An Inconvenient State

posted at 11:38 am on November 19, 2009 by Slublog
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This week, the Bangor Daily News has been doing a very good series on gun ownership in Maine and the state’s gun culture. Today’s article is on the challenge Maine presents to gun-control advocates such as the Brady Campaign. It’s an interesting article, because it shows the extent to which those advocates ignore facts that discredit their claims when seeking new laws to make it harder to purchase firearms.

Blodgett, an Augusta Democrat, arranged for the father of one of the students killed at Columbine High School in Colorado to testify in support of her bill to require private sellers at gun shows to conduct background checks of potential buyers.

But by the time the committee voted, Blodgett had even lost the support of several lawmakers who had signed on as co-sponsors. The unanimous vote against her bill dismayed Blodgett.

“After the vote, I had said that I would never do that again, but I will,” Blodgett said recently.

Blodgett’s first mistake was violating a cardinal rule of Maine politics: don’t rely on arguments made by people “from away.” Her second was trying to create a law that the state simply doesn’t need. As the article notes, the argument that firearms are a threat to public safety don’t work well in a state where the rate of firearm ownership is high and crime is low.

According to FBI crime statistics, there were 1,547 violent crimes committed in the state last year, and 31 of them were murders. That’s 117 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, or 2.4 murders per 100,000 and random crime is virtually non-existent. Of the 2008 murders, 12 were committed with a firearm. (pdf link). Maine is the sort of state where many people leave their cars and homes unlocked without fear. It’s hard for groups like the Brady Campaign to make the argument that the state needs new firearms laws to keep guns out of the hands of criminals when there are so few criminals. The gun control advocates, however, aren’t ones to allow facts to get in the way of their agenda:

A major reason for the low score is Maine policymakers’ resistance to closing the “gun show loophole,” which critics contend feeds the black market and enables convicted felons to purchase firearms from private sellers without background checks. All dealers must perform background checks on potential buyers, whether selling at their store or at a gun show.

“We certainly don’t want to disrupt that hunting culture in Maine,” said Chad Ramsey, senior associate director at the Brady Campaign. “But it only takes a few minutes to get a background check conducted, and it could save lives.”

Of course, many gun shows in Maine only allow licensed dealers to sell and forbid private sales on the premises. When I purchased a handgun at a show a few years ago, a background check was performed on the spot. The only “loophole” in Maine is private sales, of which there are many.

The push for new gun control laws in Maine makes the agenda of groups like the Brady Campaign very clear – their push for gun control laws is rooted in ideology, not state need. They simply do not seem to care that their laws are not needed or wanted, but they keep working to pass them, as the quote from Rep. Blodgett makes clear. This is not about increasing public safety. It’s about increasing state control over a right guaranteed by both the US Constitution and the Maine Constitution, which states that “Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned.” In the headline, I called Maine an inconvenient state. Clearly, to gun-control advocates, that is the case. The continued push for gun control measures is bothersome because it displays an arrogance on the part of those who are doing it ‘for our own good.’ It also shows just how dishonest the Brady Campaign is willing to be to get their way.

Their newest argument for gun laws is to simply ignore the fact that Maine is a safe state that is full of guns and bemoan our bad influence.

The Brady Campaign, the national organization Stop Handgun Violence and Maine Citizens Against Handgun Violence all contend that Maine’s lax regulations help feed the illegal gun trade — and, therefore, violent crime — in Massachusetts and other states.

…In 2008, Maine supplied 11 percent of the nearly 900 recovered guns in Massachusetts that were traced back to a specific state outside of Massachusetts, according to the report from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That was more than any other state.

So because 90 or so guns were found in Massachusetts, we need to amend our laws to close that darned “gun show loophole.”

There’s one major problem with that argument. Criminals don’t purchase guns from gun shows.

Hohenwarter pointed out that prisoners in state correctional facilities reported obtaining firearms from gun shows just 0.7 percent of the time, according to the last U.S. Department of Justice survey of the topic, conducted in 1997. Roughly 80 percent said they obtained their guns from friends and family or from the black market.

Again, Maine defeats the arguments of gun owners by simply existing. A lot of guns are sold in Maine. That such a small percentage have been found in the hands of criminals seems to indicate that most who purchase firearms here abide by the laws of their state.

Maine is not paradise. Guns are used in the commission of crimes. But they are not used often enough to warrant restriction on their ownership to law-abiding citizens. The next time you hear someone claim the Brady Campaign and other organizations are simply seeking common-sense gun laws to protect the public, point to their actions in Maine.

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