Who are we kidding? I love saying it! When stupid people do stupid things, I’m one of those people who likes to rub the morons’ idiotic noses in in the mess. Stupid should hurt.
One of the places where the stupid should hurt is New Jersey; the home of gun laws so restrictive and yet so ineffectual that not even USA Today could ignore the stupidity.
Reason.com‘s J.D. Tuccille notes:
In the latest news of the obvious, USA Today went to Camden, New Jersey, to see how successfully that state’s uber-restrictive gun laws have cut off the flow of firearms to bad guys. They haven’t, it turns out. As the article’s subhead puts it, “Gun law changes sought in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., wouldn’t address the plague of gun violence in Camden, N.J., where poverty and crime feed an enduring and bloody cycle.”
From USA Today:
In a 2011 report, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which advocates stricter gun laws, considered New Jersey the state with the second strongest gun laws in America. New Jersey topped the list because among other things, the state requires permits to purchase any handgun, a special identification card to purchase long guns, and background checks in issuing permits. It requires firearms dealers to be licensed and prohibits the possession and transfer of assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines.
And these restrictive laws have accomplished … what?
Anderson Baker lives in a state with a litany of gun regulations. But no law stopped him from becoming a teenage drug dealer who could easily acquire, and use, his weapon of choice. …
This brash teenager didn’t need gun shows or shops, nor was he slowed by background checks or waiting periods or reams of documentation. Baker secured his weapons of choice by borrowing guns from family and friends. In each instance, he was never encumbered by New Jersey’s tough-as-nails laws. …
Baker said he never attempted to get a permit and never had a background check when he got his guns.
As Camden demonstrates, yet again, gun restrictions might inconvenience the especially law-abiding, but “gun laws to people in Camden are like saying you’ll get a ticket if you jaywalk,” as Anderson Baker puts it.
No matter what your opinion of gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment is, you should be appalled at results of these laws. Not the fact that they didn’t perform as advertised, but rather that they breed utter contempt for the rule of law. The last thing we want as a people is a population that laughs at its own laws. In the old Soviet Union, there was a joke about work and wages in the State run economy: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Increasingly, the American version of that joke is “They pretend to pass laws and we pretend to obey them.”
It wasn’t the People who brought about this sorry state of affairs. It was our elected officials who wanted to be seen as doing something about various issues, but didn’t want laws where it would be possible to gauge their success. Gun control laws are a perfect example of laws that make a big, showy splash, but ultimately produce no measurable good or bad results. The politicians know they won’t be blamed for writing bad laws when their laws have no objective way of being scored.
