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By Root 1134 0

firearms to New York. The National Firearms Act of 1934 sharply reduced criminal use of machine guns. The bad guys undoubtedly turned to other, more readily available guns, but at least when they used the guns, they fired one shot at a time. If still able to acquire machine guns from hardware stores and pawnshops, our felons and gang members would undoubtedly have done so, and the drive-by shootings we read so much about today would have taken far more innocent lives. Patrick Purdy’s attack on the Stockton schoolyard, for example, might have killed even more children had he used a true, fully automatic AK-47, rather than its semiautomatic equivalent. Machine guns made a comeback in the 1980s, but only because such manufacturers as RPB and S.W. Daniel placed guns on the market that could readily, if illegally, be converted from semiautomatic to fully automatic operation.

The Gun Control Act of 1968, however much reviled by the NRA, succeeded in establishing the national tracing network that law-enforcement agencies now take for granted. Strict gun controls in Washington, D.C., helped reduce gunshot homicides in the city by 25 percent from 1976 through 1987, but did not alter the rate of homicide involving other kinds of weapons or the homicide rate in neighboring Virginia and Maryland. This improvement, of course, was erased by the 1990s, when Washington experienced a wild surge of homicides that caused the city to be dubbed the murder capital of America. Although the National Rifle Association likes to point to this as one example of how gun controls cannot work, the real lesson is rather different. Gun controls in a single city cannot possibly succeed when that city is surrounded by regions with few or no controls.

Existing federal laws contain gaping loopholes that allow the free flow of guns from legitimate channels to the bad guys. We have seen, for example, that a consumer who makes a false statement in filling out form 4473 commits a felony; a dealer who does likewise commits only a misdemeanor. Dealers must keep detailed records of their sales of guns from their stores, but a private citizen can sell a gun to a friend with no restriction. A dealer operating at a gun show must follow all federal regulations, but a private citizen at an adjacent table can sell guns from his personal collection without so much as a signature. Federal law prohibits certain classes of individuals such as convicted murderers and dope peddlers from buying guns, then relies on those same individuals to exclude themselves by giving honest answers on form 4473. This last curiosity would be comical if not for its lethal effect.

These gaps in existing federal law, and the utter lack of uniform regulations governing most other aspects of firearms transactions, create insane juxtapositions of regulation and deregulation at those points where federal and state laws intersect. Guns Unlimited, as I’ve shown, played regional variations in the law to its advantage, selling customers a handgun in one jurisdiction, but completing the paperwork and delivering the weapon in another, less-regulated locale. In Maryland, state law requires that anyone who buys a handgun from a legitimate dealer must wait seven days before he can actually take possession of the gun; yet, as per federal law, if he buys that same gun from a private seller, say after seeing it advertised in the classified ads of his local newspaper, he can receive the gun immediately.

On December 14, 1992, Wayne Lo, a Montana boy attending Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bought a semiautomatic Chinese ancestor of the AK-47, called an SKS, simply by presenting his Montana driver’s license and plunking down $150. Before the McClure-Volkmer Act, he could not have bought the gun so readily. The Gun Control Act of 1968 had banned interstate sales. Even if Lo had established residency in Massachusetts, he still could not have walked away with the gun. Under Massachusetts law, he would have had to apply for a firearms identification card and wait thirty days for a background