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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, May 04, 2009 at 10:15:27 :
In Reply to: primers posted by David on Sunday, May 03, 2009 at 23:44:41 :
All the gun restrictions that aren't outright prohibitions have been regulations that make buying, storing, and feeding guns more expensive. This is no accident. Read some of the background story of the 1964 Gun Control Act, for example, and it's pretty clear that it wasn't so much ordinary "crime" that its proponents were concerned about, but rather an armed insurrection by poor angry blacks. In the context of the segregated south, the Black Panthers, Malcom X, and huge civil rights rallies (or race riots if you prefer), southern white Democrats in particular were scared of poor black men with guns. One way to keep guns out of the hands of blacks was to require "may issue" licensing, at the discretion of the local sheriff. Other methods included banning cheap pistols (by calling them "Saturday Night Specials"), banning gun possession by convicted felons even if their crime was non-violent and long ago, and stretching the definition of "possession" to preclude anyone keeping a gun in the house where a convicted felon lives (e.g. you marry a gal who got caught selling dope 20 years ago, and you have to get rid of your guns if you want her to live with you). The 1934 Federal Firearms Act had already effectively banned the most effective home and personal defense weapon -- the short-barreled shotgun. That was more in deference to the mobsters who were annoyed at having their attempts to hijack trucks thwarted by drivers with short-barreled shotguns. A case can be made that the FFA was written to protect the mafia, while the GCA was written to disarm the blacks.
I think now it's more a broader fear of the citizens in general on the part of the government as a whole that drives gun control efforts. Government is by definition about control of people, and it worries them when people have any sort of power that's not completely under their control. The first step in control is always a "simple" or "free" permit or registration, be it for hiking in the national forest, building a garage, or owning a gun. Then comes the fee for the permit, but it's still reasonable and you always get the permit if you pay the fee (sort of like a protection racket). Then they get more selective about issuing the permits, which require more information when applying, and a large bureaucracy is created to filter the applications, which in turn means they need to raise the fees to pay the bureaucrats' wages. Eventually it goes in one of two directions. Either the permit fees become a major source of government revenue to be milked for all they're worth (e.g. building permits in many areas, including extra permits and extra fees for moving dirt, cutting trees, etc.), or the permit system essentially becomes a ban on the activity, without the political hassle and honesty of actually banning it (e.g. class III firearms, or many industrial activities that cause pollution).
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