With the terrorism in San Bernardino this week, we are once again facing renewed calls for more and more gun control. The common call among the left is to end the so called ‘gun show loophole’.
If you listen to political pundits, you would believe that anyone can walk into a gun show, anywhere in the country, and buy any gun on the spot with no background check. To put it bluntly, this is a lie. The myth of the gun show loophole is purposefully misleading people about what are known as private seller transactions. These are basically private sales between two individuals, such as your uncle selling you his old shotgun.
At gun shows, private sellers are rare. A vast majority of sellers at gun shows are licensed dealers and just like going to a licensed dealer’s store, to purchase a firearm from them, you would complete an ATF 4473 form and have a background check run over the phone before the sale is completed. I have personally purchased dozens of firearms at gun shows and was required to complete the 4473 background check every single time.
Yes, occasionally you will find private sellers at gun shows, but they are very rare. Generally because there is an expense in setting up a table to sell, but you also can only sell a small number of firearms before you are required to complete the requirements to become a dealer. Most private sellers at gun shows do not sell guns you normally think of being used in crime or terrorism- no cheap Jimenez pistols or AK47s. Private sellers almost exclusively are selling collectible or C&R (curio and relic) firearms. There is simply no point of paying a few hundred dollars for a space in a show to sell some $200 Saturday night special that you may profit $20 off of.
Will closing the gun show loophole really reduce private transactions? Most collectible and C&R guns sold by private sellers at gun shows are so old, they have no paper trail, so if one wanted to sell one of these to another collector, they would simply conduct the transaction privately, just like selling a TV at a garage sale.
For those with criminal intent selling firearms, they would not be compelled to follow the law any way. One more law is not going to stop a back-alley transaction that is probably already breaking several laws.
The entire argument around the gun show loophole is simply to keep those not aware of the facts, afraid there are a lot of criminal transactions going on at these events when there aren’t. It also continues to give anti-protection advocates talking points that can be spun to strike fear in the public.
Passing this law won’t stop current criminal transfers of firearms, what it will instead do is make criminals out of innocent citizens who have no criminal intent- like a grandfather passing down his old WWII rifle to his grandson.
Don’t allow yet another myth to go unchallenged.
