One Gun a Month Overview

Overview:

Rationing rights is anathema to the American concept of Freedom but for the sake of this discussion I will set aside the obvious constitutional issues in favor of the substantive defects in logic and pragmatism that this issue represents.

The proponents of the ‘One Gun a Month’ gun control concept hedge their bets when discussing the potential for success of this measure in stopping crime by only saying that it could, would, might help in the fight against violent crime. What is NOT heard in this discussion is “what if it hurts more than it helps”? What if it creates more crime? Who will be held responsible for the additional lives lost or the misdirection of the assets of our state?

The rationale, as we all know, for one gun a month is that it will somehow stop the ‘illegal’ trafficking in firearms by limiting the ‘legal’ sales to an artificial limit, in this case one.  The first question that comes to mind is ‘how and where did this concept originate and upon what premise of study or research is it based’?  The fact is that there aren’t any!  This measure represents the conceptual thought of that it ‘could, would, might help in the fight against violent crime’.

Examples:

South Carolina was the first state to enact this type of law, with Maryland and Virginia following suit years later.  The justification was that this law was needed to stop crime and violence.  It was a ‘trial’ of a concept that, decades later, has been proven (see attached ATF reports) to be absolutely useless.  How useless you ask?  To the point that South Carolina has repealed their ‘One Gun a Month’ law. 

The South Carolina ‘One Gun a Month’ restriction did not stop the ‘illegal’ purchasing and trafficking in firearms.  What it DID do, and what Pennsylvania’s would as well, was to remove a valuable law enforcement tracking tool, which is the submission of the ‘Multiple Sales of Firearms’ form to the BATF. This proposed law would hide the intent of ‘illegal’ purchasers from the scrutiny of law enforcement thus making all of us LESS safe and thereby INCREASING the violence in our society.

Take Virginia, an instructive example on what we need to know and consider in debating such a policy for any specific jurisdiction –city, county, or the whole state.  The evaluation of outcomes from Virginia’s 1993 one-gun-a-month limit is nicely summarized and referenced in the National Research Council report Firearms & Violence: A Critical Survey, Chapter 4, Interventions Aimed at Illegal Firearm Acquisition, pp.93-94.

This kind of intervention strategy has been called Pulling Levers: coordinating federal, state and local resources to pull every available legal lever to target suspicious dealers and multi-gun buyers for investigation, and –if warranted-- vigorously prosecute them, fully enforcing existing law.)

The NRC’s assessment makes a crucial point [quote]:

“An important question not addressed by this study is whether the law change affects the ultimate outcome of interest --the quantity of criminal harm committed with guns—or even the intermediate questions of the law’s effects on the number of guns purchased or owned.”

 

Conclusions:

One has only to examine, as we have, the violent crime rates in Maryland and Virginia to see that ALL of the projections in those states as to the impact and worth of ‘One Gun a Month’ were absolutely wrong.  Virginia, while ‘One Gun a Month’ was restricting firearms sales, was compelled by the ‘urban’ violence in Richmond to create ‘Project Exile’ and Maryland followed suit a similar plan due to the violence in Baltimore.  I doubt that anyone could call this a success story and mean it.

Is this what the proponents of ‘One Gun a Month’ seek for Pennsylvania?  Who will be responsible when the violence escalates?  Since this measure will require hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to manage who pays for this?  We are being goaded into a course of action, that will impact thousands of innocent individuals, by the advocates of this measure who will hold themselves blameless when after decades it is discovered that it has raised the body count.

The stakes in this public debate are extraordinarily high in terms of people’s lives as well as societal stability.  It is important that the true history of gun control, in all its’ myriad forms, and its’ collateral costs be added to the discussion.

To educate citizens on the rights of United States citizens to own firearms to include but not limited to: the Constitutional rights guaranteed under the 2^nd Amendment of the United States Constitution, Judicial Reform and the Pennsylvania Constitution as embodied in Article 1, Section 21 and Section 25.