Senator Levin,
Thank you for your recent response to my letter regarding your stance on firearms control.
I would like to take a moment to address some of the "successes" you quote in your letter.
You stated in your letter that, from 1994 to 2008, the Brady Law has kept 1.6 million firearms out of the hands of "potentially dangerous individuals." You are quite proud of that fact. According to a Denver Post article dated 12/19/1999, each year 12.6 million firearms are sold in the US; that number has gone up in recent years, but for the sake of discussion, let's use that number. This means that, for the fourteen year period to which you reference, more than 176,400,000 firearms were sold in the United States. Using your number of 1.6 million, this means that the Brady Law, for which billions of dollars were spent to facilitate its implementation and enforcement, has been successful in keeping 0.9% of all purchasers from legally acquiring a firearm. You're right! That is something to be proud of, and certainly justifies the expenditure of billions of taxpayer dollars to implement and continue enforcing.
There is one slight problem with your figures, however. A 0.9% success rate over fourteen years hardly explains the huge drops (over 20%) in "gun violence" that you attribute to the Brady Law. A better indicator of success would be the FBI data that show a direct correlation to the number of firearms legally purchased by Americans in the exercise of their Second Amendment rights to bear arms for their own defense, and the dramatic drop in "gun violence." When criminals know that there is a high probability that the person they might attack is armed, the likelihood of carrying through with the attack decreases dramatically. I believe this is what you used to refer to as "Mutually Assured Destruction" in the bad ol' days of the cold war nuclear arms race. The fact that an armed citizenry lowers the probability of a criminal attack has been well-known for centuries. Cesare Bonesana wrote the following in 1764:
Thank you for your recent response to my letter regarding your stance on firearms control.
I would like to take a moment to address some of the "successes" you quote in your letter.
You stated in your letter that, from 1994 to 2008, the Brady Law has kept 1.6 million firearms out of the hands of "potentially dangerous individuals." You are quite proud of that fact. According to a Denver Post article dated 12/19/1999, each year 12.6 million firearms are sold in the US; that number has gone up in recent years, but for the sake of discussion, let's use that number. This means that, for the fourteen year period to which you reference, more than 176,400,000 firearms were sold in the United States. Using your number of 1.6 million, this means that the Brady Law, for which billions of dollars were spent to facilitate its implementation and enforcement, has been successful in keeping 0.9% of all purchasers from legally acquiring a firearm. You're right! That is something to be proud of, and certainly justifies the expenditure of billions of taxpayer dollars to implement and continue enforcing.
There is one slight problem with your figures, however. A 0.9% success rate over fourteen years hardly explains the huge drops (over 20%) in "gun violence" that you attribute to the Brady Law. A better indicator of success would be the FBI data that show a direct correlation to the number of firearms legally purchased by Americans in the exercise of their Second Amendment rights to bear arms for their own defense, and the dramatic drop in "gun violence." When criminals know that there is a high probability that the person they might attack is armed, the likelihood of carrying through with the attack decreases dramatically. I believe this is what you used to refer to as "Mutually Assured Destruction" in the bad ol' days of the cold war nuclear arms race. The fact that an armed citizenry lowers the probability of a criminal attack has been well-known for centuries. Cesare Bonesana wrote the following in 1764:
"The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons."That gun control (or arms control) does not work has been a well-known fact for over two hundred years.
Your letter raises another issue, one that you consider a success, but which, you stated, you want to see expanded. Your letter states that in 2008, 9.9 million background checks were run for firearms purchases, producing 147,000 rejections. You consider it a success that 147,000 "potentially dangerous individuals" were denied the ability to legally purchase a firearm. The math, however, once again shows us that the background checks mandated by the Brady Law stopped a whopping 1.5% of purchasers from legally obtaining a firearm. Considering the billions we spend for enforcement of the Brady Law, the results are statistically insignificant. But let's take a second to consider the TRUE achievement of Brady with regard to this statistic. 147,000 "potentially dangerous individuals" were denied the ability to purchase a firearm through channels that were trackable. Did it prevent them from purchasing firearms through other, perhaps illegal, sources. NO. So in the final analysis, Brady has prevented NOTHING.
I could go on to address the other issues you raise in your response, but there really is no need. The number of incidents in which high capacity magazines have been used in relation to the total number of incidents involving firearms that occur each year in the United States is, once again, statistically nearly non-existent. You are once again proving the truthfulness of the adage, “hard cases make bad law”; you have successfully used a relative handful of incidents to drive your ideologically-flawed agenda to implement bad laws in an effort to nullify the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
Sir, it is time that you acknowledge that the gun control laws that you have helped enact are, in fact, abject failures. The Brady Law has prevented a statistically meaningless number of individuals from legally obtaining firearms. The Gun Free School Zones Act not only has not prevented anything, it has resulted in over 700 casualties since its initial enactment in 1990 because it guarantees that no one can effectively defend themselves within these zones, and must wait twenty or more minutes for police to even arrive on scene - effecting an entry takes even longer. It is time to repeal these laws, and allow the American people to defend themselves as the Second Amendment states is our RIGHT, and the US Supreme Court has stated in more than ten (10) rulings is our individual OBLIGATION.
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