So Now That We're Regulating Tobacco, Why Not Guns?
With the Senate’s vote earlier this week to regulate tobacco, a giant step
has been made towards better regulating tobacco for health and safety standards.
If as anticipated the House approves the updated version and President Obama signs it, we will all have
much to celebrate as countless lives and healthcare dollars will be saved.
While this is clearly good news, it also serves to shine a spotlight on
another deadly product which is crying out for regulation: guns. As surprising
as it might be, other than tobacco, firearms are the only consumer product not
regulated for health and safety by a federal agency.
Teddy bears, radios, and hairbrushes, which combined kill less than 100
Americans each year, are all regulated for safety. Guns, on the other
hand, kill 30,000 and injure another 70,000 Americans annually but are not
regulated. Why?
In 1972, pro-gun special interest groups used their powerful lobbying
influence to achieve an exemption from government regulation for firearms. This
precedent continues despite the fact that guns are among the most deadly
consumer products made.
Consumer product safety standards save lives.
For example, improved safety designs in the packaging of over the counter drugs,
such as pain relievers, have reduced the number of deaths from child poisonings.
The automobile industry is another good example of where consumer protection
laws have been successful in saving lives.
Changes in the design of cars and trucks–airbags, stronger frame
construction, improved seat belts–have resulted in a decline of motor
vehicle-related deaths and injuries over the last several decades. Improvements
in the design, manufacture, and sale of guns would have a similar positive
impact by reducing the number of firearm-related deaths and injuries in the
United States.
During the recent recession, we have seen the devastating impact of
industries, like banks, which in the past have professed that self-regulation is
good enough.
Now that tens of thousands of Americans have lost their life-savings and
jobs, many are no longer buying the self-regulation argument. Gun manufacturers
have learned nothing from the recent chain of events in our country. They
continue to: scoff at any attempt to reign in the deadly effects of their
products; undermine all efforts to strengthen our nation’s gun laws; and refuse
to protect the consumers who use their products. It’s time for a red flag to go
up on this reckless industry.
In 1999, a bill was introduced by Representative Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) and
Senator Robert Torricelli (D-NJ). Although it was unable to gain traction thanks
to the gun lobby, the bill would have given the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms the power to:
- Develop safety standards for firearms and related products;
- Restrict weapons that pose unreasonable risks of deaths and injury;
- Promote research and investigation into the causes and prevention of
gun-related death and injury; and
- Assist consumer in evaluating product safety.
As we have seen, like the banks, the gun industry wants one thing and one
thing only: money. The more money they make, the happier and fatter they get,
regardless of the consequences to the broader community.
Congress and the Obama administration need to find their courage and apply
the same chutzpah in their efforts to reign in the deadly gun industry as they
did recently with the banking industry.
Ten years have passed since the Kennedy-Torricelli Consumer Protection bill,
perhaps someone needs to brush the dust off of it and give it new life so that
more lives can be saved from guns.
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There seems to be an endless cycle of "Ooh, we have a crisis!", "We need more regulations !", "Things are going ok now!", "Ooh, things aren't as good as we thought!", "We need more regulations!" and it seems that every round we make, we lose more of our liberties.
Not all of us are for regulating teddy bears! Or rather, we would rather have UL, or some other private industry, to certify the safety for us, than government .
Finally, as Senator Orrin Hatch observed in a report to the Senate , people were generally safer in those times where everyone had access to guns --including madmen and criminals--than in every attempt to regulate them.
The current recession was caused by Congress pushing Freddie Mae and Fanny Mack (both quasi- government agencies) to give low-interest, adjustable-rate loans to people who can't afford them.
Will regulation really fix this? Or would we be better off to just tell government to back off, and leave us alone?!?
I mean does anyone really buy into this rhetoric?
That our government is trying to regulate more things, like smoking , which they have no Constitutional authority to do means that we should allow them to further infringe on the Constitution?
Are you totally insane or just totally dishonest? Guns are already the most regulated item in the U.S. There are at least 20,000 gun laws on the books already, most of which are not enforced and therein may lie the problem. There are so many laws, even the police can't know them all.
Your statistics on annual gun deaths and injuries are PURE FICTION! Automobile accidents and Doctors may kill or maim that many people each year but gun incidents do not. If you want to fight with gun owners, the least that you can do is be honest when printing statistics, don't just make up some pile of crap!
FSA once more conflates Consumer advocacy with regulation and control.
Firearms really are in no need of safety regulation--the designs are well-tested, typically 125 to 30 years old, well-made, and they work the way they are supposed to, for the most part: when the shooter pulls the trigger, they fire a round.
If goverment regulation were to ensure that my guns were even more reliable, I might think twice--but FSA wants them to be less accesible, more complex, and less reliable.
"Consumer Protection" is just another euphemisim from these antigun zealots. It's a proposal well worth ignoring.
gun control: the belief that a woman raped and strangled with her own hose is morally superior to one who defends herself with a firearm.
If you read this article and are ignorant, you might come away thinking that there is absolutely no regulation of firearms in the U.S. You would think, "Whoa, it's the Wild West out there. Anyone can just walk into a gun store and walk out armed, with no trouble."
Well, you'd be wrong, and I would be willing to bet that the author knows it.
In 2005 there were 271 numbered federal statutes concerning guns . And that doesn't include the ones in your state. If you live in California, there's an additional 541. That's a whole lot of legalize for anyone to remember.
And if you want to carry that gun legally (aka with a carry permit), most states have some form of permit system that requires an FBI background check and a waiting period. Mine was just over 3 months. And that's after the state-mandated class and around $300 of fees.
Another thing the author "forgot:" there is not a single study that shows a direct correlation between stricter gun laws and lower crimes rates, either in the U.S. or abroad. And even though gun ownership in the U.S. has increased rapidly in the past 20 years or so, since 1991, total violent crime is down 38%, murder is down 42%, and robbery is down 45%.
Finally, the author's statement that the gun industry is only interested in money is ludicrous. Of course that's what it's interested in. It's a business, not a charity. Show me a business that doesn't do everything to cut costs and increase profit, and I'll show you the government.
Do you honestly believe that the auto industry doesn't have powerful lobbyists in D.C.? Well, they did until the government bought them, but that's another debate. What about pharmaceuticals , manufacturing, banking, and all the major industries?
The author needs to wake up and smell the coffee. It's not the lack of regulation that causes the reported 30,000 deaths in this country. It's the lack of enforcement of the already existing laws, which there are plenty!
Legal permit holders account for such an insignificant portion of those crimes it's almost not worth mentioning. Almost, that is, because the low rate of crime committed by legal carriers of firearms is noteworthy. Take the state of Florida, which happens to have the most permit holders in the U.S., at 1.5 million. Yet only 166 of those permits have been revoked due to offenses. That's less than 0.01 percent. (That's 1/100th of a percent for the author). That's well below the rate of crime permitted by non permit holders.
You pointed out that there is no direct correlation between stricter gun laws and crime rates, but then proceeded to try to attribute declines in crime rates to a rise in gun ownership. You can't have it both ways. Either the number of firearms in circulation has an effect on crime rates, or it doesn't.
Incidentally, the relationship between firearms and crime is of an indirect nature. Guns do not cause people to commit crimes, but they do change the types of crimes they commit and the violent consequences of that crime. Guns serve to escalate the level of violence in a confrontation, and in many cases turn incidents that would otherwise be non-fatal into homicides, because a gun is a facilitator that makes it much easier to kill a person.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people; but guns make it much easier to do it.
You misread what I said. I didn't say higher gun ownership contributed to the reduced rate of crime (although there is plenty of evidence that suggests it). I was merely pointing out that DESPITE the rise in gun ownership, the rise in crime of which the author warns did not happen.
And as SolarSanitizer pointed out, the anti-gun agenda ALWAYS neglects to distinguish between legal gun owners and armed criminals. If you looked at crime statistics of legal gun owners in the U.S. it would leave you wondering what's wrong with the rest of the country.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. I'm not going to argue them in this reply.
I will, however, comment on the guns : crime relationship spelled out in your second paragraph. I'll start by agreeing with what you said. Guns, in the hands of criminals make violent crime easier. This rings true. The flip-side of this coin has to do with the vast majority of gun-owners: The law -abiding. I am talking about the some-100-million-American gun owners who use them for legal purposes. Just as a gun can allow a thug to turn a fistfight into a shooting, it also allows a citizen to turn a raping into foiled rape. To turn a kidknapping into an attempted kidknapping. To turn a strangers' stabbing/beating/whatever-ing into a tense situation and a police report.
You see, while some cases exist of criminals using this dangerous tool as a catalyst to violent crime, the vast majority of gun use results in an act of crime being thwarted. This can be hard to believe because we never hear of these occurences on TV. I can point to statistics showing this, but statistics are not really proof, are they?
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Have I missed something here? Has all the manufacturing requirements of firearms been removed? have all the gun control laws been revoked? Has the "Illegal Firearms" list in our states been burned? Has the import regulations been suspended? Has the safety and training programs required by most states, to posses or purchase a handgun been shelved? Has the registration and permitting along with all the weapons serial numbers been erased? Is the mandatory waiting periods and background checks no-longer? Can I have my M-16 back now?