Gun Guys: A Road Trip

Dan Baum “Gun Guys: A Road Trip”  Alfred A. Knopf, 2013, 320 pp.

The author belongs to a rare section of the U.S. population: A gun owner with the ability to write a balanced book and inhabit neither the left or right partisan fringe.  I would sure like to find an author with a similarly balanced approach on the subjects of gay marriage, abortion, and the separation of church and state.  Oh well…I’ll just appreciate this isolated attempt which is an even-handed presentation of the gun controversy issue.  The book is well worth reading.

In Gun Guys the author takes a year-long road trip to meet some of the 40 percent of Americans who own guns.  Along the way, we visit gun shows, stores, and shooting ranges to investigate just why people own these weapons. 

My Notes:

Pg. 29:  In 1987, Florida created a state agency to issue gun-carry permits to any adult who wanted one, provided there was no good reason to deny it.  The Florida law was nicknamed “shall issue”—as in, state officials shall issue the permit and not apply their own discretion.  Thirty-seven states now have shall-issue laws. 

Pg. 56:  In 1994, after the country had been brutalized by the crack-cocaine murder wave of the late eighties and early nineties, a federal ban aimed at the AK-47 was passed. A sunset provision gave Congress the chance to let the ban expire a decade later--and it did. Whether the short-lived ban saved lives is undetermined.  What is undeniable is that its 1994 passage contributed to giving the Democrats their worst drubbing since 1946, ending their hold on both houses.

Pg. 127:  In 1968 Congress—spurred by assassinations and riots—passed the first gun law that affected the average gun owner.  It banned mail-order gun sales, prohibited in-store sales to felons or lunatics, and imposed a waiting period on handgun sales.  For nearly three decades, though, the law largely ran on the honor system  A buyer signed an affidavit saying he wasn’t a “prohibited person,” but...who knew”  Not until 1994 did the Brady Law give the Gun Control Act teeth, by requiring stores to run a computerized check on a buyer’s record, in lieu of a waiting period.  Of course this all applied only to federally licensed gun dealers at shows and in their stores.  Everyone else at gun shows or at private sales was exempt.

Pg. 160:  Industry Reference Guide is published annually by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.  It tracks the number of hunting licenses as well as public attitudes towards guns and gun laws. The statistics published appear, at first glance, to be good news for the gun industry.  Yet the number of licensed gun dealers has fallen by about half in twenty years.  Walmart appeared to have been as toxic to mom-and-pop gun stores as it was to locally-owned clothing stores.  But Walmart didn’t entirely explain the disappearance of gun stores, because, except in Alaska, Walmart didn’t sell handguns.  Online shopping wasn’t putting gun stores out of business, either.  Unless the gun was very old and/or the buyer had a special federal license, the gun had to be shipped to a gun store, where the on-line buyer had to go through the same background check as anybody else.  The reason gun stores were closing was: While more and more guns were being sold every year, they were going to the same shrinking group of aging white men.  The average age of “avid” hunters was almost forty-four.  Two-thirds of handgun buyers were forty-five or older.

Pg. 217:  Russia has a murder rate four times that of the U.S., with no legal private guns in circulation.  Clearly the Russians’ murder rate has little to do with their gun laws.  The U.S. has approximately 270 million privately owned guns.  In the U.S. a pair of sociologists in the mid-1980s surveyed almost two thousand violent felons in prison about their gun lives.  Almost half the guns that the felons had used were stolen.  Add to that the ones they thought were “probably” stolen, and it jumped to 70 percent.  Most were stolen from households.  Today an estimated half a million guns a year go missing one way or the other.

Pg. 255:  The Second Amendment is maddeningly vague, its awkwardly punctuated and capitalized text reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  No other amendment was as opaque.  Nobody has ever had a ghost of a clue what the framers meant by it.  For years, the tide of the Second Amendment argument flowed in the direction of the collective-militia analysis.  Then Antonin Scalia, in 2008, wrote the lead opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, striking down the federal district’s thirty-three-year-old handgun ban, reversing long-standing precedent, and establishing that the Second Amendment indeed guaranteed an individual right to be armed.  In the 5-4 opinion, Scalia declared that gun bans were “off the table” in the federal district.  A year later, in the same 5-4 majority,  McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended Scalia’s ruling to the entire nation.  The Court held that the right of an individual to "keep and bear arms" protected by the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and applies to the states.

Pg. 262:  Although the NRA had never been bigger or richer than it was in 2010, it was a middling player by Washington standards.  Its membership of four million was no bigger than that of the National Wildlife Federation.  It didn’t even give out much money.  NRA contributions to congressional candidates were about half that of the pipefitters’ union.  Most members of Congress didn’t need NRA money or pressure to toe the pro-gun line.  They and their constituents were already on board.  Gallup had been asking people about stricter gun control for decades; in twenty years, support had fallen by a third, to less than 50 percent.