In search of justice

North East Gun Shows puts on about four regional
shows per year, mostly in Massachusetts, and a brisk
business seems to be unfolding inside the pavilion as
I walk through its rows. Gun sales are up in the United
States, at least based on the number of background
checks that the FBI conducted in August 2016: 1,853,815,
a 6 percent increase over the previous August, the 16th
month in a row with an increase, and the most monthly
background checks that the FBI has conducted since
recording began in 1998. Even so, legal gun ownership
is lower than it was 40 years ago—just over a third of
Americans report owning a firearm.
Concurrently, gun violence has spiked in some U.S.
cities this year, most notably in Chicago, which is in
the midst of its most violent year in two decades. Mass
shootings, such as the one in Orlando in June, fuel
debates over gun access and the ongoing American
romance with firepower. Pro- and anti-gun rights rhetoric
peppered the presidential campaign, too, with some gunrights
advocates saying firearms sales spiked because
of Hillary Clinton’s promise to intensify background
checks. “The gun business is a really interesting
business,” says Mark Latham, VLS professor of
law. “It has had several near-death experiences
in terms of sales. Few people hunt anymore,
and that was a big part of what their businesses
sold. Fewer people [now] own guns in the U.S.,
but those that do own lots of them.”
Latham, who grew up in Chicago and saw
his share of gun injuries as a critical-care nurse
there, points out that despite anti-gun sentiment
that kicks up after high-profile mass shootings,
gun owners have a powerful legislative
advocate: the National Rifle Association. “The
NRA is, in my estimation, the most powerful
lobbying organization in the country and the
world,” Latham says. The NRA’s fierce defense
of the Second Amendment—which protects individual
Americans’ right to keep and bear arms,
even as firearm violence continues to devastate
communities such as Chicago—has kept Americans’
access to guns largely unfettered in most
states. For instance, “There’s no justifiable use
for so-called assault weapons,” Latham says, but
efforts to ban them wither under pressure from
the NRA. Yet should the interests of gun owners
trump the rights of those who want to live free
of gun violence?
A PATCHWORK OF LAWS
Rules, licensing, and waiting periods for purchasing
guns vary from state to state, which makes
obtaining a gun a very different experience in,
say, Oregon than in Alabama. In California, for instance,
a prospective gun owner must wait 10 days from purchase
to possession. In Vermont—a state with some
of the least restrictive gun-control laws in the U.S.—it
simply takes proof of Vermont residence, as well as an
instant background check, to leave a gun retailer with a
concealed, licensed firearm. In Texas, you can carry your
firearm openly in most public places. In New York City,
your chances of getting a handgun permit from the police
are close to nil. And so the relative ease of obtaining
a gun in southern U.S. states has fueled a conduit of illegal
firearms into more restrictive northern states such
as New York, a trail that law enforcement calls the “Iron
Pipeline.”
Adobe Stock
LOQUITUR 12