The National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist Chris Cox issued an approving statement immediately after the failure of Senate legislation to expand background checks to gun shows and Internet sales:

Today, the misguided Manchin-Toomey-Schumer proposal failed in the U.S. Senate. This amendment would have criminalized certain private transfers of firearms between honest citizens, requiring lifelong friends, neighbors and some family members to get federal government permission to exercise a fundamental right or face prosecution.  As we have noted previously, expanding background checks, at gun shows or elsewhere, will not reduce violent crime or keep our kids safe in their schools.

Three things:

1. The notion that there’s a fundamental right to privately transfer the weapon you own to someone else without telling anyone about it is amazingly silly. I can’t privately transfer the house I own to a lifelong friend or a neighbor without informing the government. And my house is probably the least dangerous thing I own.

2. If the NRA’s esteemed lobbyist intended to say that expanding background checks would somehow limit a citizen’s right to own a gun, he is obviously wrong. It might take a couple of days or even a week … but that doesn’t infringe upon the right. That citizen can still own the gun, though he has to submit to a simple background check … just as he would if he wasn’t getting the gun via private transfer. Anyhow, I’m sure a law-abiding citizen isn’t so desperate for a gun that he absolutely must have it right this very moment without anyone knowing he has it except the person who slipped it to him quietly while no one was looking, nor are most law-abiding citizens so concerned that someone might discover they’re actually felons.

3. Finally, it is stunning that the NRA is able to regularly get away with pushing the idea that they’ve somehow demonstrated that nothing we do — apart from buying more guns, of course — will reduce gun violence. I’d love for someone to send me the research on how background checks do nothing to curb gun violence. Saying it doesn’t make it so. Here’s what I learned, from a quick Google search:

The FBI denied 72,659 attempted gun buys in 2010, based on red flags raised by the background check system, according to the most recent data available from the Department of Justice. That’s just 1.2 percent of the more than 6 million applications. The most common reasons: nearly half were felony indictment or conviction; 19 percent were fugitives; and 11 percent were those who had violated state laws. The rejection rate has been essentially unchanged over the years.

So … that might not be very many people who couldn’t buy the gun they wanted under our current system of background checks. But I’ll go out on a limb and argue it’s probably better, all things being equal, that a bunch of these 70,000+ gun buys were denied.

Would I be sad if this number went up because felons couldn’t buy guns at gun shows or from their neighbors? I would not be.

The chief executive of the National Rifle Association said Sunday that his organization would lead a national campaign against efforts by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York to persuade Congress to adopt stricter gun controls.

The mayor and the rifle association executive, Wayne LaPierre, appeared separately on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” on Sunday. Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire and a registered independent, said he was spending $12 million on advertising in support of pending federal legislation to curb gun violence. In reply, Mr. LaPierre, said, “He can’t buy America.’’

It turns out that responsible citizens without guns can stop bad guys from committing crimes:

A customer has captured a man suspected of robbing a Lincoln bank.

Lincoln Police Capt. Danny Reitan says the suspect was armed with a pocket knife but never opened it Saturday morning at the Union Bank branch on North 48th Street.

The customer, 28-year-old Garret Bush, wrestled the suspect to the ground and held him for police. Bush says he just felt like he was doing his duty. He says “you just can’t always stand by and let people get away with stuff like this.”

In other news, sometimes responsible citizens drop their loaded guns on the floor at McDonald’s and accidentally shoot other people in the stomach:

A husband was shot in the stomach as he sat in a McDonald’s when his wife’s loaded gun fell out of her pocket. 

Richard Lee Cooper, 47, was hit in the abdomen when the .22-caliber Derringer pistol fell to the floor, causing it to go off. 

Barbara Annette Masters, 48, was carrying the loaded gun in her pocket as the pair ate at the McDonald’s in Bend, Oregon, on Thursday afternoon.

And, yes, I’m pretty sure that single-serving anecdotes always support my policy preferences but never yours. Just so we’re on the same page.

But seriously, how many gun accidents before we stop talking about how these aren’t the real responsible gun owners that the NRA keeps talking about and just admit that guns are incredibly dangerous weapons and that carrying them around all the time instead of locking them up increases the risk that someone’s going to get shot?

Two adults and three children were killed in a shooting involving what police said appeared to be an assault rifle in Albuquerque’s South Valley on Saturday night.

[…]

A man, a woman and three children were found dead at the scene, all of whom had suffered several gunshot wounds, deputies said.

Investigators said several weapons appear to have been used in the shooting, including an assault-type rifle.

The logic of perpetual apocalypse is unremitting. Because no modern liberal democracy as stable as the United States has ever succumbed to totalitarianism (and please, don’t talk to me about Nazi Germany), there are no warning signs to look out for, no knowledge about what infringements on gun rights are the first step towards tyranny. Assuming that gun rights are really the first thing to go if we start down the road to serfdom, then it would seem necessary to protect them absolutely, as you never know which gun restriction might represent the first mile marker. Indeed, that’s why NRA arguments against prudent regulation so frequently lapse into paranoid conspiracy-mongering about plots to undermine the Second Amendment.

This thinking is profoundly undemocratic and, in a certain sense, profoundly unconservative. Democracies are supposed to, except in cases where fundamental democratic and human rights are at stake, be free to consider all available policy options to solve problems at hand. 32,000 gun deaths a year mean that we undeniably face a real problem. Yet by making the specter of totalitarianism the lodestar for the American gun debate, the gun rights ideology precludes the sort of collective deliberation that democratic societies value as a means of solving problems. It also abandons a conservative appreciation for empirical detail and moderate, pragmatic policy experimentation in favor of wild fantasy. If part of what we appreciate about democratic politics is public, rational deliberation, then argument from tyranny is a heresy.

Over the weekend, the Journal News published interactive maps that identify all pistol permit holders in New York’s Westchester and Rockland counties.

Gun owners are furious, as are people who don’t particularly care for guns but who love privacy.

And so we’re dragged into a debate about gun ownership, privacy, and press freedom.

Can the Journal News staff do what they did? Certainly. All of the information is public, as they repeatedly point out. Should they have done it? Almost certainly not.

People are arguing that criminals will make use of this information, choosing to burglarize houses that aren’t on the list and are thus undefended or choosing to burglarize houses that are on the list during the day in order to steal the guns while their owners are at work. Other people are arguing that it’s a vindictive and reactionary violation of people’s privacy, as no one is publishing interactive guides about any other personal property ownership and that gun ownership shouldn’t be stigmatized.

The Journal News staff argues that it’s providing a public service to its readers, that there’s a value in knowing which of your neighbors have a pistol permit. This is pretty much the only argument that makes sense for them, as there’s really no other reason to do what they did beyond simply drawing attention to their newspaper’s website.

Sadly, they’re wrong in their claim.

There’s no public service here because what they’ve highlighted doesn’t matter. This is true for two reasons:

1. Their information is radically incomplete, as the Journal News points out. The maps only include people who have pistol permits, but this could also include a bunch of people who don’t actually own guns. It could also leave out some people who don’t have permits. Having a permit is a requirement if you want to legally own a pistol … but not everyone who lives in these counties legally own pistols and not everyone who got the permit went on to buy the gun. And the maps don’t include rifles or shotguns. These can be purchased without a permit.

2. Knowing whether or not my neighbors have pistols doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me. It doesn’t make me safer and it shouldn’t necessarily make me warier of the neighborhood in which I live or specifically of kindly old Mr. Johnson next door who has a permit. That is, unless someone wants to argue that there is no legitimate reason for someone to own a pistol. The Journal News staff doesn’t want to make that argument; in fact, the only argument they make appears under someone else’s name and it’s nothing but an anecdote about one person’s personal belief that all guns are always unsafe:

“I would love to know if someone next to me had guns. It makes me safer to know so I can deal with that,” said [John] Thompson, whose group counsels youths against gun violence. “I might not choose to live there.”

Knowing that someone next door has a gun doesn’t actually make Thompson safer; it might make him feel that he is safer for knowing it, but that’s a different story. This is just the opposite argument of the one that Wayne LaPierre floated on “Meet the Press”, that gun owners say they are safer because they have firearms in the house. LaPierre is wrong and so is Thompson; one’s personal feelings about safety don’t amount to facts about safety.

It’s no secret that I don’t like guns. But neither am I someone who thinks gun owners are all wingnuts who are stockpiling guns to protect themselves against the government (which is why I frequently lampoon those who are doing this) or to murder their neighbors. If you want to think seriously about ways to put a brake on gun deaths in our country — apart from arming everyone, which is the NRA position — simply publishing a list of (some) (potential) gun owners isn’t going to help.

HT: Anonymous Question Asker.