Post Las Vegas legislative proposals

[Tom Servo]

Here's a rundown of what we have so far:

HR 3998: the Protect America Act of 2017. What an inspiring name! This is the "terror watchlist" one that denies sales to "known or suspected terrorists." So, if you're on a vague, unconstitutional list with no notification or due process, you can be denied the right to own a gun. This has nothing to do with the Las Vegas shooter.

HR 3999: the "bump stock" bill. This would outlaw "bump fire" stocks, as well as "any part or combination of parts that is designed and functions to increase the rate of fire of a semiautomatic rifle but does not convert the semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun." That language is vague enough to include any replacement trigger, even one that simply makes a hunting rifle more accurate or a pistol easier to shoot for someone with weak hands. While it might seem to be relevant to the shooting, bump fire can be performed without the silly stock, and the language about triggers is vague enough to snare innocent people in a statutory trap. And that's exactly the idea.

HR 4018: a 3-day waiting period for handguns. Waiting periods have never been proven to do anything, and several states have repealed them. Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Las Vegas shooting.

HR 4025: Multiple Firearm Sales Reporting Modernization Act of 2017. Currently, licensed dealers are required to report multiple handgun sales in a 5-day period to a single person. This act would apply that requirement to all firearms. I've seen no indication that the Las Vegas shooter bought multiple guns at once, so this is pretty much more burdensome paperwork for dealers and nothing more.

HR 4052: a ban on transfer or possession of "high capacity" magazines. This one outlaws all magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of centerfire ammunition. Notice it bans possession. That means all magazines currently lawfully owned would have to be turned in or destroyed.

S 1945 is basically the Senate version, charmingly titled the Keep Americans Safe Act.

S 1923: Background Check Completion Act of 2017. This outlaws what Hillary Clinton referred to as the "Charleston loophole." Currently, the FBI has three business days to conduct a background check and determine if a buyer is prohibited from taking possession of a firearm. If they can't provide a result within that period, the buyer is assumed to be legal and the dealer can transfer the gun. This bill would make it so the buyer cannot take possession until the dealer receives a definitive "proceed" result from the FBI, a process that can sometimes take months, and sometimes never happens. This one's easy: simply shut down the NICS system, and nobody gets a gun. Again, this has no connection to the Las Vegas shooting.

HR 3962: Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2017. This one's fairly self-explanatory.

HR 3987: Protecting Americans from Gun Violence Act of 2017. This one stipulates a fee on background checks (which we were promised was never going to happen as a condition of getting the Brady Act passed in the first place), the funds from which will go to funding CDC research into "gun violence." It also requires lost or stolen firearms to be reported to the police within 48 hours. Failure to do so is punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to a year in prison for each firearm.

H.R.4268 - To amend title 18, United States Code, to provide for a 7-day waiting period before a semiautomatic firearm, a silencer, armor piercing ammunition, or a large capacity ammunition magazine may be transferred.. There's no catch title on this one, and Congress.gov doesn't have the bill text as of 11/10/2017, but I think it will be self-explanatory.

We should expect Dianne Feinstein's Assault Weapons Ban 2.0: This Time It's Really Gonna Pass and Schumer's Universal Background Check Bill XVII: Back From the Dead any time now as well.

The easiest way to make your voice heard is to sign up on PopVox. From there, you can send feedback on each bill to your specific legislators. Don't assume this stuff is dead because the President said nice things to the NRA on the campaign trail. Don't get complacent because your legislators pinky swear they hunted geese with Uncle Bob back in the day. They're going to be under a great deal of pressure, and they're going to be tempted to do what's politically expedient unless we tell them otherwise.

 

[Targa]

Thanks for putting this information together.

 

[5whiskey]

Good compilation Tom. I don't see much of anything passing but I do believe it's important to not become complacent. It's ironic because gun control supporters could have realized some of these goals (Senator Cornyn's terror watch list bill with due process incorporated) were they capable of the "common sense compromise" that they often preach about.

I will be contacting my representatives, though I believe they are quite likely to vote against anything proposed except the possibility of the bump stock ban.

 

[Glenn E. Meyer]

It would nice if the progun legislators would respond with such vigor sometimes. Dream on, Glenn.

 

[RAEIndustries]

Oh yes for that dream to come true the proven legislators would have to come out of their comas Glenn

 

[JWT]

The PopVox site is excellent and gives gunowners an easy way to express their opinions on firearm legislation in progress. Thanks for mentioning it.

 

[Ghost1958]

My legislators are Hal Rodgers, Rand Paul, and Ole Mitch.

The first two won't vote for a anti gun bill.

Mitch, ahhhh, he's a, compromiser, bit knows if he votes anti gun KY will boot him first chance.

I still write and call all of them monthly to push for repeal of all existing gun regs and oppose any new ones. And to oppose Nation reciprocity.
Already wrote and called two days ago.

 

[carguychris]

HR 3962: Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2017. This one's fairly self-explanatory.

I dunno, Tom. It goes well beyond simply barring the shipment or receipt of mail-order ammunition.

• It bars anyone without an FFL from selling OR shipping ammunition to anyone other than an FFL, whether or not this is done in the course of conducting business;
• It requires FFL record-keeping of ammunition sales (not this again!); and
• It requires FFL reporting of ammunition sales totaling 1,000 or more rounds to the same non-licensed individual within 5 consecutive business days.

IOW this legislation should be more honestly titled the "Substantially Reducing the Availability and Driving Up the Cost of Ammunition in General Act."

This legislation is likely DOA as written but I think it's important for us to understand what's in it.

 

[JN01]

HR 3987: Protecting Americans from Gun Violence Act of 2017. This one stipulates a fee on background checks (which we were promised was never going to happen as a condition of getting the Brady Act passed in the first place), the funds from which will go to funding CDC research into "gun violence." It also requires lost or stolen firearms to be reported to the police within 48 hours. Failure to do so is punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to a year in prison for each firearm.

How about someone attach an amendment to that one allocating half the money for gun violence research to the CDC and the other half to the NRA or SAF- see how the sponsors like that?

 

[5whiskey]

I'm pretty sure HR 3987 might not pass constitutional muster. The government charging a fee to exercise a constitutional right is usually a no-no. It would be akin to the state charging you a fee if you want an attorney to represent you, or charging a fee to give a speech on your own property. So issues would (should) arise by charging to exercise 2A rights. Most protest permits are without fees, as charging for free speech, even on public property, may not be acceptable if challenged.

 

[Tom Servo]

The funny thing is, the Obama administration gave them $10 million in 2013 to do a study on gun violence. The Atlantic called it, "the “Executive Order the NRA Should Fear the Most."

Then the CDC did their study. The results (which the administration so wanted to be politicized their way) weren't what they wanted. Here are a few quotes:

Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.

Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.

The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths. Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.

Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.

There is empirical evidence that gun turn in programs are ineffective, as noted in the 2005 NRC study Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. For example, in 2009, an estimated 310 million guns were available to civilians in the United States (Krouse, 2012), but gun buy-back programs typically recover less than 1,000 guns (NRC, 2005). On the local level, buy-backs may increase awareness of firearm violence. However, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, guns recovered in the buy-back were not the same guns as those most often used in homicides and suicides (Kuhn et al., 2002).

...and, of course, the coup de grace:

Whether gun restrictions reduce firearm-related violence is an unresolved issue

The administration promptly buried it, which is why most people are still under the impression that the CDC is somehow barred from doing research on gun violence. In fact, they were given money, they did their survey, and it just didn't meet the a priori conclusions gun-control advocates wanted.

Of course, give it time and they can put somebody like Mark Rosenberg in there. Then we can go back to the situation that caused the opposition to "gun violence research" funding in the first place, which was blatant politicization of the process.

 

[DaleA]

I have made a few moderately long posts on this site and they were a chore to accomplish. They took a lot of time and many were just my rambling thoughts and didn't require any research.

Writing may be easier for some folk but I would certainly consider it 'work' for anyone that does it.

The above posts were longer than stuff I've posted and needed more research than stuff I've posted.

Thank you Tom Servo (and others who have contributed) for taking the time and expending the effort to create these posts. This is good information. I think we should tell you how much we appreciate your work more often.

 

[Spats McGee]

Thanks, Tom, for digging all of this out and posting it. As expected, the anti-gun crowd promptly rolled out everything on their Wish List.

 

[Tom Servo]

One of the canards we kept hearing after Newtown was that the CDC was somehow banned from doing research on gun violence, and that this was somehow a contributing factor in the problem. The President used it, Secretary Clinton used it, and the media latched on to it.

The problem is, it is an absolute lie. The CDC can do all the studies they want. However, if they want to do advocacy, they don't get federal funding to do so.

Their crusade against guns (particularly handguns) started in the 1970's, but things reached a head in 1993 with the publication of Arthur Kellerman's “Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home” study, which despite being easily and soundly debunked, was published and repeated like crazy among the media and gun-control advocates. Any time you hear "you're X times more likely to get shot if you own a gun," it's a reference to this study.

And Kellerman wasn't alone. Just about every article on the matter published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association were obviously written to advocate for the banning or reduction of handguns, even when data didn't line up with that conclusion.

In 1994, Dr. Katherine Christoffel, a member of the CDC-funded Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan was quoted as saying, “guns are a virus that must be eradicated… They are causing an epidemic of death by gunshot, which should be treated like any epidemic…you get rid of the virus…get rid of the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of deaths.”

Later that year, CDC head Mark Rosenberg told the Washington Post, “we need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like we did with cigarettes. Now it is dirty, deadly and banned.” He also published an article in one journal entitled "The Bullet as Pathogen."

This was pretty much the height of the gun-control movement in America. They had the sympathetic, unquestioning ear of the pre-internet, three-channel media. They had an administration in the White House who was willing to sign off on any legislation they could get through congress.

Then the Republicans took control of Congress, and in 1996, the Dickey Amendment was inserted into an omnibus spending bill. It stated, "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control." The $2.6 million that had been allotted for gun research was reallocated to the study of brain injuries.

At no point was any money actually cut from the CDC budget. In no way is the CDC prohibited from doing gun research. The only thing the Dickey Amendment does is deny funding for advocacy. When a politician or Twitter celebrity claims the CDC is somehow barred from researching the issue, that person is plainly lying.

 

[MagnumWill]

Thanks for that, Tom. That’s great information to have.

 

[armoredman]

That is good info, thank you.

 

[zukiphile]

This is the most succinct yet informative thread I've clicked in a long time.

If you don't want the entire thread to be a sticky, the first and tenth posts could be, at least for this session of Congress.

The easiest way to make your voice heard is to sign up on PopVox. From there, you can send feedback on each bill to your specific legislators. Don't assume this stuff is dead because the President said nice things to the NRA on the campaign trail. Don't get complacent because your legislators pinky swear they hunted geese with Uncle Bob back in the day. They're going to be under a great deal of pressure, and they're going to be tempted to do what's politically expedient unless we tell them otherwise.

And follow through. Hold a grudge when you vote. I've used:

"If you vote for X, I will vote for you in 2018. If you vote against X, I will vote and campaign for your opponent."

I am under no illusion that a voter promise will change my rep's vote, but I can be transparent about the effects of his vote.

 

[Prndll]

The problem for most reasonable people is the lack of interest (to downright refusal) to support the opponent (for good reason). It's that spot between the rock and hard place where politicians have most people over a barrel and ends up frustrating people to the point of just not voting at all.

 

[Armorer-at-Law]

States are jumping on the ban bandwagon too. Ohio just introduced a bill that is a clone of the proposed federal ban, though I don't expect it to go anywhere. In other states, I expect it will fly right though.

 

[Ghost1958]

I'm pretty sure HR 3987 might not pass constitutional muster. The government charging a fee to exercise a constitutional right is usually a no-no. It would be akin to the state charging you a fee if you want an attorney to represent you, or charging a fee to give a speech on your own property. So issues would (should) arise by charging to exercise 2A rights. Most protest permits are without fees, as charging for free speech, even on public property, may not be acceptable if challenged.

You mean kinda like cc permits?