As our nation continues to contemplate the horror of the Fort Hood shootings, one revelation about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan caught my eye. In 1996, after completing his official “NRA Personal Protection Course,” he was issued a permit in Virginia to carry a concealed weapon. Virginia is one of the many states where the gun lobby achieved passage of a so-called “shall-issue” concealed carry law limiting the discretion of police to deny concealed carry permits. Because Hasan had no criminal record, he was issued a permit. The Virginia court order granting his application stated that Virginia law “does not permit a judge to inquire into the necessity for, or appropriateness of, granting such permission.”

I was reminded of a letter to the editor of the Washington Post by Chris Cox, Chief Lobbyist of the National Rifle Association, written in August after the NRA-backed Thune Amendment on concealed carry had failed in the Senate. The Amendment would have allowed anyone with a concealed carry license from any state to carry concealed in any other state, even in defiance of that state’s law. After noting that permit holders had already passed a background check, Cox asserted, “They are good people in their home states, and they will remain virtuous and responsible when they are in other states.”

You see, according to the NRA, the world is neatly divided into “good people” and “bad people.” The good people have always been good and always will be. And we know who they are. If they can pass a background check, we should give them a license to carry a concealed weapon. Then they can shoot the bad people when they start victimizing the good people. As NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre once put it, “Good people make good decisions. That’s why they’re good people.”

It is a worldview almost childlike in its simplicity. It does not, however, account for the people who we thought were good – until they pulled the trigger and inflicted mayhem on others. In the NRA’s world, Hasan was among the “good people,” until he committed mass murder. So were concealed carry permit holders George Sodini, Richard Poplawski and Michael McLendon, all of whom committed multiple killings this year. It seems that sometimes the “good people” make very bad decisions indeed.

The point, of course, is that it is dangerous folly to issue concealed carry licenses to virtually anyone who can pass a criminal background check. It is one thing to allow individuals to have guns in the home as long as they can pass a background check. It is quite another to rely on such checks to determine who can carry a gun concealed outside the home. Inside the home, the risk of gun possession largely is borne by those who live there. On the streets, the risk from an individual’s decision to carry a concealed gun in public is borne almost entirely by people who had no say in the decision, no knowledge of it, and no practical way to minimize the risk to themselves. And the risks are considerable. The evidence is overwhelming that “shall issue” states routinely issue licenses to dangerous people, who then commit dangerous acts – either intentionally, recklessly, or accidentally — with their guns.

Of course, the drumbeat has begun that lives could have been saved at Fort Hood if the military had lifted its restrictions on carrying guns on base, allowing more military personnel to be in a position to return fire from an attacker like Hasan. This idea amounts to introducing enormous additional daily risk into the lives of those who live and work on military bases on the off chance that the “good people” will be armed at the right time in the right place to respond to the most unlikely of events – a mass shooting in progress by one of the “bad people”.

Once we emerge from the make-believe world of “good people” vs. “bad people,” we cannot escape the chilling reality that Hasan himself was one of those our concealed carry laws had “deputized” to protect us all from potential attackers. How many more need to die at the hands of these “good people” before we insist that gun policy be grounded in reality, not make-believe?

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s new book, Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy.

Should someone who wants to buy a military-style assault weapon be required to undergo a criminal background check?

In America they don’t have to.

In fact, felons, gangsters, wife-beaters, and the dangerously mentally ill can buy as many military-style assault weapons, semi-automatic pistols and other firearms as they can carry, with no questions asked.

They just have to know where to go.

It’s no secret. There are thousands of gun shows in 43 states that don’t require Brady criminal background checks for all gun show sales.

Why do criminals and traffickers go to gun shows? As the bank robber Willie Sutton might have put it, “Because that’s where the guns are.”

Our weak gun laws make it lethally simple for unlicensed gun vendors to sell as many firearms as they can to whomever they can, cash and carry.

Colin Goddard proved it. Colin survived being shot four times at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. After learning more about our nearly non-existent laws restricting access to guns, he took it upon himself to document how easy we make it for dangerous people to get guns in this country.

Watch Colin’s story here:

This past summer, Colin went to gun shows across America in Minnesota, Ohio, Texas and his home state of Virginia.  Equipped with a hidden camera and accompanied by a resident of each state he visited, Colin filmed how recklessly – even callously – unlicensed gun sellers sold military-style assault weapons and semi-automatic pistols with no criminal background check, and without even requiring identification.

Currently, the Brady Law, requiring criminal background checks on gun buyers, applies only to Federally licensed gun dealers.  A loophole in the law allows the kind of gun sales that Colin was able to document in the video below: unlicensed gun sellers unloading their guns to anyone who has the cash.

Watch what Colin found here:

One gun show seller in Ohio sold an AK-47 military-style assault rifle to Colin’s associate, even after he said he didn’t have identification with him. After taking his cash, the gun seller told him, “Have fun with it.”

Another gun seller in Minnesota sold a semiautomatic pistol with no questions asked. In fact, he clearly knew the underhanded nature of his business when he told Colin and his associate with a laugh: “OK, there’s no tax. There’s no paperwork. That’s worth something.” This seller clearly didn’t care who his gun buyers were, anticipating that some of them will actually pay a premium to avoid a criminal background check altogether.

A gun seller in Virginia sold Colin a rifle with a high-capacity ammunition magazine and was only concerned about the sale price. He didn’t ask Colin a single question about his background, didn’t ask to see any identification, and didn’t ask why he wanted the weapon.

The gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, fights to keep these sales legal. Due to their lobbying, any felon can walk into one of approximately 5,000 gun shows in 43 states that don’t require criminal background checks at gun shows, and buy whatever weapon he wants from these unlicensed gun sellers.

America’s weak gun laws practically invite dangerous people to arm themselves.

You can help can change this by joining us in telling Congress to stand up to the gun lobby and require all gun buyers at gun shows to undergo a Brady criminal background check.

We make it too easy for dangerous people to get guns in this country. Tell Congress to close “the gun show loophole.”

Please go to www.bradycampaign.org and sign our petition today.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

By Doug Pennington
Assistant Director, Communications

After the shooting massacre at Fort Hood, commanding Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone was asked whether personnel in the Soldier Readiness Center on base would have been armed during the attack.

Gen. Cone  answered:

No.  We would not.  As a matter of practice, we do not carry weapons. This is our home.  So, we do have security guards that are here, the M.P.s and the Department of the Army civilian police.  But soldiers on Fort Hood do not carry weapons.

I will say that we are, as a matter of assurance to the local community, we are going to increase our security presence here in the coming days.  But the fact is that soldiers do not carry weapons routinely unless they‘re in a training event, et cetera, or something of this nature.

So, even as the National Rifle Association tries to arm America to the teeth, soldiers — America’s professional gun users — do not carry weapons on base “as a matter of practice.”

Why?  Because it’s their home.

You just knew that had to hit the gun zealots where it hurts most.

Sure enough, Jacob Sullum of Reason came out yesterday to show he knows better than a commanding General how to run America’s largest Army base.

What is Sullum’s brilliant answer to the Fort Hood massacre?

“More guns,” of course.

…If someone else at the processing center had a gun when Hasan started shooting, it seems likely that fewer people would have been killed or injured….

“It seems likely“?  And if wishes were horses, Reason editors would ride….

Here we see the counterfactual — the last refuge of gun advocates without facts, desperately trying to force guns into every aspect of American life.

Conveniently, they never openly consider the opposite possibility: that even more people would be dead.

(An aside: isn’t it ironic how some libertarians want government to stay out of their lives, yet have no problem with forcing other people to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere they turn?  The grocery store; the park; the school; the airport.  Apparently, we have the “freedom” to live with what these so-called libertarians tell us to live with.  After all, they have the guns, right?)

Sullum also cited what he called the “breathtaking inanity” of the Brady Campaign’s belief that more guns aren’t the answer to gun violence.

Okay, fine.  Let’s step back for a moment.

Enough reporting of the Fort Hood massacre has been done to reach some tentative conclusions about the accused shooter and the shooting itself.

• The shooter was issued a Virginia concealed carry permit in 1996.  (See his permit application here. ) This means, according to people like Jacob Sullum and John Lott/”Mary Rosh,” the alleged Fort Hood murderer was, by definition, a “law-abiding citizen”… right up to the point he massacred 13 people and wounded another 30.  This also means that Sullum’s “more guns” policy would help put guns in the next “law-abiding” mass murderer’s hands, and make it legal for him to carry them virtually anywhere he chooses.

• The shooter used a firearm — the FN FiveSeveN — that shouldn’t be available to the general public in the first place, a weapon dubbed by law enforcement as a “cop-killer” and “an assault rifle that fits in your pocket.”  The ammunition type that the Fort Hood killer used has not yet been reported.  However, the FN FiveSeveN can fire ammunition that — according to FN’s own marketing — will penetrate body armor and Kevlar helmets.  (See this cached page at GunBroker.com selling the weapon, with FN’s marketing language.  Also, watch a Brady Campaign demonstration of the FN firing armor-piercing ammunition, as compared to other weapons.)  Sullum says that pointing out this fact after a mass murderer uses the same model weapon is “bizarre.”

• The Fort Hood shooter fired over 100 rounds in about 7 minutes.

• The shooter apparently purchased “several high-capacity gun magazines” when he bought the FN FiveSeveN pistol at a Killeen, Texas gun store appropriately named “Guns Galore.”  The 20-round magazine comes standard with the FiveSeveN.  Had President Bush and the U.S. Congress not been so weak to allow the Federal assault weapons ban to expire in 2004, those magazines would not have been legally sold from Guns Galore.  A shooter limited to using only 10-round magazines is forced to reload twice as often as one who uses 20-round magazines, creating more opportunities to attack him when he isn’t shooting, thus possibly saving lives.  Sullum breezily dismisses this as “matter[ing] little.”

• While the shooter apparently contacted a radical cleric with “unmistakable connections to past terrorist plots,” investigators reportedly decided not to delve further into the future killer’s life.  FBI reportedly concluded that the shooter “was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning.”  Either way, even if the Fort Hood killer had been placed on the Terrorist Watch List — while he would have been denied entry onto a passenger aircraft — he still would have been allowed to buy his “cop-killer” pistol from Guns Galore.  Why?  Because, thanks to the National Rifle Association,  law enforcement is prohibited from blocking gun purchases by someone on the Terrorist Watch List if  the buyer doesn’t have another disqualifying reason (such as a felony conviction or domestic violence restraining order).

All these warning signs.  All these holes in the ability of law enforcement to do their job, shot through by lobbying from the NRA.

The ease with which America’s weak gun laws permitted a deranged killer to arm himself and massacre so many of our servicemen and -women should be a national tragedy.

Yet the only answer Sullum can manage is the “breathtaking inanity” to play the gun lobby’s broken record of “more guns… more guns…more guns….”

Of course, his conclusion can only follow from an equally inane assumption that mass shootings beset us like natural disasters,  as if nothing can be done to prevent them.

Taking his assumption to its logical extension, Sullum’s libertarian dystopia would deregulate gun ownership and gun-carrying entirely, so as to give everyone a gun who wants one; always assume some number of them are mass murderers; and then either duck or engage in the crossfire when bullets start to fly.  (Thomas Hobbes would call this a “state of nature.”)

In fact, Sullum’s answer is the equivalent of waving the white flag of surrender. Surrender to a permanent armed insanity in America — a culture of shooting deaths and injuries that cripple our efforts to build a stronger, more peaceful society in the belief that building such a society is futile.

What Sullum ignores is the inconvenient truth that shootings are not natural disasters.  They are man-made massacres aided and abetted by America’s almost non-existent gun laws — designed by the gun lobby — which take a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to putting firearms in the hands of killers.

Give in to that violent futility? No, thank you.

That would be breathtakingly inane.

___

UPDATE: For readers referred from Joe Huffman, guns are not speech.

___

By Doug Pennington
Assistant Director, Communications

While some of our friends on the other side of the gun violence prevention issue can be forgiven some, er, irrational exuberance over yesterday’s election results, the reality is a little more mundane.

For better or worse, guns didn’t play a prominent role in the outcomes of any of the four high-profile races yesterday — Virginia Governor, New York-23, New Jersey Governor, and New York City Mayor.  By almost all accounts, the bad economy and high unemployment were the key ballot-box issues.

Further, all these races played out on the home turf of either side of the gun violence prevention debate.  NRA-endorsed Bob McDonnell won the governor’s election in the NRA’s home state of Virginia.  Meanwhile, NRA-endorsed Dede Scozzafava couldn’t even make it to Election Day in the conservative NY-23rd Congressional district — which a Democrat won for the first time since the Civil War era.

On the other hand, Brady Campaign-endorsed Michael Bloomberg won a historic third term as New York City mayor, while Brady-endorsed Jon Corzine lost his bid for re-election as New Jersey governor to gun control supporter Chris Christie.

In short, NRA and Brady each went 1-1 in yesterday’s big races.

While the NRA will surely trumpet its candidate’s win in Virginia, observers will remember how NRA’s TV ads told McDonnell supporters to vote on the wrong day, while in another TV advertisement they “reinforced defaming stereotypes” of Italian-Americans.

And, finally, for all their storied “power,” the special Congressional election in New York state showed NRA leaders unable to even keep their candidate in the race — much less push her to victory.

For all the drama, yesterday’s elections — while saying a lot about the state of the economy today — said little about the state of the gun violence prevention issue in America.

We know that individuals can defy the law. Can a state legislature defy the law? When it comes to the gun issue, apparently it can.

I refer to the extraordinary legislation passed into law by the states of Montana and Tennessee declaring that guns or ammunition manufactured and retained entirely within the borders of those states are “not subject to federal law.” Apparently, similar legislation has been introduced in Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, South Carolina, Florida, Arizona and Colorado.

Can a state unilaterally exempt its homemade products from the reach of federal law? Only if it is prepared to defy the United States Constitution.

Under the Constitution, Congress has certain enumerated powers, including the power “to regulate Commerce . . . among the several states.” In its 2005 ruling in Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the principle, first set out in the Depression-era case of Wickard v. Filburn, that the Commerce Clause allows Congress to regulate purely intrastate activity involving a product, if it rationally concludes that to leave such activity unregulated would undercut its regulation of interstate commerce in the product. In Gonzales, the Supreme Court upheld Congressional power to ban the possession and use of marijuana, even by a California resident who cultivated her own marijuana and used it for personal medical purposes within the state entirely in accord with state law.

There is no doubt that, under these Supreme Court rulings, Congress has the power to regulate the manufacture and sale of guns that never cross the borders of Montana or Tennessee. Although some may disagree with this reading of the Commerce Clause, the more fundamental point is that, under our Constitution, the scope of federal Commerce Clause power is not for individual states to decide. In addition to misunderstanding the Commerce Clause, legislators in Montana and Tennessee seem prepared to defy the Supremacy Clause, under which federal enactments “shall be the supreme Law of the Land . . . .” As the High Court made clear in Gonzales, “the Supremacy Clause unambiguously provides that if there is any conflict between federal and state law, federal law shall prevail,” meaning that “state action cannot circumscribe Congress’ plenary commerce power.” The Gonzales Court expressly rejected Justice Thomas’ radical suggestion in dissent that “States possess the power to dictate the extent of Congress’ commerce power . . . .” Isn’t that exactly what Montana and Tennessee think they have done?

The idea that states can unilaterally “opt out” of federal law is not new. Its ancestors range from the 18th century Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, who thought only the states should have the power to regulate commerce, to John C. Calhoun’s nullification doctrine that led to the Civil War, to Governor George Wallace standing in the doorway defying the Attorney General of the United States, who was enforcing a federal order requiring the enrollment of black students at the University of Alabama. In short, on the issue of gun control, Montana and Tennessee have cast their lot with the historic “losers” in the great constitutional debate over state vs. federal power.

The enforceability of federal gun laws against purely intrastate conduct in Montana and Tennessee seems destined for the federal courts. The question arises: If these states believe they have the authority to exempt gun manufacturing and sales from federal law, do they also claim the authority to defy federal court rulings – even by the Supreme Court – to the contrary? Is secession next?

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s new book, Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy.