Kevin Williamson, now at The Dispatch, has researched and written extensively on the issue of illegal possession and enforcement. It's the policy most closely correlated with the crime rate. And it makes sense, if thugs were sitting in jail for illegally possessing guns, then they wouldn't be using them to commit crime. Some snippets - he specifically mentions Philly:
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"Enforce the gun laws we have!" This is a common riposte from gun-rights advocates to gun-control proposals, and it is a good one. There are many examples herePhiladelphia dismisses 61 percent of all gun cases without trial or charges, the U.S. attorney for Chicago refuses to prosecute the great majority of straw-buyer cases, etc.but here's the one that really stands out for me: According to the hilariously misnamed Government Accountability Office, there were about 112,000 attempts by prohibited persons to buy firearms in 2017. These weren't oopsies: 36 percent of those attempts were by convicted felons, 30 percent were subjects of protective orders, 16 percent had been convicted of disqualifying domestic-violence charges, etc. That's 112,000 federal felonies in which all of the evidence is documented, dated, and signed by the offenders, who even go so far as to provide photocopies of their identification cards. Out of those 112,000 cases, there were only 12 prosecutions. These people are habitual criminals: According to the DOJ, about 30 percent of those who fail a background check go on to be arrested on unrelated criminal charges within five years.
In 2021, the NYPD made 4,456 gun arrests, which resulted in a grand total of oneone!conviction at trial, along with 698 plea deals and 983 dismissals. Which is to say, if you get arrested for illegal gun possession in New York City, by far the most likely outcome is outright dismissal. In Philadelphia, dismissals outnumber prosecutions 2-to-1, with 61 percent of gun cases simply being thrown out.
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The majority of murders in our country are committed by people who would be legally prohibited from owning a firearm: More than half of all murders are committed by people with prior felony convictions, and once you throw in other disqualifierscertain misdemeanors, open criminal cases, domestic-abuse orders, dishonorable military discharges, fugitive status, illegal alien status, a finding of mental incompetency, etc.you end up covering a very large share of murderers. And, at the risk of sounding like a snoot, most of them aren't highly organized people with access to a machine shop. They get their guns the old-fashioned way: They steal them, buy them illegally, and bully girlfriends and nephews with clean records into acting as straw buyers. In the case of straw buyers, tracing might be of some use in a prosecution. In cases such as the Colorado Springs massacre, tracing isn't an issue.
