ATLANTA — A new organization has urged President Barack Obama to confront firearms violence, particularly by strengthening the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Here's hoping that he doesn't take up the challenge set out by Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Obama's plate already is heaped. But here's also hoping the president keeps the pitch floating near the top of his to-do pile, to be taken up as soon as time allows.
The appeal to the president from some 450 mayors was reported by the Washington Post. The beauty part of the mayors' approach is that it calls for no new laws. Instead, almost mischievously, the mayors play to the gun lobby's own standard-issue retort to any proposed new firearms control laws or regulations — the argument that there are enough already and all we need to do is enforce them.
(A phony pose, by the way. The gun lobby works steadily to undermine enforcement by limiting the reach of current laws and chipping away at enforcement budgets. It is pleasant nonetheless to see the lobby skewered by its own debating point.)
As if to validate the lobby's dodge by real action, the mayors make 40 recommendations. They suggest, for instance, that the ATF require manufacturers to stamp new guns with a hidden serial number in addition to the one criminals often file off, that it use undercover testers to find out if unlawful out-of-state or felon buyers are shopping gun shows, and that it more closely track firearms used in crimes back to their retail source and share that and other information regularly with state and local law enforcement.
Crucially, the mayors call for more ATF agents. The agency is able to inspect gun dealers, on average, only once every 11 years.
The report also notes that of 67,713 cases referred by the FBI in 2005, federal prosecutors pursued only 135 and recommends that the FBI alert local authorities whenever a would-be gun buyer fails a background check.
There is about these and other of the recommendations nothing remotely radical or threatening the Second Amendment right to own firearms.
Surely the least we can do against the nation's appalling level of firearms violence is to pursue fully the legal options already available, as partial counter to the mayhem.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence reports that 276 Americans are shot daily, 100,400 every year. And small wonder. Gun shows and private sales remains essentially unregulated, amounting to nearly half of all annual sales. There is little push even against the 1 percent of licensed dealers who account for nearly 60 percent of the crime guns that law enforcement can trace.
There are 97 guns around for every 100 of us. (Subtract newborns, little kids and people in comas and you've got ... ) And the pathological reaction to Obama's election was a huge leap in gun sales. And even working extra shifts, ammunition makers are unable to keep up with the demand for their product.
No other country pretending to civilization puts up with such a reckless level of domestic armament — or suffers the violence that inevitably follows from it.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn(at)earthlink.net.