime and gun control.  This was also looked at, and in more depth, by Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.  As noted, the topic of guns was discussed there, and its really that thread that I'd refer to for that topic.  It was a popular one at one time as well, once being in the top ten posts here, although it obviously no longer is.

Anyhow, the reason I reference both of these now, and in particular the first one, is because we've seen some supposed Presidential action guns and we're accordingly seeing some reporting on it. And the reporting is picking up the use of terms which are, quite frankly, propogandistic.

This isn't a thread on gun control, pluses or minuses, I'd note.  It's on language.  I'll confess that I'm not a fan of control control concepts and I think that rational examination of the entire topic argues against new gun controls schemes, although I'll also note that there are thoughtful people who hold the opposite.  That noted, let's look at the current terms people are throwing around and some of what's being proposed.

One term that's suddenly popped up, and is being used by the national televised press, is "gun safety", as in calling gun control concepts "gun safety" concepts.  I'm calling bull on that.

Gun safety is the safe use of firearms on a personal level.  Love it or hate it, the National Rifle Association has been a big backer of gun safety.  Non gun folks like to think of the NRA as the "gun lobby" (we will get to that), but it's far more than an advocating entity.  It has a huge focus on firearms and range safety and the extent to which it publishes materials on this and is extremely proactive on this is amazing.

Indeed, accidents from firearms in the US have dropped way, way off in recent decades and this is the safest era ever in terms of the use of firearms.  Gun accidents are quite rare, and the NRA deserves real thanks on that.  People who like to go around calling gun control concepts "gun safety" concepts do not and ought to knock it off.  Indeed, we stand to now loose ground on gun safety as people who like to confuse gun control with gun safety are intentionally blurring the lines or convincing themselves of their own propaganda.  Co-opting a term leads to demnishment of it.  The NRA is the gun safety organization, and let's not pretend that Every Town For Gun Safety is as well.  Bull.

While on that, let's talk about "common sense gun control".  Every pro gun control politician likes to say "the American public is for common sense gun control".  Well, everyone is for common sense, of course, and for most people, common sense means "the way I think".

That's why "common sense" gun control tends to be whatever the speaker backs.  So, somebody will state that "common sense" gun control argues for the prohibition of "assault rifles".  That speaker probably isn't aware that an assault rifle is a sub caliber (less than the WWII standard rifle caliber) selective fire weapon and, therefore, it's already controlled by the National Firearms Act.  What they mean, probably, is that they don't like semi automatic rifles that look like post World War Two military ones, even if in terms of functioning semi automatic rifles are now over 100 years old.

Whether you back these measures or not, "common sense" has no common meaning, and is therefore actually meaningless.  Indeed, there's strong reason to argue that intelligent deductive reasoning is much better than common sense anyhow, as the common perception of something is often badly in error.

Finally, I'll note the "gun show loophole".  It's not a loophole.

"Loophole" in common political parlance has come to mean "an aspect of the law I don't like", rather than a real loophole.  A loophole is an accidental and technical exception to a law.  I know this, as I'm a lawyer, of course, and I've actually gotten somebody off of a minor criminal matter because of a true loophole (which I'll keep to myself, thank you).  It's something that is technically correct, but the law didn't intend.

In political speech, however, a loophole has come to mean an exception to the law that I don't like, and therefore shouldn't be there. We constantly hear about "tax loopholes". They aren't loopholes, they're written into the tax code on purpose.  Maybe you like them, maybe you don't, but they aren't errors.

Same thing with the "gun show loophole".  What this really pertains to is that only those in the business of selling firearms have to have a Federal Firearms License.  People who imagine a loophole to exist here either imagine that: 1) there's a loophole as if you buy are firearm at a gun show and its not from  dealer, you don't have to go through a background check; and/or 2) there are people who sell a lot of guns at gunshows who aren't dealers.

Both of these things are roughly true, on the Federal level, but not I'd note in every state.  Colorado, for example, requires a background check for every sale of a firearms.  Wyoming doesn't.  But this aspect of the Federal law isn't some sort of omission.  The Federal government never intended to add additional registration at the private level.

That may sound odd (how were we talking about registration?) but it's true. Guns are registered at their point of manufacture or import, registered again at their first point of post factory delivery, registered again at the dealer level, and registered again by the dealer, in his books, when he sells the firearm.  There's never been a provision in the Federal law that something additional had to happen once the end user acquired the firearm, and there's no support for that now.  Just because a guy buys a table at a gun show and sells a gun, doesn't convert him into a dealer.

Now, some will note, and again correctly, that some gun show venders sell a lot of guns.  That's probably true, but they tend to be guys who acquire and trade off a lot of peculiar guns. So, a guy that gets a lot of World War Two rifles in and sells them out, on a continual basis, probably isn't a dealer in the way the law imagined. Whether he should be or not is another question, but it's also the case that he's pretty far from being a danger to the public really.  So the loophole, if there is one, isn't much of one.

So what's the point? Well, this debate has slipped into the bad semantics category, and nothing good ever comes of that.  Indeed, the whole history of gun control tends to be that way. Things get banned here or there that were never a realistic threat to anyone, and weird results occur.  In quite a few European nations you can't own a semi automatic rifle in the same cartridge as that nation's military round. Why?  Well, I can deduce it, but its stupid.  In the US silencers are subject to the NFA, in Europe they are very common.  American politicians convinced themselves assassins were using them in crime battles, Europeans worried about keeping their hearing.  Here the Europeans were right.  Anyhow, thinking this out poorly, and playing games with words, doesn't achieve anything of value.