NY: Gillibrand Believes the Impossible; Making Gun Sales more Illegal will work

 

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Campaigning against the Confirmation of Justice Amy Barrett in 2020 Wikimedia commons CC 2.0

Those who wish to disarm other people have a disconnect with reality. They refuse to believe some things are not possible. This creates problems.

One of the reasons people push to disarm others is they refuse to arm themselves. Having made that decision, or, having had that decision made for them; they personally see no cost to their disarming of others. 

Disarm that guy over there. He is not me. It doesn't hurt me.

This is how  ideologues who refuse to accept reality get elected again and again. Consider Kirsten Gillibrand, U.S. Senator from New York.  From the nydailynews.com:

A measure to create a federal gun trafficking crime failed to make it through the Senate in 2013, on the heels of the devastating shooting that killed 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn. Still, Gillibrand said she was “very hopeful” the legislation will pass this time around.

“Guns travel up the iron pipeline along I-95 from states like Florida or Georgia or Pennsylvania where gun laws are far less strict,” Gillibrand said in the news conference. “The percentage of illegally trafficked guns in New York State has continued to grow in recent years, but I refuse to believe that we can’t stop these illegal guns from coming into our state.”

She plans to reintroduce the legislation this week, according to her office. Adams praised Gillibrand for her dogged decade-long effort on the bill.

It is already illegal to buy a gun outside of New York, bring it to New York, and sell it in New York, without going through a federally licensed dealer. It is a felony in both federal law and New York State law. Gillibrand seems to think making those actions somehow more illegal, with more law, will work where the current laws do not. 

Consider her self-admitted mindset:

I refuse to believe that we can’t stop these illegal guns from coming into our state.

The laws have been in place for more than 50 years. It is part of the framework of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Homicide skyrocketed after the 1968 GCA was passed. The legal restrictions have not worked the whole time.  In New York, in 1967, the murder rate was 6.5 per 100k. It was rising rapidly. It reached a peak of 14.5 in 1990. Then it started falling. the current rate, 2.9 is the lowest since 1965.  Gun laws in the rest of the nation became less and less restrictive since 1987.

You cannot have a free republic, with the limits and checks on government which we have, and do what Gillibrand wants done. Nor is there any evidence what she wants done would have any effect on the number of people murdered. 

The latest numbers, from 2019, show 7,363 guns were traced in New York State in 2019. The largest category were taken simply for illegal possession (3,395), some may have been from gun "buybacks" (Orwellian speak for gun turn-in events). Of the guns whose state of origin could be determined, New York was the largest number, 1,048 of 4,974, or 21%.  At most, 6315 guns of all types came from outside of New York.

That is an average of about 17.3 guns a day from outside of New York. It is a tiny amount of guns. Only 18 guns would be required to be smuggled per day into New York, in the millions of vehicles which enter New York every day, to keep up this number.  The time from when the guns were purchased, until they were traced in New York averaged 11.25 years.

Consider the guns traced from Mexico. In 2019, there were 13,387 guns from the United States traced from Mexico. The border with Mexico is much more tightly controlled than the border with New York. There are many more people in Mexico than New York. Gun control in Mexico is much more intense than it is in New York. The homicide rate in Mexico is much higher in Mexico than in New York. In 2019 it was Mexico 29 per 100K  population. In  NY it was 2.9, only 10% of that in Mexico.

There is plenty of evidence the number of legal guns in a population does not affect the murder rate.

Brazil, India, and China all have roughly the same number of illegally owned firearms per 100 people.  The homicide rates vary from six times the rate of the U.S. (Brazil) to 2/3 the rate of the U.S. (India) to one eighth the rate of the U.S. (China).

These numbers verify the research of John Lott, which shows there is no correlation between homicide numbers and the number of guns owned per 100 people. Lott’s study compares all the countries in the world he could obtain data from. (from 2014)

There is plenty of evidence the number of guns does not affect the overall suicide rate.

They may have some small effect on the number of murders with guns, or the number of suicides with guns, but they do not change the overall numbers.

Why push the obviously flawed concept of controlling the gun flow, in order to reduce violent crime and homicides, when it demonstrably does not work?

For Gillibrand, this is a brand. It is what won her the Senate seat, and placed her in a position of power and authority, one of most influential and powerful people in the world. That is plenty of reason enough.

It costs her nothing. It is important to understand, the people who want others disarmed, assume such policies cost them nothing. They may be wrong in the long term analysis. They may also be dead long before any adverse effects would impact them. 

The adverse effects may take generations. Then again, the adverse effects of generations of undermining the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution of the United States appear to be having significant adverse effect right now, in 2021.

©2021 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

Gun Watch