Katie Couric made a "documentary" about gun violence in the United States. For the documentary, she interviewed a group of gun enthusiasts called the "Virginia Citizens Defense League".
The interview was clearly misrepresented in the documentary. Couric asks basically: "without background checks, how do we keep felons and terrorists from purchasing a gun?" The group actually answered with a slew of predictable NRA talking points. Instead of showing their answers, the video was edited to make it appear that the group was stumped by the question, and dramatic sounds are played to enhance the effect. It's one thing to not use footage, but it's another thing entirely to edit the footage to lie.
This is the actual interview transcript, as I transcribed it from the gun nut group's audio recording:
Begin Transcript
Couric: If there are no background checks, how do you prevent... I know how you all are gonna answer this, but I'm asking anyway. If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from walking into, say, a licensed gun dealer and purchasing a gun?
Male Gun Enthusiast: Well, one... If you're not in jail, you should still have your basic rights and you should be able to go out and buy a gun.
Couric: So, if you're a terrorist or felon...
Male Gun Enthusiast: If you're a felon and you've done your time, you should have your rights.
Another Male Gun Enthusiast: The fact is we do have statutes, both at the state and federal level that prohibit classes of people from being in possession of firearms. If you're under 18 in Virginia, you can't walk around with a gun. If you're a [sic] illegal immigrant; if you're a convicted felon; if you've been adjudicated insane; these things are already illegal. So, what we're really asking about is a question of prior restraint. How can we prevent future crime by identifying bad guys before they do anything bad. And the simple answer is, you can't. And particularly under the legal system we have in the United States, there are a lot of Supreme Court opinions that say prior restraint is something that the government does not have the authority to do. Until there is an overt act that allows us to say "that's a bad guy", then you can't punish him.
Female Gun Enthusiast: Um.. I would take another outlook on this. First I'll ask you what crime... er... what law has ever stopped a crime? Tell me one law that has ever stopped a crime from happening.
Couric: Well, some would argue since the Brady Bill was enacted... you know, people who have an opposing point of view... 2 million guns have been kept from the hands of criminals.
Female Gun Enthusiast: But who's to say that that person that was denied a background check didn't go out and buy or steal a gun?
Couric: Well (unintelligible) made it more difficult... and who knows, that's sort of hypothetical. But I think that that's a law that kept guns from getting into the hands of wrong... uh... people who should not own guns according to people who support the Brady Bill.
Female Gun Enthusiast: If that were the case, we would have seen a significant reduction in crime with the reduction of sales of guns.
Couric: Or we would have seen a smaller increase, and that again is hard to measure.
Male Gun Enthusiast: I tell people all the time if you go to Prince Georges County Maryland, it must be the safest place on earth because they have tremendous gun control. But in fact, it's practically the murder capitol of the country. It's because people who have.. um.. who are otherwise law abiding, self reliant folks are prohibited from being able to defend themselves, and the people who want to kill them are not. Like Chicago.
Female Gun Enthusiast: So... Back to the point I was getting to in a round-about way. Um.. If someone wants to commit murder, and even if they are prevented from getting a gun to commit that murder with, it doesn't necessarily stop them from committing the murder, and the murder is already against the law. The tools they use may change, but if they are bound and determined to break a law (commit murder, commit robbery, break into somebody's house, whatever it is that they are going to do), then the law is not stopping them, it is just giving an avenue to punish them if and when they are caught.
Couric: Is it making it though... potentially more difficult to carry out a crime if it is harder to obtain a gun?
Female Gun Enthusiast: I don't think it is harder to obtain a gun.
Couric: Well, let's say they're [sic] aren't able to buy a gun legally because of a background check, and they have to go somewhere else or they have to find someone to sell them a gun. Theoretically, is that making it perhaps harder for that person to go and kill someone they're angry at. Could they have changed their mind in the interim? I'm just asking.
Female Gun Enthusiast: I do not think that it would make a difference in the person wanting to commit the crime. Where we have seen it make a difference, and there was a case just recently which there was a woman that wanted to buy a gun because of an ex that was threatening to kill her, and there was a waiting period in the state that she lived in (male voice: New Jersey) and she was killed before the end of the waiting period.
End Transcript
My Responses:
Objection 1: They did their time.
Did you notice how they avoided the terrorist part of the question? Anyway, the first objection is this idea that all rights should be restored once one has "done their time". There are a couple problems with this:
- At the moment, our legal system is purely punitive, having very little focus on rehabilitation. If shortcomings or social problems led to the crime in the first place, pure punishment and release will not reduce the likelihood of repeat offenses. If anything, spending time in prison for the crimes your education predisposed you would seem to harden a criminal.
- In the case of someone who has a history of violence, why is it rational to give them easy access to lethal weapons immediately upon release from "doing their time"? At the very least a probation period should be required. If a child molester "pays his dues", should they immediately be allowed unlimited access to children? If a pyromaniac "does his time", should he immediately be given access to matches and gasoline?
Given our "justice" system's laser-like focus on punishment and disregarding any kind of rehabilitation, I think it's a mistake to allow anyone access to the tools or victims of their crime.
For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them. - Thomas More (1516 CE)Objection 2: We already have laws to keep certain people from owning guns.
The second objection sounds rational on the surface until you apply the same reasoning to a different crime. Let's apply this reasoning to child molesters. Before states started passing the sex offender registry laws and laws restricting where sex offenders could live, there were already laws that made it a crime to molest a child. If we apply this reasoning to the sex offender restrictions, we'd have no idea when a sex offender moved in to the neighborhood. We'd also have no means of restricting them from living within a certain distance of schools and daycare centers. We'd have no legal means of keeping them from lingering outside a school, or standing outside a daycare taking pictures of the kids.
It seems perfectly rational, for certain crimes, to ensure that people convicted of those crimes do not have access to the tools of violence or potential victims. Restricting where a sex offender may live, how close they can be to schools and daycare centers, and requiring them to register their home address with authorities seem like rational responses to someone who has demonstrated their willingness to harm children.
If these gun enthusiasts are so concerned with rights, how many of them are willing to send their children to a daycare run by sex offenders? Probably none. Yet these same people are perfectly happy giving a felon unfettered access to guns. They may not come right out and say it, but their support of the gun show loophole says with deeds what they refuse to say with words.
Objection 2: The law forbids "Prior Restraint".
This one is a real doozy. I'm not sure if this guy is aware that he's misapplying a first amendment legal precedent, or if he's purposely trying to confuse people. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Prior restraint has absolutely nothing to do with guns or crime in general. Prior restraint is a legal prohibition on the government doing anything to stop publication of information it doesn't like. For example: If the Nixon Administration had tried to stop the publication of the Watergate Scandal, or if the Clinton Administration had tried to stop publication of the Lewinski affair, or if the Bush Administration had tried to stop the publication of the Bush-Aznar Memo.
Applying "prior restraint" to the second amendment is like applying the "plastic reindeer" rule to the 19th amendment. It's not just absurd, it's dishonest. The government absolutely can restrain someone from re-offending. It's not considered unreasonable to take away the driver's license of a repeat DUI offender, or to require that the offending driver use a breath alcohol ignition interlock device.
I used to complain about my beloved partner being racially profiled at the airport because he's brown. I stopped complaining when I noticed so many self-proclaimed "patriots" give the following excuse: "Sorry for the inconvenience, but 9/11 changed everything".
Yep. 9/11 made it so gun enthusiasts focus entirely on their 2nd amendment rights, while completely ignoring the fact that other people's constitutionally enumerated rights are being curtailed every day.
Objection 3: What law has ever stopped a crime?
Katie Couric did a poor job responding to this question. She brought up the "Brady Bill", but that's a soft pitch to throw at seasoned gun apologists. Why the hell didn't she bring up the Patriot Act? Conservatives love to tout how we haven't had another terrorist attack since we gave up our liberties in the Enabling Act.... er... Patriot Act. It's true that we haven't had another massive attack like we had on 9/11, so apparently the law is working. Why aren't these gun enthusiasts decrying the Patriot Act? It certainly has stopped large-scale attacks.
Objection 4: Criminals will find a way to get a gun.
By this logic, child rapists will find ways to gain access to kids, and terrorists will find ways to terrorize (see Boston Bombing and Planned Parenthood shooting). By this logic, we shouldn't have any sex offender registries or the Patriot Act. By this logic, we should pass basic laws forbidding certain activities, and do nothing to plug holes that are later realized to exist in the law. I guess we don't have any lawyers waiting to exploit loopholes, and businesses never EVER exploit loopholes to increase profits or avoid regulation.
If we have reasonable gun control and a requirement to lock up guns, buying a gun on the black market will become increasingly difficult. If guns are required to be locked up, there is no reason to expect robbers to target gun owners, as the guns would be locked up. As more and more guns are seized from criminals, the black market will be slowly depleted of stock. The black market prices will go so high that no one will be able to afford to go the black market route.
Objection 5: If restricting gun sales worked, we'd have noticed a reduction in crime after passage of the Brady Bill.
There's really no way to know because the Brady Bill left this massive gun show loophole in place. However, we actually did see a massive drop in violent crime starting in 1993 (when the bill was passed). Here are the data for violent crimes from 1990 - 2000:
1990 - 1,820,130
1991 - 1,911,770
1992 - 1,932,270
1993 - 1,926,020
1994 - 1,857,670
1995 - 1,798,790
1996 - 1,688,540
1997 - 1,634,770
1998 - 1,531,044
1999 - 1,426,044
2000 - 1,425,486
As you can see, from a peak in 1992, there was a drop of 506,784 by 2000. In 2014, the number was 1,197,987, which is a reduction of 734,283. Just imagine how much this number would drop if we got rid of the gun show loophole.
Objection 6: If gun control worked, Prince George's County should be the safest place in the country, not the murder capitol of the country.
The problem is, counties don't have border enforcement. When you drive from one county to the next, you aren't expecting to be stopped, and have your person, vehicle, and possessions searched. It's extremely easy for the average person to simply drive across the county line to buy a firearm. If we enacted strict gun control legislation nationwide, a person would have to travel outside the U.S. and sneak the gun in the country. That's far more difficult for the average person to do just to get around a background check.
Objection 7: The criminals will just find other ways to kill.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather fight someone who has a knife or machete than fight someone with a gun. This is doubly true if I, as a law abiding citizen, do have a gun that I've purchased legally.
Objection 8: The NJ waiting period cost Carol Browne her life
The New Jersey case mentioned toward the end is the murder of Carol Browne. After getting a restraining order against her woman-beating ex-boyfriend, Carol Browne applied to purchase a gun. New Jersey has a 7 day waiting period once you get a permit (which requires a background check). Getting the permit itself can sometimes take up to 30 days.
While I sympathize with the family of Mrs. Browne, it appears the militant right has blown this way out of proportion. Rather than pushing for a victim / restraining order exemption, they just lay the blanket claim that waiting periods put victims in danger. Let's not forget that these are the same lunatics who, out of the other side of their mouths claim that a violent felon should be able to buy a gun immediately upon release from prison. They aren't interested in the rights of victims. If they were, their actions would line up with their words.
Conclusion:
While I agree that Mrs. Couric misrepresented these gun enthusiasts, their arguments don't appear to have any validity outside the echo chamber of right wing gun enthusiasts. I don't know why the hell anyone is surprised that a "documentary" lied. Hell, just look at Bowling for Columbine, where they hint at a link between the founding of the NRA and the founding of the KKK. Also, take a look at the right wing hit job "documentaries" done against Obama and Hillary Clinton. Take a look at "Food Inc.", and observe the anti-science, logical fallacy laden snow job. This is part of the whole "free speech" thing in the first amendment. We have to be vigilant and expose lies, regardless of who tells them. I'd also like to add that this "documentary" was never aired or published as fact-based, nor was it ever sold as journalism. Documentaries don't have to meet any journalism standards.
I wholeheartedly support the right for law abiding citizens to own firearms for defensive and hunting purposes. I oppose the short-sighted left wing efforts to ban guns (anyone who says they don't exist is lying), but I also think the NRA is the biggest threat to second amendment rights. Their staunch opposition to basic gun control allows so much violence that people will eventually force the issue in the form of a ban. The shortsightedness of the NRA can be summarized by reviewing the ridiculous law in Kennesaw GA requiring homeowners to own a gun. There are exemptions in place, but they were an after-thought brought about by a lawsuit. Supporters of the law claim that the law decreased burglaries 89% immediately after the law passed. However, FBI data shows a slight increase that year. Gun enthusiasts really don't like facts they can't spin.
