Gun control laws don’t work.
Yet politicians eager to curb Americans’ Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” keep pushing for tighter laws to grab more guns.
How’s that for a bureaucratic phrase?
The APPS data “identify criminals who are prohibited from possessing firearms subsequent to the legal acquisition of firearms or registration of assault weapons.” In English, they’re felons or others who previously had purchased guns, but were banned from owning them. Yet, they continued to hold the guns or are suspected of having them.
“The APPS program”—weirdly defined by the AG as a system and a program—“is a highly sophisticated investigative tool that provides law enforcement agencies with information about gun owners who are legally prohibited from possessing firearms.”
SB 950’s Senate floor analysis from 2001 actually explained it in clear language: “This bill will provide a way for law enforcement to find out which proven felons are still possessing weapons.”
And the analysis provided the reason for the law as well.
“The Attorney General [Bill Lockyer, the powerful former Senate majority leader] is sponsoring the bill in the wake of the mass slaying in February 2000 at Navistar’s International Truck and Engine Plant in Melrose Place, Illinois. In that case, the murderer was a twice-convicted felon who had previously, before his convictions, purchased firearms. Thus, even though he was prohibited and in possession of firearms, there was no way for law enforcement to find out, and he was left to commit murder.
Failed Potential
“But what seemed at the time like a straight-forward approach to the enforcement of existing gun laws has instead become mired in chronic shortcomings, failing for years to make good on its potential. Successive administrations have vowed to fix the problems, but all have fallen short,” CalMatters reported on July 27.That assumes there actually was any “potential” regarding the system.
“The notion that you will stop criminals from getting guns simply because you stop them from having legally acquired guns seems as likely to succeed as preventing criminals from buying illegal drugs, which obviously has worked flawlessly,” Lott said, with a touch of irony. “The major source of illegal guns is drug dealers, who have to have weapons to protect their very valuable property.”
The Brady Background Check System was enacted by Congress in 1993. That’s what you go through when you buy a gun, and it’s used with APPS.
“There is no real evidence that the Brady system has reduced violent crime [even gun control people agree, but they now claim that’s because it didn’t go far enough]. I would argue that there is no evidence that background checks on the private transfer of guns have reduced violent crime or mass public shootings,” Lott said.
Does Not Compute
Then there’s the problem of flagging innocent people. A lot of Americans hold the same names. As noted above, the California DOJ claims that its APPS database “is a highly sophisticated investigative tool.” If that’s really the case, then it’s the only efficient computer system run by the state government.“Nearly half of the claims EDD processed in the first six months of the claim surge required additional intervention to complete filing after claimants submitted them online,” the report reads.
Let’s not forget the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), a byword for bureaucratic incompetence.
Getting back to guns, Lott said that the APPS has followed a similar trend of technological failure.
“The background check system that we have is a mess, with about 99 percent of the 3.8 million who have been stopped being mistakes. It is one thing to stop a felon from buying a gun, but it is something else to stop a law-abiding person simply because they have a name similar to a felon,” he said.
With racial tensions rising since the killing of George Floyd more than a year ago, the last thing we need to do is make that worse over guns. But that’s what’s happening.
“The error rate is very high among minorities because people tend to have names similar to others in their racial groups,” Lott said. “When I was recently working at the [U.S. Department of Justice], the error rate for black males was three times their share of the population and for Hispanic males was 2.5 times their share of the population.”
Lack of Data
The CalMatters article summarized numerous problems with the APPS being unable to go after a lot of people who aren’t supposed to have guns, but still have them.“Experts on the system—who note that thousands of guns have, in fact, been removed from individuals—say stakeholders throughout government must summon the resolve to finally fix the system’s deepening problems,” the article reads.
“Although the state does not track how many individuals, if any, commit crimes while they continue to remain armed, the agency has good reason to be concerned.”
But if there’s no data, there’s just smoke. The state has no idea what’s going on.
“At the time of its adoption, the Armed and Prohibited Persons System was seen as the low-hanging fruit of gun-control measures—taking firearms from known owners who legally shouldn’t have them,” the article states.
Ghost Guns
Ah, yes, the bogeyman of ghost guns, which President Joe Biden also demanded be regulated in his Feb. 14 speech attacking the Second Amendment. They’re made by using 3D printers, which means the only way to stop them is by banning or regulating those printers. The designs can be downloaded from internet sites located around the world.The fact is, unless you live in a city such as Chicago or Baltimore that’s run by Democrats defunding the police, your chances of being murdered are quite low, by guns or other means. It’s a gigantic country of 330 million people. So bad things will happen, including massacres that lead the news cycle.
The Armed and Prohibited Persons System was a mistake enacted 20 years ago that shouldn’t be fixed, but ended. Of course, if police in the course of their work come across someone who shouldn’t own a gun, then they should enforce the law. But a special program sending officers to people’s homes—often the wrong homes—in search of alleged violators went too far.
We need to get back to the American reflex to always bend our laws toward freedom.