Why not one a lifetime?
Whenever a place has lots of gun crime, their local politicos are quick to posture and subsequently pass laws that only affect the people not committing the gun crime in the first place. In New Jersey, there’s a push for a one gun a month bill. Scott Bach tells us why that bill is a bad idea:
A New Jersey Court recently pronounced: “There is no rational relationship between restricting the number of guns that a licensed gun dealer and a licensed gun owner can transact per month and the frequency of illegal gun possession and crime.”
In so holding, the Court voided a local ordinance that rationed firearms specifically to law abiding citizens pre-certified by the State as having no criminal or mental health record after passing a 13-point background investigation.
Trying to reduce gun crime by rationing firearms to law abiding citizens is a little like trying to reduce stabbings by rationing steak knives to restaurant goers, which is why the Court found the ordinance to be irrational. The criminal misuse of any lawful product is not a function of the number of units sold to honest citizens; it’s a function of how effectively society deals with those who misuse them
Despite judicial recognition of the fallacy of gun rationing, gun ban extremist group CeaseFire NJ, embarrassed by its loss at the local level, is now pushing for passage of statewide gun rationing in the form of Assembly Bill A339, misleadingly citing statistics to buoy their latest whopper — that handguns bought by law abiding citizens from New Jersey licensed dealers are significantly involved in crime and illegal trafficking.
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:51 pm
To be fair, I don’t think the logic behind gun rationing is that they are concerned that someone who buys more guns is more likely to commit a violent crime, I think their worry is that people who buy handguns frequently might be acting as straw buyers and reselling the handguns?
That concern at least makes sense logically.