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A Question of Efficacy: Regulate Gun Owners or Regulate Gun Industry?

At the recent seventh annual Citizens' Conference to Stop Gun Violence in Arlington, VA, pollster Celinda Lake suggested to participants that now is a critical time for them to decide what essential message they should identify and rally behind in order to counter the anti-gun-control forces in the 2002 mid-term elections.

In a year that saw 750,000 women, men, and children march on Washington and call for action to stop gun violence, many people were left frustrated with the election of NRA-supported George W. Bush and a Congress that once again is apparently placing low priority on meaningful gun-control legislation. "There's a feeling of "what more does it take for this movement to go forward?"," Lake said.

One answer, she suggested, may be that activists need to place stronger emphasis on gun control as "a values issue or a moral issue" about the common sense, for instance, of ensuring the safety of all children and less on regulation of gun owners. In the last election, the discussion of regulation primarily focused on licensing and registration, either or both of which were supported by many Democratic candidates, including Presidential aspirants Bill Bradley and Al Gore.

The problem was not only did it fail to ignite pro-gun-control passions, as Lake pointed out. It also galvanized anti-gun-control voters into taking concerted, well-organized political action. In the wake of those supports developments, some voices in the gun-violence-prevention movement are calling for at least a second look at the wisdom of placing licensing and registration at the center of a political agenda.

"Gore thought that he could protect himself from some of the backlash from the pro-gun people by only supporting licensing and not registration," said Kristen Rand, federal policy director at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C. "But the fact of the matter is that to the pro-gun people they're one and the same-licensing equals registration equals confiscation. The NRA had been preparing their members for this; they saw it coming. So as soon as those words came out of Al Gore's mouth, they started this campaign through gun stores, through their magazines, over the Internet-this campaign of register to vote or register your guns."

When Gore saw how vehement the opposition was, how politically dangerous, he withdrew from virtually any discussion of gun control, let alone licensing. But Rand argues that for Gore it was too late. It put him in the position of always being on the defensive about wanting to take people's guns away and not being able to attack Bush's record on guns.

She contends that Gore's position on licensing hurt him terribly in the end. "You can make a credible argument that because the NRA used that message to pull some of the union members away from the Democratic ticket, away from their union interests, to vote pro-gun, which caused the Democrats to expend many more resources than they would have otherwise had to expend in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania, that it cost Al Gore West Virginia and hurt him in Tennessee. You can make a credible argument that the licensing-and-registration message had a lot to do with Al Gore not winning."

Gun control per se was not the problem, Rand said. "We believe strongly that it's not a gun-control message that hurt Gore and maybe hurt some people in House races. We believe it was specifically licensing and registration."

The VPC opposition to licensing and registration was not a product of Gore's failed campaign. VPC was doubtful about licensing and registration prior to the 2000 campaign. "We saw it coming," Rand said. "We warned people: If you start up with this licensing and registration message, this is what's going to happen. We walked them through it, but nobody wanted to hear it. Everyone wanted to push Gore and Bradley as far as they could toward that message. The VPC was arguing to Gore and Bradley that a much smarter message was regulate the gun industry. Because it doesn't immediately threaten individual gun owners, it would ultimately be more effective."

The VPC supports a bill that has been introduced by Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-RI) and Sen. Robert G. Torricelli (D-NJ) by Kennedy and Torricelli that would give the U.S. Treasury Department the right to regulate firearms as consumer products. (Astonishingly, guns are exempted from regulation as consumer products by act of Congress.)

The VPC and the Consumer Federation of America have jointly conducted focus groups on this issue and, according to Rand, gun owners don't have "the same level of paranoia" when the regulation refers to the industry instead of the individual.

In addition to the political shortcomings of licensing and registration, the VPC also contends that they wouldn't do much to reduce gun violence. Registration would provide a good tracing tool for investigators, Rand said, "but the political costs of getting that are probably not worth it because you're basically having a battle that's akin to banning handguns for a somewhat limited return."

One of the arguments that supporters of licensing and registration make is that auto registration and driver licensing played roles in declining rates of auto fatalities since 1970. However, as VPC points out, licensing and registration were in place during the 1950s and - 60s when auto death and injury rates were escalating. It wasn't until the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and its focus on auto and thoroughfare design that the rates started to drop.

If the analogy will hold true with guns, and if Congress is unwilling to act, one positive sign on the horizon is a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last year that the state's attorney general has the power to regulate handguns as consumer products. Former attorney general Scott Harshbarger had drawn up the regulations, including requirements that all pistols include magazine disconnect safeties and chamber-loaded indicators.

On March 13, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence's Legal Action Project released a report, "Targeting Safety," which took a close look at the Massachusetts example and concluded from state-by-state analyses of attorneys general's powers in each that more than 20 states possess the statutory wherewithal to follow Massachusetts' lead. The Center compiled the report to "operate as a springboard to help galvanize some of those states where people have maybe given this idea a passing thought," according to staff attorney Rachana Bhowmilk, chief author of the report.

In theory, at least, if many of these states were to follow Massachusetts' lead, the critical mass could be a catalyst for federal action.

Bhowmilk emphasizes that in no way does the report represent an alternative plan to other positions, including support of licensing and registration, that the Center holds.

Indeed, licensing and registration are widely supported as essential components of an effective national system of gun regulation, in the minds of many gun-violence-prevention supporters. Pointing to the U.S. Supreme Court's position that Second Amendment gun rights refer only to collective use of arms by state populations (for militia purposes) and not to individuals, former Million Mom March policy director Eric Gorovitz told listeners at the Citizens Conference that licensing and registration "is a way of drawing the line" in determining who gets to benefit from a privilege granted by the state.

As is the case with drivers, gun owners would be required to know applicable gun laws in their state and demonstrate an ability to operate their gun safely. The VPC has problems with this, too, however, because they say it plays into the NRA's hands and its plans to greatly expand the number of target ranges with NRA-trained instructors. In addition, VPC points to research by David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health, who found that people who receive gun training are more likely to keep guns loaded and unlocked in their homes than people who haven't gotten the training.

Supporters of licensing and registration contend that they are essential, however, to stop the flow of legal guns into the secondary market. Registration would mean that a gun would have to be registered each time it's sold, just like cars. This system would place greater responsibility on sellers to know who is buying their gun because sellers will be criminally liable if they can't show that they disposed of the gun properly.

Certainly, this would seem to make good common sense. But is it worth the political cost?

"You can't put the responsibility for product safety on the user," Rand said. "It doesn't work. They tried that with cars and it was a miserable failure. Only when you look upstream to the manufacturer, up the chain of distribution, does it work because they have an economic incentive and they're in a better position to take steps to prevent things. There's no other product where we rely on the individual user to prevent product-related death and injury."

Original feature article, Join Together Online (www.jointogether.org), April 3, 2001.


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