From the desk of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

What's Going On (at Gun Shows)

Last week, Dr. Garen Wintemute, the Director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, released a fascinating study that takes an inside look at America’s gun shows. Entitled “Inside Gun Shows: What Goes On When Everybody Thinks Nobody’s Watching,” it catalogues Wintemute’s observations at 78 gun shows that he attended in 19 states between 2005 and 2008. More importantly, it contains hundreds of color photographs that he took surreptitiously at these events. These photos document illegal straw purchases; anonymous, undocumented private party gun sales; the widespread availability of assault weapons; and the links between gun shows and the Neo-Nazi movement.

In the study, Wintemute describes the two systems of commerce that operate side-by-side at gun shows. On the one hand, you have dealers licensed by the federal government who are required to conduct background checks on gun purchasers. At the shows he attended, Wintemute found that those prohibited under federal law from purchasing firearms (i.e., convicted felons, domestic abusers, drug users, the mentally ill, etc.) would often evade this requirement by engaging in straw purchases. In a straw purchase, a prohibited purchaser recruits an individual(s) with a clean criminal record to pass a background check and purchase firearms for him/her (a straw purchase is a federal felony offense for both the straw purchaser and the ultimate possessor of the firearms). “The openness and sense of impunity with which straw purchases were sometimes conducted was striking,” Wintemute reports. Licensed dealers account for two-thirds of trafficked firearms that come from gun shows.

Private party sellers are also present at gun shows. These sellers are not licensed by the government and are not required to conduct background checks. A 1986 law exempted anyone who is “not engaged in the business” of dealing firearms from the background check requirement. Theoretically, these are individuals who make “occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who [sell] all or part of [their] collection of firearms.” The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), however, has noted that the effect of this law “has often been to frustrate the prosecution of unlicensed dealers masquerading as collectors or hobbyists but who are really trafficking firearms to felons or other prohibited persons.” More than 85% of crime guns recovered by ATF have gone through at least one private party transaction following their initial sale by a licensed gun dealer.

Private gun sales don’t occur only at gun shows, Wintemute emphasizes. They can occur virtually anywhere—at flea markets, through classified ads in newspapers, over the Internet, in private homes, on the street, etc. Because they are anonymous and involve no paperwork, they are particularly attractive to prohibited purchasers.

At gun shows, the ATF estimates that 25 to 50% of all gun sellers who rent table space are unlicensed. Private sellers can also walk around freely at gun shows, selling firearms they’ve brought with them to other attendees. Private sales were common at the gun shows Wintemute attended. He even observed such sales occurring in states where they are illegal.

In terms of the wares that were available at gun shows, Wintemute observed that, “All types of guns are available at gun shows, but assault weapons, particularly civilian versions of AR and AK rifles, seem to figure more prominently at gun shows than in gun commerce generally.”

Little enforcement action was evident at these events. ATF has stated that “too often [gun] shows provide a ready supply of firearms to prohibited persons, gangs, violent criminals, and illegal firearms traffickers.” Yet, as Wintemute notes, the understaffed ATF has no proactive program of gun show enforcement and conducts investigations at only 3.3% of the approximately 2,300 gun shows that occur each year.

In terms of the social environment at gun shows, Wintemute observed three phenomena that have “significant potential to contribute to firearm violence. These concern: 1) promoting objectification and violence in relationships between men and women, 2) facilitating children’s access to firearms, and 3) endorsing violence as a tool for problem-solving.” Neo-Nazi and Neo-Confederate paraphernalia was common. The Turner Diaries is everywhere,” Wintemute notes, “and Mein Kaumpf can be found next to [John Lott’s] More Guns, Less Crime.”

At present, 17 states regulate gun shows in some manner. Six regulate all private party gun sales and nine more regulate private party sales of handguns only. Two states regulate private party sales at gun shows only.

In his study, Wintemute makes three key recommendations to improve existing regulation of firearm commerce. First, he says that law enforcement operations at gun shows must be expanded. “Ideally,” he says, “there would be an enforcement operation at every major event.” He cites California as an example of where such a program has worked, and well. Second, he calls for all private gun sales (not just those at gun shows) to be regulated to prevent prohibited persons from buying guns. “It appears that denial of gun purchases [through background checks] significantly lowers the risk of committing violent and gun-related crimes among the persons who are directly affected,” Wintemute notes. Finally, he calls for voluntary action by promoters and licensed dealers at gun shows to police potentially illegal sales. “Little goes on at a gun show that is not observed by those nearby,” he states.

You can view the full study along with photographs and videos here.

Thomas Jefferson and "The Blood of Tyrants"

Josh Horwitz

Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

New Hampshire resident William Kostric caused a national stir on August 11 when he appeared outside President Obama's town hall meeting in Portsmouth with a loaded semiautomatic handgun strapped to his leg. Kostric held a sign that read, "IT IS TIME TO WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY!" This was a reference to the following quote by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Asked to explain the message he was trying to send, Kostric stated, "I wanted people to remember the rights that we have and how quickly we're losing them in this country ... It doesn't take a genius to see we're traveling down a road at breakneck speed that's towards tyranny." While Kostric claimed he was not calling for violence, many viewed his actions as threatening and assumed that the "tyrant" he had in mind was the president.

It was certainly not the first time a gun rights activist had referred to Jefferson's "tree of liberty" quote. On the day he bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Timothy McVeigh wore a t-shirt that bore Jefferson's words with an image of a tree with blood dripping from its branches. A Google search will reveal that the quote is cited on a myriad of pro-gun websites today, almost always with no context or source provided. But what was the context of Jefferson's remarks, and what exactly did he mean?

"What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure," Jefferson wrote in a letter to William S. Smith, a diplomatic official in London, on November 13, 1787. Jefferson was commenting on Shays' Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts that had been put down earlier that year by organized state militia forces. "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion," Jefferson remarked. "Let them take arms."

In the same letter, however, Jefferson stated that the rebellion was "founded in ignorance ... The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive." Jefferson also referred to the delegates who had finalized a draft of the U.S. Constitution in September 1787, stating, "Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen-yard in order."

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention had indeed taken Shays' Rebellion very seriously, viewing the lack of a strong institutional response to the incident as symptomatic of a weak central government that was struggling to preserve the liberties they had fought so hard for. The country could not be governed in a state of perpetual revolution, the delegates realized, and despite the fears of Anti-Federalists, the Constitution authorized Congress to raise a standing Army. Furthermore, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution stated that one of the purposes of the Militia was to "suppress Insurrections"--not to foment them.

One of the delegates at the convention was James Madison, the man who would draft the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1789. Jefferson exchanged letters frequently with Madison, sharing his view that Shays' Rebellion was "absolutely unjustifiable," but "did not appear to threaten serious consequences." We need "a little rebellion now and then," he told Madison. Madison disagreed, and supported Congressional enlistment of troops during the rebellion until "the spirit of insurrection was subdued." In a speech before Congress on February 19, 1787, he argued that Shays' rebels were "internal enemies" and constituted a threat to the "tranquility of the Union." To Madison, the rebellion was treason.

With the drafting of the Constitution, Jefferson became more tempered in his own views, and acknowledged that well ordered republican democratic political processes could make armed violence unnecessary. In a letter to Dutch diplomat Charles William Frederick Dumas, Jefferson observed, "Happy for us, that when we find our constitutions defective and insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or to restore their constitutions."

Upon becoming President of the United States in 1801, Jefferson's views about executive power and private rebellion were further transformed. In contrast to his previous advocacy for a ban on standing armies, Jefferson proposed the creation of a national military academy, which was built in West Point, New York. In 1807, after Aaron Burr conspired with military officers to create an independent republic in the American Southwest, Jefferson declared him a traitor and had him arrested and prosecuted for treason. In 1808, Jefferson deployed U.S. Army troops inside the country to enforce a trade embargo against Great Britain and France. Historian Henry Adams observed about Jefferson's embargo policies: "Personal liberties and rights of property were more directly curtailed in the United States by embargo than in Great Britain by centuries of almost continuous foreign war." Jefferson's use of military personnel to enforce domestic laws remains unprecedented.

Those who hold the belief that the Second Amendment gives them an individual right to take violent action against our government should it lapse into "tyranny" have isolated Jefferson's "tree of liberty" quote in order to justify a radical ideology. The truth is that Jefferson's views on private rebellion were far more thoughtful and nuanced. While scholars like Saul Cornell have acknowledged that Jefferson affirmed an individual right to keep arms for private purposes, he never described disorganized or spontaneous insurrection as a right. Jefferson instead envisioned "a universally armed citizenry organized into well-regulated militia units based on a system of 'ward republics'" as a deterrent against "usurpers" and a key guarantor of a healthy republic.

The anti-government protesters carrying semiautomatic handguns and assault weapons outside of contemporary town hall meetings would undoubtedly consider such detailed regulation of the Militia to be--for lack of a better word--"tyrannical."

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