The National Review
May 21, 2002
Gun Games
Truth is a casualty of the anti-gun cause.
by Dave Kopel
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel052102.asp
The new radio ads from the misleadingly named "Americans for Gun Safety" feature John McCain and Joe Lieberman making a variety of bogus claims as part of their campaign against gun shows.
McCain states: "A few years ago, Congress passed a law to make sure people undergo a simple background check before buying a gun." Lieberman chimes in, "That's right, John. That law has stopped 700,000 criminals from buying a weapon."
But that's not true. The 700,000 figure is simply the number of initial denials under the National Instant Check System and its predecessor, the Brady waiting period. The figure includes people who were initially denied a gun because they had the same name as a criminal, but who appealed and were later authorized to purchase. It also includes people denied for improper reasons, such as unpaid traffic tickets.
McCain continues: "Problem is, there's a dangerous loophole because right now the law doesn't cover most of America's gun shows." Lieberman then adds, "That means criminals are getting around the law and buying guns with no questions asked."
These quotes create the entirely false impression that gun shows are some kind of Brigadoon, where the normal gun laws do not apply for a weekend at a county fairground. To the contrary, federal gun laws apply at gun shows precisely as they apply anywhere else. If you are "engaged in the business" of selling guns, you must have a Federal Firearms License (FFL). Your customers must fill out the federal registration paperwork, and you must put your customers through the National Instant Check System (or its state equivalent). This is true whether you sell from a retail store, from a home-based business, or at a gun show.
Conversely, if you are not engaged in the business, then the federal paperwork laws do not apply to you — nor should they, since federal power to regulate gun sales is based on the interstate commerce power, and a collector who sells three guns a year to people in his home state is not engaged in interstate commerce.
The legal status of a small-time collector remains the same whether he sells his three guns a year to friends at work, at meetings of his hunting club, or at a gun show where he rents a table one weekend.
In other words, there is no "gun-show loophole." The phrase is an audacious lie, invented by people who want to abolish privacy for firearms owners. Indeed, the figure of 700,000 gun purchasers who were turned down includes people who were turned down when attempting to buy at gun shows from federally licensed firearms dealers.