IN TOO many neighbourhoods it is easier to buy a gun than a book or fresh vegetables, Barack Obama said in a speech to international police chiefs on October 27th in Chicago. Mr Obama renewed his call for universal background checks for buyers of guns, which he has tried, unsuccessfully, to get Congress to vote into federal law for years. Two years ago he was close to reaching his goal, but the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey bill to extend background checks to gun sales over the internet and gun shows was nixed by the Senate.
The police bosses are on the president’s side. Their job would be much easier if fewer guns were in circulation and if all buyers of guns were to undergo checks of their background, especially their criminal and mental-health history. The proliferation of guns is one of the reasons for the substantial rise in violent crime in many American cities this year, they say. Current rules on background checks apply only to licensed gun dealers but up to 40% of gun sales take place at gun fairs or over the internet, which do not require such checks. The American public is overwhelmingly on the president’s side too. According to a poll published in August by the Pew Research Centre, 85% of those surveyed are in favour of expanded background checks for gun owners. Almost 80% support laws to prevent people with a mental illness from buying a gun and 70% back the creation of a federal database to track all gun sales. So why is there still no federal law on background checks?
The politically powerful National Rifle Association and other pro-gun groups oppose universal background checks or indeed any law that could restrict gun sales. They invoke the Second Amendment of 1791, which protects “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”. And they argue that guns prevent crime. After one particularly horrific mass-shooting, the killing of 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, Wayne LaPierre, the boss of the NRA, declared that school employees should have been armed because “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”.
As the NRA and other pro-gun lobbies seem to be able to intimidate Congress to an extent that it won’t try again to pass a law to tighten gun legislation any time soon, several states passed their own stricter gun laws. New York, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Rhode Island and Maryland have some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Several of these states require background checks at private sales. And even though studies show that the rates of murders and suicides are lower in states with strict gun laws, these states could be doing even better if it weren’t for their neighbours with lax gun laws. Illinois, for instance, borders Wisconsin and Indiana, two states with hardly any restrictions on gun sales. In Chicago, which has especially restrictive gun laws, more than half of the guns confiscated by police come from out-of-state. No wonder then that Chicago’s police chief is one of the most vocal advocates of universal nation-wide background checks for gun buyers.