Year: 2009

Stu Bykofsky, who deserves our thanks for getting the other side of this story out to the newspaper reading public, has a column in the Philadelphia Daily News defending Colosimo’s Gun Shop:

Colosimo; his wife, Mary Elizabeth; and his lawyer, Daniel Del Collo Jr., had two four-hour meetings with the group at Colosimo’s shooting range.

Mary Elizabeth baked cookies and the protesters cooked up a “10-point voluntary code” that they wanted Colosimo to sign. Gathering’s laudable goal is to reduce “straw” purchases, by which guns are bought legally by someone with a clean record, then illegally sold or bartered to criminals.

At the first meeting, Gathering brought along someone from CeaseFire New Jersey. At the second meeting, it brought along a couple of lawyers from the office of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Colosimo says that the group portrayed itself as “faith-based,” and that he felt backstabbed when it dragged in out-of-town lawyers.

Well, a while ago, I said that no good would come of any gun shop meeting with this group.  Now you know.  It’s not a negotiation, it’s a shakedown.  Colosimo already did 9 out of their 10 points.  But he refused to sign on to a database to track his customers.

The number is high, Colosimo says, not because he has done anything wrong, but because he has sold “hundreds of thousands” of guns over the decades. An infinitesimal fraction were used in crimes.

Blaming Colosimo for gun crime is like blaming Mayor Nutter for more murderers in Philadelphia than in Narberth. The larger the pool, the more likely you’ll find bad people in it.

Gathering, which picketed Colosimo’s for several days, boasts that Wal-Mart, the mammoth merchandiser that sells more guns than anyone, signed the 10-point code. That’s a red herring because Wal-Mart sells no handguns, except in Alaska. Everywhere else it sells rifles and shotguns, which are not the problem firearms.

If you want to know why I called for a Zumboing of Wal-Mart and any other gun shop that caves to these thugs, this is why.  Wal-Mart will be used as the stick to beat other gun shops into submission.  “You will submit, because Wal-Mart did.”   Colosimo is principled enough to tell them to get lost, but not all gun shop owners are so willing.  A warning to any gun shop owner: do not meet with these people.  Direct all correspondence from them to your attorney.  They are not out to negotiate, they are out to shut you down.

Dave Hardy has linked to this most excellent law review by Nicholas J. Johnson called “Imagining Gun Control in America.  Understanding the Remainder Problem” that I think everyone should read.  Here’s a sample, discussion how banning private sales won’t facilitate a solution to the “remainder” problem, the remainder being the guns that don’t get turned in in defiance of a confiscation order (which is to say, most of them):

Requiring private sales at gun shows to be routed through a dealer might lay the foundation for regulating secondary-market sales. But we know that sales by FFLs are only about half of all gun transfers, and sales at gun shows are only a fraction of those. With nearly half of gun transfers involving private trades out of the existing inventory, people who complain about the gun show loophole can really only be satisfied by a flat ban on private transfers―e.g., requiring all transfers go through an FFL, who will route the buyer through the NICS.

Competing impulses complicate projections about defiance of rules that would introduce the government as a filter between all private buyers and sellers. The defiance impulse that confounds registration and confiscation operates here for obvious reasons. Channeling secondary sales through a government filter brings no-paper guns back into the system. Indeed, this type of system would be one way to confront the remainder problem that otherwise impairs attempts at gun registration. If all secondary sales were required to go through FFLs and all FFL transactions were recorded, eventually, in theory, most guns would be registered. However, where registration and confiscation are background possibilities, the impulse to resist secondary sales restrictions will be similar to the impulse to resist registration and confiscation. The no-paper gun will continue to have premium value. People will pay extra for them and have powerful incentives to retain and acquire them in various ways. These incentives will fuel defiance of secondary sales restrictions.

That is absolutely spot on, and why these schemes will not serve their intended effect. Get this, gun control folks, we know your end game. We have no intention of playing along with your little scheme. My experience with the gun community here in Pennsylvania suggests that non-compliance for our ban on private transfers of pistols is exceedingly high; most people don’t even know about the restriction, and are shocked and outraged when informed the law actually makes them felons for selling a pistol to a friend or shooting buddy.  A federal ban, especially in states where local authorities have no incentive or intention to enforce federal gun laws, is even more likely to be defied.  The paper trails for the guns meant to be subject to these regulations won’t be worth the paper they aren’t printed on.