There Are Too Many Gun Laws

At Ammoland Dean Weingarten has an article entitled America Has A Problem with Too Many Gun Laws. Actually, Weingarten would have been correct if he had left out the word "Gun" from the title. While it is true that there are too many gun laws, the truth is there are too many laws, period.

The United States has far too many gun laws. There are laws about where you buy a gun, who can buy a gun, who can possess a gun, who can carry a gun, what kind of gun can be bought, shot, loaned, carried, or given, and where a gun may be possessed, purchased, shot or traded, what kind of ammunition can be sold, possessed, made, or shot, and where it can be at what times.

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In the colonies and the early Republic, there were extremely few gun laws. The rare gun laws were almost never enforced, in part because there was little serious mechanism to enforce them. The electorate would not accept any significant attempt to disarm them. Some early laws required people to be armed.

Weingarten points to the reconstruction period after the Civil War that politicians began passing laws to disarm disfavored groups such as blacks, Catholics, the Irish and of course the Italians. Then with the advent of the Progressive Movement and their so called "good government," the regulation of guns picked up. As Weingarten notes, disarmament is necessary to carrying out the Progressive agenda. The most notorious of these laws though was New York's Sullivan Act which was just knocked down by Bruen.

In cities, organized crime, in conjunction with corrupt city governments, worked to disarm people to protect their enforcers, such as the Sullivan law in New York, passed by the notorious “Big Tim” Sullivan.

Sullivan knew the gangs would flout the law, but appearances were more important than results. Young toughs took to sewing the pockets of their coats shut, so that cops couldn’t plant firearms on them, and many gangsters stashed their weapons inside their girlfriends’ “bird cages” — wire-mesh fashion contraptions around which women would wind their hair.

Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, were disarmed, which solved another problem: Gangsters had been bitterly complaining to Tammany that their victims sometimes shot back at them.

There are too many gun laws, clearly. There are thousands, and they overlap and contradict each other. They make the ownership and carrying of guns a risk to otherwise law abiding citizens excersizing their rights. But what is worse is that these laws have no effect on crime which is always the excuse given.  Worse still, they create criminals out of otherwise law abiding citizens.

The results are millions of people whose lives are disrupted, who are convicted of crimes for exercising their Constitutional rights, whose property is stolen under the color of law, and whose ability to defend themselves is severely compromised.

These are serious costs. Those who push to disarm people ignore the costs of their measures. Those who bear most of the costs are the poor, who are most vulnerable to the machinations of the legal system, and the middle class, who have resources that can be plundered by the government, careers which can be destroyed, and property that can be confiscated.

Because of the multitude of gun laws in the USA, it is easy for a person to run afoul of the law through simple necessity.