Finance

Second Amendment News By The Numbers: Bump Stock Ban Makes Trump More Of A Gun Control President Than Obama Ever Was

Trump's most significant gun control policy achievement to date outstrips Obama's by nearly a full order of magnitude.

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An economist might refer to guns as durable goods. Properly cared for, a firearm will last practically forever. I own a rifle manufactured by the Soviets during World War II. It kicks like a mule, only takes a handful of cartridges at a time, and is operated by bolt action, but it still works as well as I imagine it did the day the Soviets laid it to rest in a grave of cosmoline some 80 years ago. Guns do not readily wear out.

Yet, according to the 2018 firearms commerce report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, in 2016, the last year for which data is available, 11,497,441 firearms were manufactured in the U.S., including weapons purchased by domestic law enforcement agencies but excluding production for the U.S. military (another 5 million or so guns were imported). There has been quite a prodigious increase over time. The domestic gun production number from 2004, the year the Federal Assault Weapon Ban expired, was only 3,099,025. Such leaps and bounds in production are unusual for a product that does not degrade over time and which already saturates the market.

There is now approximately one gun in existence for every person, including children, in America. However, based on numbers from Gallup and General Social Survey, only about a quarter of Americans are gun owners. Out of that quarter, according to a 2015 survey from Harvard and Northwestern University, more than half own just one or two guns. About 14 percent of gun-owning Americans own between eight and 140 guns. These armed-to-the-teeth Americans (myself included, at the single-digit end of that spectrum), are just three percent of the total U.S. population, but collectively own half of the civilian guns in the U.S. The growth strategy for the gun industry doesn’t necessarily require getting more Americans involved; all gun makers need to do is keep selling guns to those who already own more firearms than a person could possibly need.

There are plenty of logical reasons to own more than one gun. Maybe you have a deer rifle, a duck hunting shotgun, and a .22 caliber handgun for plinking at the range. Maybe you inherited a gun from your grandpa and it’s all you have left to remember him by. But a lot of gun sales, particularly among the owners of double-digit numbers of guns, are not entirely logical, but are driven by fear of new regulations banning particular types of guns.

Cries of “Obama’s going to take your guns!” were so loud in conservative circles dating back a decade that very few people remember that the only two major gun bills Obama signed into law actually expanded the rights of gun owners. One was a measure that allowed Amtrak passengers to carry firearms in checked baggage, and the other allowed the carry of firearms in national parks, reversing President Reagan’s policy that required guns to be locked in the trunks or glove compartments of vehicles upon entering national parks. Obama did announce a set of “executive actions” aimed at better enforcement of existing federal gun laws, but even the Charles Koch-founded Cato Institute said of these executive actions that “apoplectic opponents and overjoyed supporters are both probably overreacting.” Despite Obama being largely ineffectual on gun control policy, firearms sales spiked during his second term amid fears that he would enact gun control measures. Conversely, gun sales slumped when Trump was elected, in tandem with a perception among the hardcore gun owners that he would be comparatively lax on gun control and there was therefore no rush to equip oneself with hardware allowing for rapid sprays of bullets to be flung every which way.

The most significant gun control action from Obama was a second-term regulation requiring the Social Security Administration to supplement the federal firearms background check system with information about individuals who received Social Security benefits for mental illnesses. This measure was aimed at prohibiting mentally ill individuals from buying firearms, and approximately 75,000 people would have been impacted by the rule, according to official estimates. Trump quietly nullified the rule early in 2017 before it had fully taken effect.

Trump, though, is sending mixed signals on gun control. While he revoked Obama’s very modest mental health background check measure, he just promulgated a new rule banning bump stocks, the gun accessory used in last year’s Las Vegas massacre to mimic an automatic rate of fire. If you don’t yet know what a bump stock is, basically it’s a replacement butt for an AR-15 (or some other style of semi-automatic weapon) that has a piece partially extending over the trigger; a bump stock then uses the kick of the gun, which agitates the gun frame, to marginally depress the trigger during the recovery from each recoil, resulting in the rapid fire of successive rounds so long as the trigger finger remains held in place. Bump stock owners have 90 days to turn in or destroy their bump stocks (with no compensation) under the new Trump Administration rule.

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As many as 520,000 Americans own bump stocks, according to ATF estimates, meaning that Trump’s most significant gun control policy achievement to date outstrips Obama’s by nearly a full order of magnitude, as measured by the number of individuals affected.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that the U.S. gun industry accounted for $51.3 billion worth of economic activity in 2016 alone (a different study found that gun violence costs the U.S. $229 billion per year, but no one pays lobbyists to prevent diffuse and indirect economic losses). Facing a well-funded and powerful gun lobby, neither Trump nor Obama has done anything to meaningfully tackle America’s gun violence epidemic. They both bypassed bought-and-paid-for Congresses and took tiny, marginal steps on their own. But you’d have a hard time making a fact-based argument that Obama advanced more gun control than Trump at the equivalent stage in his presidency. He didn’t. It’s not even close. Right now, Trump is much more of a gun control president than Obama ever was, whatever the ephemeral public perception of their respective records on gun control may be.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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