The Lawfare Campaign against Gunmakers

Kevin D. Williamson

Police, prosecutors, and policymakers: All of them respond to incentives, just like anybody else. Gun control provides a textbook example of that. It is remarkable how little our elite law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors are willing to do when it comes to policing the criminal use of firearms. The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, whose office has responsibility for Chicago, has for years maintained a policy of refusing to prosecute most straw-buyer cases unless they are part of a larger organized-crime investigation, partly because those cases are a lot of work and partly because they tend to net a lot of sympathetic defendants, the girlfriends and grandmothers and nephews with clean records who buy firearms illegally for convicted felons. Local officials in Chicago and Illinois practically never pursue gun-trafficking cases: As ProPublica reports, between 2014 and 2017 Cook County authorities charged only twelve gunrunning cases and zero gun-trafficking cases. Chicago police made only 142 arrests for illegal gun sales over the course of a decade — and no arrests at all for gun trafficking. Of the many arrests for illegal possession of firearms, few led to prosecutions and fewer still to convictions. Similar stories play out less dramatically in jurisdictions around the country and in the federal system: Thousands of gun purchases are wrongly approved in federal background checks every year, but the ATF makes no effort at all to recover those guns. There are reasons for that. The people who are driving Chicago’s sustained murder problem are young and mobile. Chasing them is hard work, catching them is harder still, and convicting them brings very little in the way of headlines or glory. The companies that legally manufacture and sell firearms are a much easier target. They have fixed addresses and keep regular business hours. They also keep copious records, and they and their customers are — as even Daniel Webster, the Michael Bloomberg Professor of American Health and the director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University, confesses — considerably more law-abiding than the average American.

Our police agencies police these law-abiding people and their businesses because they are easy to police. Gun-control advocates target them for another reason. The first is cultural: From the op-ed cartoons to the rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates, the face of gun violence in the United States is not that of the criminals who frolic on the streets of St. Louis or Chicago but the face of the NRA and sport shooters: white, male, middle-aged, middle-class, conservative, churchgoing, Republican-voting, and, preferably, for the purpose of caricature, a little paunchy. These are not criminals, but cultural and political enemies for the American Left, whose spiritual home is in Brooklyn and Silicon Valley, and in imitations of those from Austin to Portland. But there is another reason to target ordinary, law-abiding businesses in the firearms trade rather than, say, criminals: They have a lot of money. Nobody is going to get rich suing a car-trunk gun trafficker in Gary, Ind...MORE