Slate: It's Racist to Take Guns off the Street

The Bazelons continue their 3 generation crusade to facilitate criminal violence.

For a number of years, I’ve been pointing out an overlooked crucial distinction between two types of gun control: point-of-sale and point-of-use.

Point-of-sale gun control, such as waiting periods on purchases, could discourage some murders. For example, the crazy man who shot Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) in the head over some insane personal grudge in Tucson in 2011 bought his weapons at a Walmart on his way to Rep. Giffords’ appearance. (No, I won’t be needing a bag for my gun purchase.) A ten day waiting period might well have discombobulated his not-right-in-the-head planning. And more in-depth background checks might have uncovered that he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

But new retail sales are, in general, a fairly minor part of the gun murder problem. After all, guns are a consumer durable with an indefinite lifespan measured in decades or generations, and thus there are several hundred million of them out there.

Restrictions on retail sales might help discourage some of the most spectacular shooting by schizos, transgenders, and the like because they tend to be friendless loners who don’t know a guy who knows a guy … So, they get their guns from their parents’ closets or by buying them at retail stores.

(Of course, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law crusades to not discriminate against crazy people’s rights to own guns just because they are crazy.

That’s stigmatizing!)

But, a huge fraction of murders are carried out by …

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