- H.R.2403
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- Title: To expand the powers of the Attorney General to
regulate the manufacture, distribution, and sale of firearms and ammunition,
and to expand the jurisdiction of the Attorney General to include firearm
products and nonpowder firearms.
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- Tim Wheeler & Dave Kopel on Guns & Regulation
on National Review Online
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- Guns vs. Teddy Bears - There's no competition when it
comes to regulation.
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- NationalReview.com
http://www.NationalReview.com/
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- Guns vs. Teddy Bears
http://www.NationalReview.com/kopel/wheeler-kopel200401130846.as p
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- By Tim Wheeler & Dave Kopel
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- January 13, 2004
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- Should unelected officials be allowed to order the confiscation
of some or all guns and ammunition in the United States? This is the question
posed by Sen. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) and Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), in their
proposed Firearms Safety and Consumer Protection Act. As one might suspect,
the bill is about neither firearm safety nor consumer protection, but is
an especially clever stratagem by the gun-prohibition lobby. The Kennedy-Corzine
bill would give the Treasury Department and the courts nearly unlimited
powers to restrict firearms manufacture and sales, and to confiscate guns.
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- The bill is premised on the gun-control activists' claim
that guns are an unregulated consumer product. Teddy bears, they preach,
are more heavily regulated than guns; though anyone who has tried to buy
a gun lately would probably disagree. For example, there is no federal
agency like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE
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- http://www.ATF.Treas.gov) that licenses teddy-bear manufacturers,
wholesalers, and vendors. Teddy-bear stores do not have to keep permanent
records on all their customers, and make those records available for government
inspection.
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- You don't need permission from the FBI to buy a teddy
bear, but you do if you want to buy a gun. No other consumer product requires
federal- government approval for every single retail transaction.
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- The Supreme Court accurately characterizes the gun trade
as a "pervasively regulated business" (United States v. Biswell,
1972). Thus gun stores, but not teddy-bear stores, are subject to warrant-less
inspection by federal agents, notwithstanding the Fourth Amendment requirement
that searches are only allowed with a warrant based upon probable cause.
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- It's not as though no one ever thought of setting safety
standards for guns and ammunition. The original consumer safety regulations
for American firearms were the standards set for the industry by the Sporting
Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute
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- (http://www.SAAMI.org), an industry trade association.
SAAMI was created in 1926, pursuant to a request from the federal government.
SAAMI has promulgated over 700 standards, which are updated every five
years. SAAMI standards are examined and reviewed by the American National
Standards Institute (http://www.ANSI.org) and by the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (http://www.NIST.gov).
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- Although SAAMI standards are not legally binding, manufacturers
bidding for government contracts must meet the standards, since the FBI,
the U.S. military, and many state or local government agencies often require
that procured firearms meet SAAMI specifications. Of course Congress and
the state legislatures enact all sorts of "gun- safety" laws.
The federal "assault-weapons" law bans over 200 models of firearms.
(Most of the guns are banned by the generic "assault- weapon"
definition, rather than by being specifically named.) Some states ban small,
inexpensive "junk guns"). Federal and state laws require a variety
of safety information to be supplied by gun stores, and some states require
consumers to take a test or pass a class before purchasing a handgun. So
the legislative branch - that is, the law-making branch - is certainly
capable of passing laws that it thinks will promote gun safety.
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- SAAMI standards should satisfy true consumer advocates.
Seeking additional legislation is the proper approach for people who want
additional restrictions. But gun-prohibition activists have realized that
most Americans believe they have a right to own guns, and a right not to
have their property confiscated. Because legislators have to answer to
their constituents, passing gun-prohibition laws is difficult even in states
such as New York and California. Gun confiscation is even more difficult
to enact. Hence the campaign to authorize unelected bureaucrats to confiscate
guns - under the guise of consumer safety.
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- The first effort to set up bureaucrat-based gun prohibition
came shortly after the creation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission
(http://www.CPSC.gov). In 1975, congressmen from Illinois and Michigan
tried to push an amendment that would give the CPSC the power to control
and ban guns and ammunition. Members of Congress lined up to excoriate
the amendment's authors for their attempt at back-door gun prohibition.
The Congressional Record from July 29, 1975, documents the comments from
outraged representatives:
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- Representative Ketchum (California): "The issue
of gun control is one which must be decided by Congress, as the elected
representatives of the people. It would be an absolute outrage to give
this kind of authority to a Federal bureaucracy."
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- Representative Dingell (Michigan): "The amendment
gives CPSC the right to test every firearm and every round of ammunition
and to issue all manner of regulations, harassing the firearms manufacturers,
harassing sportsmen, harassing licensed firearms dealers, and generally
getting their nose into those things that the Congress said they should
not get their nose into."
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- Representative Evans (Indiana): "Mr. Chairman, I
have received more letters from my constituents on the issue of banning
handgun ammunition as a hazardous substance than perhaps any other matter.
The people in the sixth district were irate that the Commission was considering,
in effect, handgun control by a back-door method."
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- Congress reacted by passing legislation in 1976 that
explicitly denied the CPSC authority over firearms and ammunition. The
1975-76 debate showed that the proponents of administrative gun prohibition
could not show any real problem of gun injuries from improper labeling
of guns or ammunition. In the three decades since that debate, accidental
gun-related injuries and deaths have plummeted - proving that prohibition
imposed by a federal bureaucracy is not the only path to ever-greater safety.
Take true consumer-product safety advocates, who would target defective
guns. For example, if a bullet gets stuck in the firing chamber, the energy
gunpowder explosion will not travel down the gun barrel, but will be directed
outward in all directions from the firing chamber - destroying the gun,
and possibly injuring the shooter's hand. Such malfunctions are what the
SAAMI standards prevent.
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- Importantly, tort lawsuits are available if a manufacturer
makes guns or ammunition which malfunction dangerously. Such lawsuits have
helped drive some low-quality manufacturers out of the market, and the
potential of such lawsuits provides a continuing incentive for manufacturers
to maintain high quality control.
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- Most states have enacted tort-reform laws to restrict
junk lawsuits against gun companies, and federal legislation passed the
House this summer. Neither the state nor the federal reforms restrict product-liability
suits for guns which really are defective.
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- The social problem with guns does not involve mislabeling
or malfunctions: The problem involves people who deliberately misuse firearms.
Likewise, the problem of criminals driving cars to escape from the scene
of convenience-store robberies does not involve defective car design; it
involves deliberate misuse of a properly functioning product. Robberies
and gun crimes are serious problems, but they are criminal-justice problems,
not product-regulation problems.
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- Yet now, the Kennedy-Corzine bill would authorize administrative
bans on guns and ammunition. It is a founded on the 1970s campaign for
administrative gun prohibition, except that the Treasury Department, rather
than the Consumer Product Safety Commission, would have the gun-banning
power. All it would take is a Democratic president (Howard Dean excepted)
to make the right appointments, and the gun-prohibition juggernaut would
roll. The Kennedy-Corzine bill is loaded with special clauses that make
it especially dangerous, even beyond the obvious danger of authorizing
firearms prohibition.
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- It applies to firearms accessories, and thus would set
the stage for the prohibition of laser sights. Laser sights have become
very popular in the last decade, as their price has declined. Pro- and
anti-rights activists agree that such sights make it significantly easier
for the shooter to fire the gun accurately under intense time pressure
- as in a self-defense situation. Since the antigun movement is founded
on the premise that it is immoral to use guns for self-defense unless you
are a government employee, laser sights are anathema to them. The Kennedy-Corzine
bill also applies to airguns, such as the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun (http://www.DaisyMuseum.com).
Antigun activists in Canada, UK, and other nations have imposed severe
restrictions on hundreds of models of such guns, and Kennedy-Corzine would
allow similar restrictions in the United States. BB gun opponents refer
to the guns as "non-powder firearms," although the term is an
oxymoron. A firearm uses fire (the gunpowder explosion); something which
is powered only by compressed air can be a gun (which shoots an object
down a barrel), but it cannot be a "firearm." Not only would
the Treasury be allowed to prohibit the future manufacture and sale of
some or all guns, it would also be allowed to "recall" guns -
that is, to confiscate some or all guns currently in private hands. No
compensation would be paid to the owners.
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- A Treasury official would be authorized to take "emergency
action" to ban or confiscate guns, without having to comply with normal
administrative procedures - such as those that require public comment before
the promulgation of a rule, or which require public notice before a rule
is created.
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- And most important of all, Kennedy-Corzine allows private
enforcement of the Act. This means that even if Tom Delay were the secretary
of the Treasury, a gun-ban group could sue in a sympathetic court (perhaps
in New York City or San Francisco), and a single federal judge could order
gun confiscation, prohibit gun manufacture, or do almost anything else
he wanted to eliminate or restrict gun ownership.
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- Putting aside the merits of gun policy, and ignoring
the Second Amendment, we are still left a fundamental question: Since Article
I of the U.S. Constitution gives "all legislative powers herein granted"
to the Congress, why should unelected officials in the executive branch
be given the power to ban guns which Congress has not voted to ban? It
violates the text of the Constitution for Congress to delegate law- making
power to executive-branch agencies such as the CPSC.
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- Moreover, allowing Congress to delegate law making to
administrative agencies allows Congress to dodge tough decisions, as detailed
in David Schoenbrod's fine book, Power Without Responsibility: How Congress
Abuses the People through Delegation.
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- Under the Constitution, it is supposed to be hard to
make new laws; the proposed law must be passed by the House of Representatives,
by the Senate, and then signed by the president (or re-passed by 2/3 of
each house of Congress over the President's veto).
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- By making it difficult to impose new laws, the Founders
created a system in which liberty would be the norm, and restraint would
be the exception. But law making by executive agencies inverts the whole
process; a single bureaucrat, with the wave of his pen, creates new laws.
Then, victims of the new restriction carry the difficult burden of trying
to get Congress to pass a law to remove the infringement on liberty.
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- An additional liberty protection implicit in the Constitution's
grant of law-making power to Congress alone is that there are a finite
number of hours in the day. If only Congress can make the laws, then we
will have only as many laws as Congress has the time to pass. Delegation,
though, enables hundreds of executive-branch agencies to make laws, even
while Congress is adjourned.
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- Foisting the hard choices off onto federal agencies undermines
democracy, since a person who does not like a congressional vote can vote
against the congressman in the next election, but no one can vote against
a bureaucrat. For most of our country's history, Congress did not attempt
to give its law-making power to the executive branch. In the few instances
when Congress did, the Supreme Court said "no." For example,
in 1935 a unanimous Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery
Act, which a delegated to President Roosevelt and his National Recovery
Administration the authority to regulate the entire economy (Schecter Poultry
Corp. v. United States).
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- But a few years later, the Court, under intense political
pressure from the Roosevelt administration, abandoned its constitutional
duty of enforcing the separation of powers between the legislative and
executive branches. As a result, the volume of laws unconstitutionally
made by the executive branch (which are contained in the Code of Federal
Regulations) is roughly four times larger than the volume of laws constitutionally
created by Congress (contained in the United States Code).
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- Several years ago, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Rep.
J. D. Hayworth (R-AZ) proposed legislation to specify that no new administrative
regulation would go into effect unless Congress voted to implement it.
Such legislation would be a gigantic step forward for strict and appropriate
enforcement of the Constitution. Just as the mere risk of gun prohibition
by the CPSC in 1975 spurred Congress to take protective measures, the new
Kennedy-Corzine bill suggests that citizens who are serious about the Second
Amendment should also get serious about enforcing Article I.
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- -- Timothy Wheeler, M.D., is director of Doctors for
Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Claremont Institute (http://www.Claremont.org).
Dave Kopel (http://www.DaveKopel.org) is co-author of the new book Supreme
Court Gun Cases.
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- First published 1-13-4
- http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:h.r.02403:
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