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The Problem Is Ordinary Killers, Not Exotic Guns
Finding a really nice classic Mustang is not always easy and is never cheap, and, for years, a handful of very committed car enthusiasts have been making an end-run around the classic-car market and the restoration industry both by more or less building entirely new cars from the parts catalogue. This is something that is a lot easier to do with very popular classics such as the Mustang than it would be with (alas!) the 1966 Volvo P1800 I very stupidly bought as a broke college student. In reality, building a new Mustang from the catalogue entails a lot more than ordering the parts and putting them together — there is a reason most cars are built in factories rather than in artisans’ workshops. But you can do it, if you really want to.
You can build a gun from scratch, too, if you have the inclination and the skills. Contrary to what a great many people seem to think, there isn’t any law against it. There never has been, at least at the federal level. There are many kits you can buy to build old-style black-powder muskets and Kentucky rifles — a relatively easy project whose main challenges are related to woodworking rather than mechanics. But you can build sophisticated modern firearms, too. If you are a skilled machinist and have the right equipment, you can build one entirely from scratch. If that is too much for you, then you can build one from commercially available parts that simply need to be assembled — but you will have to pass a federal background check when purchasing the “receiver,” which is what the ATF considers a firearm when it is complete or almost complete.
The distinction between firearm and firearm parts is necessary in that firearm parts often are replaced or modified. For example, regular shooters eventually have to replace their rifles’ barrels, which simply wear out. Buying a new barrel for an old rifle is not the same as buying a whole new rifle, legally or practically. Likewise, some shooters will change the stocks or “furniture” on their weapons, change the grips or sights, upgrade certain mechanical parts (especially triggers), etc. At its simplest, a firearm is just a length of pipe that is closed at one end. Because it would be impractical to classify all of these the various parts as firearms under federal law, a more sophisticated distinction has to be made.
A gray area — and here I mean a political gray area; the law at this time is reasonably clear — is the issue of receivers that are sold incomplete. A receiver becomes a firearm under federal law only when it has reached a certain stage of completion. Finishing an unfinished receiver is not like snapping together LEGO bricks — it usually requires some basic machining equipment and skills, though in some cases 3D printing can be used as a workaround. A firearm made from an unfinished receiver, like one made entirely from scratch, never has to go through the background check required by a retail sale, because, as far as federal law is concerned, there never was a retail sale of a firearm at all — only the sale of some firearm parts that were used in the production of a homemade firearm.
These homemade guns, which do not have serial numbers and which require no background check to acquire, are what is meant — purportedly meant, anyway — by the scary-sounding and imprecise term “ghost guns,” the latest terror totem of the anti-gun lobby. I write purportedly because many of the firearms reported as “ghost guns” are not homemade firearms at all but ordinary commercially sold firearms that have had their serial numbers removed or obscured. As often is the case when it comes to crime in the United States, good national data are difficult to find because of inconsistent reporting practices across jurisdictions.
When I first started reading about the upsurge in “ghost guns,” my first thought was to wonder why a criminal would go to the trouble of relying on a process that involves drill presses and mechanical skill rather than do what U.S. criminals have been doing for generations; i.e., using stolen guns or guns bought in criminal transactions. As it turns out, that is pretty much what our criminals are still doing, though some cities and states report significant increases in ghost-gun seizures. There have been a few murders involving ghost guns, and those cases predictably have received a disproportionate amount of attention. To give you an idea of the situation on the ground, the gun-control group Everytown conducted a review of federal “ghost gun” cases — 114 of them over a decade, a number that should tell you something — and found that there were 2,513 such firearms connected to criminal activity. But — and these are Everytown’s findings, not mine — the crime associated with those 2,513 firearms was illegal manufacturing or dealing in 2,200 cases, not robbery or murder or assault. Put another way, almost all of the crimes associated with so-called ghost guns were, in Everytown’s review of the data, the crime of simply possessing such a weapon in the first place or selling one.
That is not surprising. Consider a point of comparison: Contrary to what many people think, it is legal to own a fully automatic weapon in the United States, provided it was manufactured before 1986, though the process of acquiring one is closely regulated and the supply of such weapons is relatively small. Almost all of the crimes associated with legally owned fully automatic weapons in the United States are violations of firearms regulations. The number of murders committed with legally owned fully automatic weapons in the United States in the past 80 years or so could be counted on your fingers. (And, in every case that I have found, those crimes were committed not by civilian owners of machine guns but by police and military personnel using service weapons. It is possible I have missed one or two.) The same is true for many other exotic armaments and accessories, such as sound suppressors, which also are legal to own and increasingly common, especially among the very busy hunters working to keep the feral hog population under control here in Texas.
(The fear of “silencers” is a largely American thing probably driven by Hollywood; in many European countries, suppressors are sold over the counter, and some European firing ranges go as far as to require them as a courtesy to other shooters. I envy this every time I am at the range next to a guy firing a .458 Winchester magnum rifle with a muzzle brake, a device that reduces recoil but makes a firearm about twice as loud. Apparently, my corner of Texas is rife with guys who are dealing with problem elephants.)
For most periods in U.S. history — and ours is no different — the most common firearm used in a crime is whatever the most common handgun of the day happens to be: A generation or two ago, it was .38 revolvers, and now it is 9mm pistols. We spend a great deal of time (and political energy) worrying about so-called assault rifles, which are used in murders only exceedingly rarely — all rifles put together, from AR-type firearms to Elmer Fudd deer rifles, account for about 3 percent of the firearms used in murders. We also are for some (probably cinematic) reason preoccupied with particular unusual weapons that are seldom if ever used in violent crimes: For example, California went bananas a few years ago over .50-caliber rifles, which are now banned in the state. I have been able to find no case in which a .50-caliber rifle was used in a murder in California, and their use in violent crimes is pretty rare everywhere else. (Don’t take my word: Check the Violence Policy Center’s review.) There is a pretty good reason for that, of course: There’s a very nice .50-caliber rifle on the shelf of my local firearms dealer — it is almost six feet long, weighs almost 50 pounds, and costs $13,000.
The more you know about the ballistic facts on the ground, the sillier these scaremongering stories sound. The anti-gun lobby talks in fearful terms about the so-called military-style rifles available to the American buying public, but there are some pretty common hunting rifles that fire cartridges that are five to six times as powerful as the standard 5.56mm used in AR-pattern rifles. This makes perfect sense when you consider that it takes a lot more oomph to kill a Cape buffalo or a bull elk than it does to kill a Russian, which is what the 5.56mm round was designed to do. (Hence its full formal name, 5.56×45mm NATO.) The gun-grabbers who proclaim that they have no interest in taking away granddad’s deer rifle are being pretty silly, from an empirical point of view.
The supposed allure of “ghost guns” is that they are “untraceable.” Which they are — like pretty much every other firearm in the United States. We do not maintain a national gun registry, and, in spite of what you see on television, there isn’t really any such thing as a “registered” or “unregistered” firearm as a matter of federal law and the laws of almost all the states. When police find a firearm that they believe to have been used in a crime, they can, if they choose, consult federal records that will show them which federally licensed firearms dealer sold that gun. Criminals are not as a class of people very intelligent, but even so there are not very many who: (1) are eligible to buy a gun legally from a dealer; (2) actually do so; and (3) leave that gun at the scene of a crime. But that is the only way in most cases that government records could be used to trace a gun from a crime scene to its owner. (Most cases: A couple of states maintain legally questionable databases that might provide more information.) Most firearms change hands at least once — and often several times — before they end up at a crime scene or in the hands of investigators. The thing about career criminals is — they’re career criminals. They don’t buy criminal implements from federally regulated providers. In many cases, they can’t: A large share of our murders are committed by people who already have at least one felony conviction.
Once you start looking at the statistics, you’ll notice a lot of small percentages and weak correlations — a tiny share of “assault rifles” used in murders, Hollywood-style machine guns practically nowhere in evidence, “ghost guns” more common than I would have expected (9 percent of the firearms confiscated by police in Philadelphia, for example) but still pretty rare, etc.
Where you will see much stronger correlations is in who is shooting the guns: About 90 percent of murder suspects in cities such as New York and Chicago have prior arrest histories; in Charlotte, half of the murder suspects have had prior gun charges dismissed, which is a genuine scandal; the No. 1 thing people being convicted of violent felonies have in common is a prior arrest for a violent felony, which is the case for two-thirds of violent felons.
(For context, be aware that the majority of murder victims are criminal offenders, too, a finding that has held true in the big cities for half a century. A 2012 survey of New York murder victims found that 20 percent of them were on probation or parole or had an active arrest warrant, 10 percent were confirmed gang members, 71 percent had prior arrests, etc. Only one in five male murder victims in New York did not have a prior arrest.)
If prior offenders make up 90 percent of our murderers, and “ghost guns” are involved in less than 1 percent of our murders, why are we concentrating on the “ghost guns” rather than on the murderers?
The tripartite answer is politics, theater, and cowardice.
The Wild Side of Inflation
Lou Reed’s New York came out in 1989, and it announced the beginning of the end of the 1980s. (The 1980s would persist musically until 1991 and Nirvana’s Nevermind.) New York is typical Lou Reed territory — addiction, abuse, poverty, urban decay — with a new and unexpected element: nostalgia. “I’ll take Manhattan in a garbage bag / with Latin written on it that says: ‘It’s hard to give a sh** these days’ / Manhattan’s sinking like a rock / into the filthy Hudson, what a shock / They wrote a book about it, they said it was like ancient Rome.” But something already was changing in New York, which was at that time only five years away from electing Rudy Giuliani and becoming the greatest urban comeback story the nation had ever seen.
One of the songs on New York is a much-maligned haves-and-have-nots anthem, “Strawman,” which I very much like. But it is a song that needs to be adjusted for inflation.
“Does anybody need another million-dollar movie?” Reed asks. “Does anybody need another million-dollar star?” That $1 million was a lowball figure even then, but $1 million budgets and paydays are positively quaint by contemporary standards: The biggest film of 1989 was Batman, which cost about $48 million to make, $5 million of which went to pay its star, Michael Keaton. Christian Bale was paid something on the order of $30 million in the $250 million Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. (Robert Pattinson’s modest $3 million payday for the most recent Batman film has been the subject of some perplexed commentary in Hollywood.) Hollywood action figures such as Dwayne Johnson are not million-dollar stars, but billionaire-adjacent stars. (You won’t find many if any actors among the ranks of Hollywood billionaires, but you’ll find a fair number with hundreds of millions of dollars.) The rich get richer.
But the line that really makes me laugh in “Strawman” is, “Does anybody need a $60,000 car?” In 2022, an optioned-up Ford Super Duty pickup — that great emblem of blue-collar success — can cross the $100,000 mark, while a top-of-the-line Mercedes sedan is a bit more than twice that. A $60,000 car in 2022 is a decent Volvo station wagon. As a New Yorker, Reed probably did not have much of a feel for car budgets, though he did once make a commercial for Honda scooters.
Lou Reed fretted about the questionable necessity of a “billion-dollar rocket.” I wonder what he would have made of the $2.5 billion — privately built and privately owned — rockets of 2022.
But not everything on that record is an exercise in lyrical anthropology. Unhappily, New York is once again starting to look like New York.
Kingly Deference
Some things really never change. In the run up to the American Revolution — and in many other disputes with monarchs over the years — it was conventional for dissidents to blame the king’s ministers, rather than the king himself, for crimes, tyranny, and misgovernance. It was, in fact, a maxim of English law that “the king can do no wrong,” a legal principle cited unsuccessfully by Charles I right before they cut his head off. This is a prime example of the idolatry at the center of royal politics — if the king is God’s anointed, then his crimes must reflect poorly upon the Almighty. As Donald Trump disappoints his supporters by doing the most predictable thing in the world — spurning actual conservatives to support another television personality, Dr. Oz, in the Pennsylvania Senate race — true believers in the 21st-century United States are faced with the same troubling issue as their medieval forebears: How can the anointed do wrong? As with earlier royalists, they have set upon the same solution: Blame the ministers! Erick Erickson, who remarkably went from boycotting Trump as a “fascist” to actively supporting him, writes of the recent shenanigans: “It’s like Donald Trump’s staff is sabotaging Trump by convincing him to make the worst possible endorsements.” Not the king, but his wicked ministers!
That is not the thinking of a citizen — that is the thinking of a subject.
Or a cult member.
Words about Words
A phrase that seems to have fallen out of use except by attentive fans of the movie Pulp Fiction: “according to Hoyle.” In Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, the mob trigger Jules (played by Samuel L. Jackson, who at some point got a name upgrade from his earlier credits as plain ol’ “Sam Jackson”) witnesses what he believes to be a miracle, and vows to amend his life. Challenged by his doubtful colleague, he explains: “Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.” This is sound on both literary and theological grounds, I think.
Edmond Hoyle was an 18th-century Englishman who tutored the aristocracy on whist, a card game enjoyed by the high-society crowd. He wrote a little pamphlet on the subject, A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, which became so popular that a bookseller paid him an unusually large sum of money for the rights to the work, and then paid him an additional fee to autograph copies to distinguish them from unauthorized piracies. (That detail is particularly poignant for any writer who has ever known the pain of discovering an autographed copy of one of his books in a secondhand bookshop.) A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist was considered authoritative for more than a century, until the rules of the game were revised — and, as such, “according to Hoyle” came to mean “in accordance with the most widely accepted authority.”
Furthermore . . .
A reader inquires about my use of the phrase “a long jeremiad” last week. “Isn’t that redundant?” he asks, in that jeremiad is defined as a “long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes.”
Guilty as charged. I’ll send in the $20 bounty for redundancies as soon as I can get the cash out of the ATM machine.
Rampant Prescriptivism
The Judas Priest song notwithstanding, the expression is, “You’ve got another think coming,” not “You’ve got another thing coming.” It’s another way of saying, “Think again.” E.g.: “If you think that Dr. Oz is going to be anything other than embarrassing as a senator, then you’ve got another think coming.”
Sidebar: I think it usually is preferable to write out “then” in “if . . . then” formulations such as the one above, rather than to let the “then” be implicit, as we often do. “Then” is not technically an according-to-Hoyle coordinating conjunction, but it should be treated as one in such usages.
Also: “Judas priest!” as a mild profanity is of relatively recent coinage, dating to the early 20th century. It was used in place of “Jesus Christ!” to avoid taking the Name in vain. Possibly influenced by “Judas tree,” Cercis siliquastrum, the species from which Judas Iscariot is supposed to have hanged himself.
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Beastly News . . .
Pancake will eat the rosemary. The marigolds she only rolls in.
Recommended
It is years old, but I have only recently got around to watching The Chosen, the crowdfunded series about the life of Jesus. It is very good, and often moving. It is particularly clever — and effective — in situating the Gospel in the private domestic lives of the Biblical characters. Peter is not some holy man who is waiting around expecting the Messiah — he is a fisherman with financial problems and a tax bill he cannot pay, worried about disappointing his wife more than about being thrown in prison over his debt. The social dynamic of the wedding at Cana (the groom’s parents are socially inferior to the bride’s insufferably snooty family and fear public humiliation) is entirely recognizable in our own time. Some substantial liberties are taken with the Biblical account, of course, but these are dramatically useful and serve the spirit of the enterprise.
When an exasperated (and, up to that point, unnamed) wine merchant at the wedding is irritated and perplexed by being told to fill the empty wine jars with water, he says: “From the instructions you have provided, I see no logical solution to the problem.” Jesus, with a little sigh, replies: “It’s going to be like that sometimes, Thomas.”
The tone is distinctly Evangelical, though not overbearingly so, and in addition to being a version of the Gospel story, it is simultaneously something that would have been difficult to explain to an earlier generation of Christians: a Protestant love-letter to Jewish piety.
Also Recommended
With Good Friday approaching, do yourself a great favor and read Father Richard John Neuhaus’s Death on a Friday Afternoon if you haven’t read it before — or if you have, for that matter. It is a book that is not going to stop being good or true.
In Closing
This is Holy Week, and, while I will not be taking any time off, it is a good time to remember my friend Jay Nordlinger’s oft-repeated observation that journalism, from the Latin diurnalis (“daily”), is a thing of a day. History takes a longer view, but there is still another, much longer view, that has a claim on our attention.
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