The Return of the Gun Show “Loophole”

One of my first posts on this site was a righteous fisking of an Economist article on gun violence, in which I called it the worst gun violence article of the year (so far). Now, technically, what Joe Biden said yesterday about the (alleged) Gun Show Loophole, was not an article, but it’s pretty damned dumb and if he’d only written it down instead of mumbled it during one of his random word salad press conferences, I would be tempted to put it at the top of my 2021 list.

Said he… “You can go to a gun show, you can buy whatever you want — no background check.”

I don’t much care whether he believes this or not, but some of our fellow Americans will hear Ole “sticky fingers” Joe and say “Wait, what!? That’s outrageous! We’ve got to do something!” and so it’s worth taking a moment to slap our ailing President around a bit.

First of all, we have to deal with the “whatever you want…” part. What if I want a Stinger Missile or a fully functional M1 Abrams Tank or a tactical nuke? This is one of the most frustrating lies the anti-Gun folks tell, that there are no limits to the kinds of weapons Americans can buy. It goes hand-in-hand with their insatiable desire to describe everyday run-of-the-mill semi-automatic rifles as “weapons of war” and to conflate semi-automatic rifles with fully automatic rifles by dishonestly labeling them “assault rifles.” Why do they do this? Because they know that if the sort of average Americans who don’t live their lives online or on cable news can be made to believe that some of us are running around with Cruise Missile launchers in our backyards, then they can more easily convince those same people that an unconstitutional Government crackdown on guns is really just “common sense” gun reform.

Second, we have to deal with the more complicated aspect of this most popular of Democrat slurs… the idea that there are no background checks at gun shows.

Anyone who has ever been to a gun show (including me!) will tell you that it is virtually impossible to find someone willing to sell you a gun without a background check. This is even true in States where a background check is not required by the individual State.

Why would that be? Why would gun dealers who are not required to do a background check on their buyers do it anyway?

The answer is that Federal Law makes it a felony to sell a gun to anyone who is prohibited by law from buying or owning a gun. What that means, in the real world, is that if I sell a gun to a guy without doing a background check and it later turns out that the guy I sold it to was legally prohibited from owning a gun, and that guy goes on a shooting spree with the gun I sold him, guess who goes into the jail cell right next to the shooter?

That’s right, I do.

It’s called Federal Supremacy, folks… look it up.

But that’s just the practical reason why all this talk of “gun show loopholes” is, and has always been, pointless and stupid. The question I always ask, and which gun grabbers never seem to want to answer, is which mass shooting would have been prevented by the law you’re seeking to pass? This is almost always true of every new piece of gun legislation, but its particularly annoying with regard to the gun show loophole because no one can ever point to a mass shooting by someone who bought a gun without a backgrouond check, at a gun show. These shootings are almost always committed by people who successfully passed a background check, who stole the weapon they used in the shooting (which is already illegal) or who acquired their weapon via a straw purchase (which is also already illegal).

This is true of almost any gun control proposal you could name, including two of the measures on Biden’s new list of Executive actions… ghost guns and pistol stabilizers. Please point me to the mass shooting that was committed with either a ghost gun or a pistol stabilizer…

I’ll be over here at the gun show… waiting on your answer.