Sunday, November 16, 2008 | News, In this Issue...
Under the gun

Buyers are snatching up firearms faster than a speeding bullet

Tucker Guns
Spark St. Jude

By Stephanie Ramage

Last summer, not long after Democratic presidential primary candidate Hillary Clinton told the people of Scranton, Pa., about how she’d learned to shoot at her family’s cottage, while her opponent Barack Obama was counting up his likely electoral college votes and Republican John McCain was talking about buying insurance across state lines, the U.S. Supreme Court quietly issued an interpretation of the Second Amendment that firmly protects the rights of individual citizens to own and bear arms.

On June 26, the Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that the District of Colombia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns and its accompanying unloaded-and-locked requirement for shotguns and rifles were unconstitutional. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”

Now, however, gun owners and dealers fear that President-elect Obama’s administration, with its majority-Democrat Congress and Obama’s anti-gun track record in the Illinois Statehouse, will tilt the power in favor of gun control.

In response to this fear, guns have flown off the shelves of local gun shops. About a dozen gun dealers contacted by The Sunday Paper all said they had experienced a substantial increase in sales since late October.

Beginning on the Saturday before the Nov. 4 election, Chuck’s Firearms in Buckhead had one of its best sales weeks ever.

“Sales tripled in just one week,” says owner Jack Lesher.

The upsurge in sales precipitated by Obama’s election is only the latest development in a decades-old battle over gun rights that, at its most basic, boils down to two simple opposing views:

1. Those who oppose gun control believe that while Europe’s countries developed around the idea of faith in one’s government, even to the point of believing that God had anointed the heads of state, the United States of America came into being as a direct result of distrusting government. Colonists, with guns in their civilian hands, defeated the European system. Without guns, firearms rights advocates like to say, we would all be driving on the wrong side of the road today.

2. Those who support gun control, on the other hand, tend to believe in the notion devised by 19th century German economist and sociologist Max Weber that government is defined by its ability to control violence, and that in order to control it, the government must have a monopoly on it. In other words, those who support gun control support a more European-style doctrine that places faith in the government above faith in individual private citizens.

The two groups have diametrically opposed interpretations of the Second Amendment, which says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” 

The amendment was written in 1791, when states were much more autonomous than they are today, and when they actually had militias. Anti-gun-control proponents, or “Second Amendment rights supporters,” as they prefer to be called, have always said that “militia” means “people,” since virtually every able-bodied man served in his state’s militia when the amendment was written.

Gun-control supporters have always said that a “militia” means just that—a government military body—and if militias became a thing of the past, then only the police and the military should be allowed to have most types of guns. [Editor's Note: Later versions of the amendment included a comma after "Militia," which some argue made it clear that the authors were referring to a militia.]
In the more than 200 years since the amendment was penned, the Supreme Court has never really explained what happened to the Second Amendment when state militias, practically speaking, ceased to exist.

 That is, until this year.

What in Heller is a militia?

It took several years to bring the case “District of Colombia v. Heller” into being. Robert Levy, a legal scholar at the Cato Institute, had been looking for the perfect case to finally clarify the Second Amendment. He eventually found several Washington D.C. citizens who wanted to hold onto their handguns, but only one, a security guard in his 60s named Dick Anthony Heller, had a strong enough claim to land in the nation’s highest court.

When Justice Scalia and four other justices decided in favor of Heller, it was a victory for those who believe the Second Amendment refers to individuals, not militias.

“The funny thing about Heller is that it has flip-flopped the liberal and conservative positions,” says Matthew Shors, one of the attorneys who represented the District of Colombia in the case. “If you are a strict constitutionalist, to you it means that the states can protect themselves from the federal government. The fact that the states have chosen to allow their militias to atrophy because they think they don’t need them anymore doesn’t change the Second Amendment.”

Shors, who is rattling around in his kitchen in Virginia preparing for his son’s birthday party, says that Heller is a decision that has implications for future generations. Already, it has sparked similar cases elsewhere. There’s a case involving Obama’s hometown, Chicago, he says, and there’s also a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals case in California.

“The next issue the U.S. Supreme Court decides is whether Heller applies not just to D.C., but to state and local laws,” says Shors. “Because of the Heller decision, it is going to be harder than it has been in the past for governments to ban weapons.”

But banning weapons is not the gun-control constituency’s priority, according to Ladd Everitt, communications director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Everitt has recently returned from a trip to Tacoma, Wash., where he participated in a documentary about the illegal trafficking of guns from the U.S. into Canada. While there, the gun-control activist did something he has never done before—he fired a gun. Actually, he fired four handguns (a .357 Ruger revolver, a Glock 9 millimeter, a Sig Sauer 9 millimeter, and a Ruger .22 caliber), a shotgun (a Mossberg 12-gauge), and an assault rifle (a Hi Point 9 millimeter).

“It was amazing,” he says. “I sunk 10 bullets into the eye socket of a target. It was like a video game. I could see why a teenager would want one.”

But he’s not interested in owning one.

“I have a baby daughter at home,” he says. “And I don’t want a gun around the house.”

Everitt also doesn’t see why anyone else would need to own an assault rifle.

“An assault weapon is, at its core, originally designed for war,” he says. “These are weapons originally designed for the battlefield. I have a baseball bat, a dog, that’s enough.”

No one, he adds, should hold out any hope, though, of the Democratic Congress banning any guns. He explains that although the National Rifle Association (NRA) failed to defeat Obama, conservative, “blue dog” Democrats won’t support gun control, however much they may have supported Obama.

“So we have to look at what’s realistic,” says Everitt. “We’d like to close the gun show loophole and we’d like to see the repeal of the Tiahrt Amendment.”
 

Not about race

        Rachel Parsons, spokeswoman for the NRA, says the term “gun show loophole” is misleading.
   
    “He’s talking about private firearms sales,” she says. “That would, in essence, close down gun shows, because they would have to run a National Crime Information Center background check, and that would take up to 48 or 72 hours and most shows don’t last that long. Gun shows are community events. They are family events. Law enforcement and military personnel go there to buy things. The Justice Department has found that less than 2 percent of guns used in crime come from gun shows.”
   
    Everitt counters that  the loophole is much bigger than that.

    “If we were in Virginia, I could sell you 10 rifles from my living room sofa,” he says. “And I wouldn’t have to do a background check.”

The Tiahrt Amendment, passed in 2005 and named for its sponsor, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), restricts access of gun ownership data to law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and defense attorneys. It keeps the ownership paper trail of a gun—who bought it where and when, who they sold it to, if it was reported stolen, etc.—out of the hands of, in Parsons’ words, “politicians, special interest groups and the media. They would get a hold of it and it could be used for political grandstanding.”

Or it could be used by journalists to establish links between gun ownership and crime, or to build lawsuits like the one brought by the City of New York in 2006 against gun dealers here in Georgia and elsewhere in the Southeast. Those dealers, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, allowed 'straw' purchases that eventually provided guns to criminals in NYC. One of the stores on Bloomberg's list was Adventure Outdoors in Smyrna.

Adventure Outdoors subsequently sued Bloomberg for what its then-attorney, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, called “slander,” and for basically tricking Adventure Outdoors into allowing the alleged straw purchase. Eric Proshansky, an attorney for NYC, says the city has filed a motion for a default judgment in its case against Adventure Outdoors, which should be decided soon. [Clarification: Portions of Adventure Outdoors' complaint against NYC were dismissed. The City's appeal to dismiss the remainder of the complaint has been argued  in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and a decision is pending. .]

Last week, business was brisk at Adventure Outdoors, as it has been since three weeks before the election. Owner Jay Wallace says sales have increased by 30 percent.

“People are concerned that with the new administration coming in and the people like [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi who are still there, that there will be new bans,” he says. “They are interested in guns that are likely to fall under an assault weapons ban.”

At Range & Guns in Forest Park, manager David Aldea has seen a similar trend.

“Whenever there is a rumor of a ban, it produces a panic like a wildfire,” he says, warning that if there is a ban, “The problem with guns won’t be lessened, but the ability of the people to stand up and defend the populace will be.”

Aldea shrugs off any idea that the run on guns might be related to Obama being black. He explains that he’s well aware of how guns get linked to racial issues. But, he says, he grew up in New Jersey, where he was part of a diverse competitive marksmanship team.

 “It’s not race,” he says. “It’s the fear of a ban. When the assault weapons ban was put in place in the 1990s—and that was just on manufacturers—people went hog-wild buying guns.”

Over at Tucker Guns in Tucker, owner Scott Austin concurs.

“I have black customers, and they are just as concerned,” he says. (There were black customers in the store the day SP was there to take photos.) “People are just scared the government will take their guns away.”

Rick Callihan, a gun parts manufacturer in Atlanta, says, “The same thing would have happened if Hillary had been elected. Obama’s been a little more outspoken on guns than Hillary, and Hillary has not really had any effect on guns in New York, but there would still be more sales because she’s a Democrat. When there is a ban expected, certain guns increase in value, so people buy them up.”

No one knows for sure what the Democratic-majority Congress will do, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi failed to return calls for this story. But a review of Obama’s record in the Illinois State Senate, where he served for nine years, turns up a slew of gun-control measures he sponsored or co-sponsored.

Among them is legislation tightening requirements for guns shows, requiring that all confiscated firearms be traced, and creating “the offense of unlawful use of a semiautomatic assault weapon or large capacity ammunition feeding device, defined as knowingly selling, manufacturing, purchasing, possessing, or carrying a semiautomatic assault weapon...Provides that the offense is a Class 2 felony. Exempts peace officers and members of the Armed Services or Reserved Forces of the United States and Illinois National Guard while in the performance of their official duties... .”

John R. Lott Jr., a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” believes it’s likely that Obama will seek to expand the assault weapons ban. 

Lott’s research has shown that wherever there have been bans on guns, an increase in crime has followed. He points to the country from which America rebelled, the one whose government earned our distrust and inspired our predilection for keeping gun rights in the hands of the citizenry.

    “In 1900, in England, gun ownership was extremely common, and London had only two gun murders and five armed robberies using guns that year,” he says. “People like to compare the U.S. to Britain, but the gap between the two in terms of crime was even wider before Britain put the gun ban in place; they had even less crime than we had then. Today their violent crime rate is twice ours.” SP