gun show loophole

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pages: 456 words: 185,658

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott

affirmative action, Columbine, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, G4S, gun show loophole, income per capita, More Guns, Less Crime, Sam Peltzman, selection bias, statistical model, the medium is the message, transaction costs

Other gun laws besides right-to-carry laws might also affect crime, and the estimates therefore take into account one-gun-a-month regulations, assault weapons bans (whether there are state bans when the federal ban is not enforced), background checks on the private transfer of guns (essentially “closing” the so-called gun show loophole), the Castle Doctrine (which absolves people of having to retreat when they are being threatened with deadly force), one-gun-a-month rules, and bans on relatively inexpensive guns (so-called Saturday night specials). These gun laws may be important for explaining changes in crime rates. But, perhaps more important, these other gun-control laws appear likely to be hot topics in the near future. Shortly after the November 2008 election, Barack Obama’s transition Web site noted that Obama and Joe Biden “support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country A D E C A D E L AT E R | 255 childproof.

Presumably if assault weapons are to be used in committing any particular crime, they will be used for murder and robbery, but the data appear more supportive of an adverse effect of assault weapons bans on murder and robbery rates. Gun Show Regulations Despite the impression created by the term gun show “loophole,” there are no different rules for buying a gun at a gun show than anywhere else.202 Gun-control groups, such as Third Way (formerly Americans for Gun Safety) identify eighteen states that have closed the loophole, but interestingly, prior to 2000, only three of these states had laws that even mentioned gun shows. So how can a state close a gun show loophole if the laws didn’t even mention the term “gun show”? The issue is really private handgun transfers. What usually constitutes “closing the loophole” is mandating background checks for private transfers of handguns.

They find that gun shows modestly reduce homicides and have no impact on suicides within twenty-five miles of the gun show.207 If their result is correct, the reduction in gun shows that I find from closing the gun show loophole may explain why closing the loophole could increase murder and robbery rates. Closing down gun shows is more likely to deprive law-abiding citizens of a relatively inexpensive source of guns than to prevent criminals from getting guns. The results in table 10.12 imply little impact from closing the gun show loophole. While murder and robbery rates appear to rise, neither increase is statistically significant. Nor is the change in aggravated assaults significant.


pages: 519 words: 142,851

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Columbine, David Brooks, gun show loophole, Kickstarter, McMansion, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Timothy McVeigh, white flight

Tom took a one-year leave of absence to serve as chief lobbyist for SAFE Colorado (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic). They supported several bills in the Colorado legislature to limit access to guns for minors and criminals. Prospects looked good, especially for the flagship proposal to close the gun-show loophole. It was narrowly defeated in February. A similar measure bogged down in Congress. So a week before the anniversary, President Clinton returned to Denver to encourage survivors and support SAFE’s new strategy: to pass the same measure in Colorado with a ballot initiative. Colorado Republican leaders rebuked the president and refused to appear with him.

May 2, the governor and attorney general—the state’s most prominent Republican and Democrat—put the first two signatures on the petition for the Colorado ballot initiative. It required 62,438 signatures. They gathered nearly twice that many. The measure would pass by a two-to-one margin. The gun show loophole was closed in Colorado. It was defeated in Congress. No significant national gun-control legislation was enacted in response to Columbine. The season ended well. On May 20, the second class of survivors graduated. Nine of the injured crossed the stage, two in wheelchairs. Patrick Ireland limped to the podium to give the valedictory address.

Associated Press, Washington, June 14, 2007. Bortnick, Barry. “Passed/Amendment 22: Background Checks—Gun Shows.” (Colorado Springs)Gazette, November 8, 2000. “Colorado Kills Gun Laws.” Report by Vince Gonzales. CBS News, February 17, 2000. Ferullo, Michael. “Clinton Implores Colorado Voters to Take Action on Gun Show Loophole.” CNN.com, April 12, 2000. Hahn, Robert A., Oleg O. Bilukha, Alex Crosby, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Akiva Liberman, Eve K. Moscicki, Susan Snyder, Farris Tuma, and Peter Briss. “First Reports Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Violence: Firearms Laws: Findings from the Task Force on Community Preventive Services.”


pages: 88 words: 26,706

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

It’s probably Harris, who genuinely does part ways with the Limbaughs and Hannities of the world on a number of core issues, who marks the difference between the IDW and the more old-fashioned right. The Stanford- and UCLA-educated neuroscientist is a warmonger and an apologist for the status quo in many ways I’ll explore as the book goes on, but he has conventionally liberal views on domestic policy issues ranging from abortion to closing the gun show loophole. He supported Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump in the 2016 election. And where Ben Shapiro naively believes that God Himself shares his attitudes toward women and Palestinians, Harris is fiercely secular. Long before there was an Intellectual Dark Web, Harris belonged to a group of intellectuals who collectively branded themselves The New Atheists.


pages: 368 words: 108,222

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

Finally, Newtown was such a horror that gun safety advocates were sure something substantial would pass. No. That defeat felt like the death knell of hope. Polls indicated huge majorities favoring several gun reforms, but most of us went silent about them. Even raising the possibility of closing the gun show loophole or fixing the background-check system drew eye rolls and jabs about political naivete. A new assault weapons ban, or limiting large-capacity magazines, ideas heavily supported by the public, drew jeers. The NRA kept introducing new bills to weaken gun laws, and they were passing in legislatures around the country.

He soldiered on alone, later joined by hundreds affected by subsequent tragedies—and in nineteen years, he’s learned a thing or two. Though most of the crowd came out to see the Parkland kids, it was Tom Mauser’s name on so many lips as the audience drifted out. Mauser had lamented that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had gotten three of their four guns through the so-called gun show loophole. For a year, legislators failed to close that loophole, even in Colorado in the wake of the tragedy. Finally Mauser helped lead an effort to put it on the state ballot. It passed by 40 points. “If you put something reasonable in front of people, they will support it,” he said. He also cautioned that the NRA had been winning with a narrative suggesting that cities like Chicago with the most restrictive gun laws suffer the worst gun violence.


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

There was Ali Boumelhem, a member of Hezbollah, who was imprisoned for trying to smuggle US guns back to Lebanon. He had been buying weapons at gun shows in Michigan.66 Or Conor Claxton of the IRA, who had gone to South Florida gun shows to buy guns to smuggle back into Northern Ireland.67 Even an Al Qaeda spokesman has remarked on the gun show loophole, encouraging American jihadists to ‘go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?’68 The concern of Americans on the Mexican border, though, was not about what was going south.

And looking at crimes solely within 25 miles of a gun show ignores findings about the geography of illegal gun markets; roughly two-thirds of gun crimes are from firearms purchased out of state or far away from the scene of the deed. 66. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2001-12-13-nceditf.htm 67. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/13/us/nation-challenged-gun-control-gun-foes-use-terror-issue-push-for-stricter-laws.html 68. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/closing-the-terror-gap-and-the-gun-show-loophole/2011/06/06/AGTKubKH_story.html. Perhaps the most notable non-international case, though, was the Columbine High School massacre. The two perpetrators bought two shotguns and a Hi-Point semi-automatic from a private seller for cash at the Tanner Gun Show in Adams County, Colorado. No questions were asked, and no paperwork was filled out.


pages: 357 words: 130,117

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

Some events featured thousands of distributors and tens of thousands of attendees. At these events, licensed gun dealers—commercial establishments—had to record and report all sales, but private dealers like McVeigh could buy and sell without any reporting to the government. (This was known as the “gun show loophole”; it still exists.) The exhibitors sold new, used, and antique firearms, ammunition, shooting supplies, knives, scopes, clips, reloading supplies, holsters, carry cases, hunting gear, concealment products, gun apparel, knives, tasers, stun guns, and pepper sprays, among other things. Gun shows were also cultural events as much as commercial enterprises.

., 118 Gorelick, Jamie, 191, 199, 201, 206–7 McVeigh case and, 215–16, 218, 219 Gosar, Paul, 372 Gray, Michael, 352 Great Replacement, 21–22, 227, 363 Greene, Marjorie Taylor, 3, 241, 372 Gulf War, McVeigh’s service in, 46–47, 49, 50, 67, 357 Gumbel, Andrew, 240 guns, gun rights: Buchanan and, 58 McVeigh’s obsession with, 6, 17, 18–19, 23, 24–25, 29–30, 39, 53, 63, 70, 227, 363, 367 right-wing extremists and, 4–5, 68–69, 87, 95–96, 208, 227, 295, 299, 351, 357, 358, 365, 368, 371 see also assault weapons, 1994 bill banning; National Rifle Association; Second Amendment gun show loophole, 86 gun shows, gun show circuit, 9, 86–87 gun safety laws and, 228 McVeigh at, 9, 66–67, 87, 95, 96–97, 105, 113, 116–17, 123, 124, 226 political events at, 87 right-wing extremist community at, 9, 86, 352 Hackworth, David, 237–38 Halleck, Seymour, 276 Hammon, Cheryl, 151, 153 Hanger, Charlie, 161–62, 163, 375 McVeigh pulled over and arrested by, 162, 164–67, 171–72, 174, 176, 204, 251, 311 McVeigh trial testimony of, 315–17 Hankins, Jim, 229, 290 Hannity, Sean, 356 Harrison Radiator, 13–14, 16–17, 54 Hartzler, Adam and Alex, 218 Hartzler, Joe, 216–17, 373–74 multiple sclerosis of, 217 Hartzler, Joe, as lead counsel for McVeigh prosecution, 218–20, 251, 265, 267, 292, 297–98, 312, 331, 342 Fortiers and, 252, 254, 255–56, 321–23 John Doe number 2 and, 319–20 narrow prosecutorial focus of, 220 opening statement of, 310–11 speaking indictment and, 243–44 victims’ families and, 286–87 witnesses examined by, 319–20, 322–24 witness list streamlined by, 314, 329 Havens, Mike (fake name), 182, 243 Havens, Terry (fake name), 243 Heartland Motorsports Park, 110 Henley, William Ernest, 349–50 Henry, Patrick, 4, 5, 35, 146 Herbeck, Dan, 347 McVeigh’s letters to, 18, 35, 97, 348, 349 Herington, Kans., 52, 134, 139, 170, 180, 181, 182 Nichols’s house in, 123, 130, 180, 181, 260, 265, 266, 344 storage shed number 2 in, 129, 137, 139–40, 143, 163 Hersley, Jon, 204, 243 Hertig, Michael, 214–15 Heyer, Heather, 364 Hodge, Steve, 17, 60 McVeigh’s letters to, 23, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 56, 65, 67, 84 Hodgkinson, James, 361 Homeland Security Department, U.S.


pages: 208 words: 69,863

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

airport security, Bob Geldof, City Beautiful movement, company town, David Sedaris, desegregation, Frank Gehry, gun show loophole, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine, white picket fence

That he and his wife, Sarah, turned this rotten luck into the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is downright heroic. And not the soft-focus treacle that “heroic” often implies. I’m on their mailing list, and the most impressive, lovable thing about them is their rage. The last mailing I got, seeking help to close the gun show loophole laws that allow terrorists and criminals to purchase all the firearms they want as long as it’s at folding tables set up at fairgrounds, featured a letter from Jim that opens, “I’m sitting here in my wheelchair today, mad as hell, trying to control my anger,” and another one from Sarah in which she tells a story about how right after Jim was shot, her son was playing with what he thought was a toy gun in a family member’s truck, but it turned out to be real and when she learned this she stormed over to the phone and called up the National Rifle Association, telling them, “This is Sarah Brady and I want you to know that I will be making it my life’s work to put you out of business!”


pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

The 3D printing machines will be capable of reproducing themselves. No place in the federal budget for an ATF agent in every home. Kids printing guns while their blissfully unaware parents think their young ’uns are playing on the computer. A prohibitionist is quoted as calling the Internet a permanent “gun show loophole.” And as expected, the article reproduced one of the more provocative of my public statements. From the original Wiki Weapon video: What’s great about the Wiki Weapon is it only needs to be lethal once. We will have the reality of a weapons system that can be printed out from your desk. Anywhere there is a computer, there is a weapon.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Raise the minimum age to purchase firearms to 21. Ban high capacity magazines and bump stocks. Require universal background checks that include relevant mental health information and previous interactions with the law. Ensure a complete universal database of those banned from buying firearms. Close the private sale and gun show loophole that waives the necessity of background checks.11 In spite of extremely heavy backfire from the NRA, customers, and pro-gun legislators, Stack held his ground, losing an estimated $250 million in sales. In the coming years he became a vocal activist in Washington, promoting gun control measures.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

I closed with a bullet-point summation of my conclusions in “The Sandy Hook Effect,” points that I still contend are reasonable measures that both liberals and conservatives should be able to agree upon: Ban military-style assault weapons Ban high-capacity magazines (>10 bullets) Universal background check system Close the gun-show loophole Penalties for illegal gun trafficking Ban high-risk individuals from guns (convicted of violent crime, drugs, stalking, restraining orders) Ban sales to dangerous mentally ill Research funding on gun violence. My concluding slide in this debate, as it was for my Lott debates, was anodyne enough to be acceptable to most politicos: Even though we can’t do everything, we can do something to reduce the carnage of gun violence and further bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, peace, and freedom.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

President Clinton sent a letter of condolence, and then flew to Colorado to personally comfort the families. The shooting ignited the gun control battle again across the nation, and the Clinton administration called for new measures to apply the Brady Gun Law prohibitions to juveniles, closing the so-called ‘‘gun show loophole’’ that allowed people to buy guns at events without a background check. Still, after all the investigations and explanations, the media reports and government bulletins, no one had any real answers for why the shooting happened. At decade’s end, some of the more cherished icons of American life lay shattered in the public eye.