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You raise some interesting questions. Robert Sherrill
wrote a very entertaining book (which is to say, not footnoted, and therefore
VERY frustrating) called _The Saturday Night Special_ in the
early 1970s. Sherrill was definitely supportive of gun control, even
prohibition, but he did a reasonably entertaining job of
showing the absurdity of what came out of it. Sherrill was of the view
that
the Saturday Night Special ban was primarily an attempt to
disarm blacks by banning cheap handguns. There had been efforts to
ban cheap imports in the early 1960s, but this was driven by
the desire of American gun makers to stop their cheap competition.
There's no question in my mind that the objective of the SNS
ban laws in California was to get rid of cheap handguns, in the hopes
of reducing the supply of guns to the criminal market.
It was phrased in terms of safety, but the actual statutes and regulations
did not realistically achieve that goal--and many of the
targeted handguns passed the safety tests.
Unfortunately, California has a history of passing gun control
laws intended to keep guns out of criminal hands, but then
doesn't
bother to enforce them. (Sometimes they pass laws
intended to keep guns out of all hands, such as the assault weapon ban.)
As an example, when the one handgun a month law was under
debate, the Cal. Dept. of Justice analyzed how many people were
buying more than handgun a month. In all of California in 1993, a state with 31 million people, there were
245 people who purchased 12
or more handguns; 83 who bought
more than 20; and one person who purchased 84 handguns.[i] A little
computation tells us that these
245 people bought at least 2,940 guns (245 * 12), and no more than 10,212 handguns (83 people times 84
handguns). The latter number, of
course, is likely far above the
actual number.
It is entirely possible that some of these buyers were legitimate gun collectors, but it is foolish to pretend that most of these guns aren�t resold immediately. In California, it was illegal that year to transfer a handgun to someone else (except for immediate family members) without going through a licensed dealer, background check, and waiting period. The question that we should ask about these 245 multiple handgun buyers is, �Why pass another law? Why not just show up at the door of these people that are buying all these handguns, and ask them where the guns are? If they don�t have the guns, and they can�t provide evidence of a legal sale, it should be easy to get a conviction for selling the guns illegally.�
Unfortunately, there is more interest in passing new laws than in enforcing existing laws--especially laws that might have some realistic chance of shutting off at least a significant fraction of criminally misused guns. It doesn't take too many assumptions to guess that the 2,940 to 10,212 handguns that went through the 245 people who bought 12 or more handguns in 1993 were probably largely intended for buyers who would not pass a background check. [i] Associated Press, �One-a-month limit on handgun buys shot down in state Senate�, Santa Rosa (Cal.) Press-Democrat, June 14, 1994, B3.
Clayton E. Cramer
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