The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Will gun manufacturers accept a 10% drop in sales?

    By erica20 on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 1:24pm |

    I have been looking at "Time to Crime" data and it indicates to me that if we figured out a way to stop the flow of guns to criminals, it would mean a yearly drop in gun sales of AT LEAST 10%. 

    So I think it is time for Joe to get out there and extract a promise from gun manufacturers that they would be willing to accept a AT LEAST A 10% sales hit in order to keep our streets safer.

    Here's how I came up with this. The Mayors Against Illegal Guns web site, tracetheguns.org, says that nationwide, 22.6 % of the guns recovered in crimes are less than two years old.

    Please take a moment to digest that statistic, because I think it is a pivotal statistic. It means that each year, AT LEAST 11.3% of the guns coming out of factories are going pretty much directly into the hands of criminals. It might be way more--this 11.3% represents guns that ended up in the hands of criminals dumb enough to get caught.

    It's not like these guns are sitting in Grandpa's house for 20 years, then being stolen, or transferred one by one at gun shows by unsuspecting folk who don't realize that the person buying from them couldn't pass a background check. Gun manufacturers and FFLs know this statistic. Perhaps this is why they keep challenging law enforcement to enforce the existing laws--they know how easy it would be, but they don't want to be the ones to kill their sales.

    This needs to be dropped right at the door of gun manufacturers--I'm not sure how to do it, but public shaming and the threat of quotas are the first thing that come to mind.

     

    Comments

    Exactly right. But it's not only the guns being sold to criminals and would-be criminals. A good part of argument for people arming themselves is for defense against gun-toting criminals.

    Start cutting into sales to thugs and unstable people and you start cutting into the fear and paranoia that is used to get law-abiding citizens to buy guns. So maybe sales drop 20%, not 10%. Unacceptable!


    by acanuck on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 2:13pm

    That's what I said just now in my letter to Joe Biden!

    (Joe and I are developing quite a correspondence. I haven't received his replies, but I think that's only because he's trying to come up with just the right words...;^)

    ****

    Here's what I said:

    In terms of presenting it to the American people, I think it can be pretty simple--"We're not going to let you keep selling guns to criminals, then sell us guns to protect ourselves from criminals. That is a stupid waste of our money, and it needs to stop."

    And yeah, it's going to be more like 20%, once people figure out the game and realize that guns are in some ways nothing more than really dangerous chia pets.


    by erica20 on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 2:30pm

    Noted in this morning's reading that:

    Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley Wants a Gun-Owner Fingerprint Database
    By J.K. Trotter, The Atlantic Wire, Jan 14

    The Governor of Maryland plans to introduce a comprehensive package of proposals designed to curb gun violence, according to a handful of anonymous aides who spoke to the Washington Post. Martin O'Malley, who was elected in 2007 and expects to be as prominent a Democratic presidential contender in 2016 as fellow gun-control hawk Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has written up legislation that, if enacted, would ban assault weapons and — perhaps most significantly — require all new gun owners to submit to a fingerprint database, in order to contain the illicit distribution of guns via so-called "straw purchases" [....]

    but also that, aside from the straw dog problem, follow up with the system we have now is a major problem, my bold:

    Both Sides in Gun Debate Agree: Punish Background-Check Liars
    By Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times, Jan 13/14, 2013

    WASHINGTON — Nearly 80,000 Americans were denied guns in 2010, according to Justice Department data, because they lied or provided inaccurate information about their criminal histories on background-check forms. Yet only 44 of those people were charged with a crime.
     
    The staggeringly low number of prosecutions for people who “lie and try,” as it is called by law enforcement officials, is being studied by the Obama administration as it considers measures [....]

    Under federal law, anyone who tries to purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer must fill out a form about his criminal history. If a person checks yes to any of the questions — including whether he has been convicted of a felony or is the subject of a restraining order — the gun dealer cannot legally sell the person a weapon.

    But if the person checks no to all the questions, the dealer is required to call a screener who has the name checked against federal databases run by the F.B.I. Typically, the F.B.I. can determine someone’s status within minutes, and the dealer can inform the buyer whether he can purchase the firearm.

    When people are denied, they are free to leave the store. The local police, however, are not informed that a prohibited buyer has tried to purchase a weapon. The F.B.I. has a process that allows people “who have been wrongfully denied a firearm transfer” to appeal through its Web site. According to the Web site, those who are denied are encouraged to provide copies of their fingerprints. [....]


    by artappraiser on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 2:46pm

    Good grief.

    It would indeed be pretty easy to report these people to the police. We'd do it if they tried to write a bad check.


    by erica20 on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 2:53pm

    The bigger problem is, should this be fixed, what would it take to hire enough police to follow up on prevention when local budgets are cutting their numbers so that they can not even handle after-the fact investigation of crimes committed?

    For a comparative, how many restraining orders are proved worthless by the lack of resources to enforce them? Or look at the caseload problem with parole agents....

    I have been avoiding looking into what the deal is with Chicago's pitiful violent crime numbers, maybe it's time to start reading up on that....


    by artappraiser on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 3:03pm

    I still wonder if we're trying to impose a retail solution while ignoring the wholesale end of the problem.

    At least 10% of each year's dirty is done before a gun passes into the hands of a single retail customer, because gun manufacturers sell to FFLs who are going to sell them to people who shouldn't have them.

    I'm really starting to focus in on a penalty to manufacturers for each weapon recovered from a crime if the gun entered the market less than two years before the date of the crime. Then the manufacturer can try to get that money back from whichever FFL they sold it to.......


    by erica20 on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 3:00pm

    Ha! That's it! We should just assume that a gun used in a crime was GIVEN to the criminal by the manufacturer (in the absence of a sales record to prove the contrary). 

    So we fine the manufacturer for giving the gun to the criminal and they have to show that they sold it to a dealer.....


    by erica20 on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 3:38pm

    Wow, look at how far down the slippery slope we can go? Ha!


    by Resistance on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 3:48pm

    So Resistance, please stick with me for a moment here. I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts on this subject. 

    I don't think requiring gun manufacturers to make reasonable efforts to verify that their FFLs are ethical is a very slippery slope at all. We know that 22.6% of the guns recovered in crimes left the manufacturer less than two years before. We also know that at least 1,000,000 guns a year are sold in the US. By sheer logic, it means that AT LEAST 100,000 guns PER YEAR are going pretty directly from the manufacturer into the hands of questionable owners. It's not like these guns sat in Grandpa's closet for 20 years until the bad man came and took them. It's not like they're one-off sales at gun shows to somebody who couldn't pass a background check. 100,000 guns is a lot of guns, and if you ran a business, would you really expect people to believe that you have no idea where 10% of your product goes once it leaves the factory????

    Another interesting fact: most sales to criminals happen via a fairly small number of FFLs, who sell them to straw buyers. The mayors' site, tracetheguns.org figures that it comes down to 1.2% of FFLs. What all this means ultimately is that pretty much the whole problem of guns going into the hands of the people we'd normally consider "gun thugs," a different group from the "self defense" and "2nd Amendment" groups, could be solved at the wholesale level BY MANUFACTURERS AND FFLS, if they would do it, with very little effect on the general gun-buying public.

    So please explain to me, slowly and carefully, why you don't think they should have to do it. I don't think you'd sell a gun to a guy who smelled of marijuana and booze, and said "I just got done beating my wife." It wouldn't be right, and besides, there are laws against it. So why should gun manufacturers be allowed to reap AT LEAST 10% of their sales from  selling a dangerous product to criminals who are going to re-sell it to other criminals? Manufacturers know who they're selling to--they have to get paid. They know who the bad apples are.

    Why don't we stop them????


    by erica20 on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 5:04pm

    For some reason I think that if it was a manufacturer of anything else, you'd be saying "rah, rah, get them oligarchs bleeding the people dry, sue the evil ones to death"

    A reminder that it is possible responsibility for/collusion with criminal activity she's talking about, not even getting anywhere near the type of thing of this example, not negligence for product.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 5:15pm

    Hey, I'd take negligence, too, if that was all I could get.

    ***

    On a personal note, and possibly TMI, I have thought a lot about the unsafe at any speed concept in connection with this gun business. One of my childhood memories is of driving past a Corvair which had just hit a telephone pole, burst into flames and was in the process of immolating its four teenage passengers.

    Why did we drive by? Someday, I'll write the story.


    by erica20 on Mon, 01/14/2013 - 5:57pm