Terrific job, Adam! I hope the book gets the attention it deserves.
And thanks to FDL for hosting and to the participants who made this such an exciting session.

One of the little-discussed aspects of gun policy is crime-gun tracing. When Susan Ginsburg was at the Treasury Department during the Clinton Administration, she was able to set up a system that greatly increased the chance that a gun used to kill someone could be traced back to its last lawful sale. But that accomplishment took place in the face of fierce opposition from the NRA and its allies, and the “jack-booted fascists” at ATF are still absurdly limited by statute in their use of modern data-processing technology. That’s one of the things that keeps gun traffickers in business. Another is the absurdly light penalties: so small that they actually discourage prosecution.

This is genuinely a case of needing, not new laws, but enforcement of existing laws. And yet there’s no political consensus to support more effective efforts against gun traffickers.

Like Adam, I would have hoped that the Heller ruling would have created political space where such policies could be discussed on their merits, without the specter of “gun-grabbing.” But no such luck, so far. Adam, are there grounds to be hopeful?

And the fearless defenders of Second Amendment rights are the strong political allies of those trying to chip away at the right to vote. It’s certainly true that many liberal legal academics act as if the Bill of Rights is sacred, except for the Second Amendment, and Adam is right to call them on their inconsistency. But it’s also true that many gun rights advocates are happy to interfere with every other personal right enumerated in the Constitution.

Let’s imagine, for the moment, that African-Americans in the South had decided to defend themselves against lawless official oppression (including, of course, by law enforcement agencies) and lawless private violence by exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and organizing self-defense units. That is, imagine that Martin Luther King and the Gandhian wing of the Civil Rights movement had lost out to the CORE/SNCC/Panthers “by any means necessary” wing.

Does anyone believe that race relations in the U.S. today would be better than they now are? That the result would not have been a war of extermination by Southern whites against Southern blacks, with the Federal government either wringing its hands ineffectually or forced to fight a second Civil War?

Off-topic for this discussion, but the claim that drug prohibition is “a complete failure” has to deal with the fact that the one addictive intoxicant we re-legalized – alcohol – does more damage, causes more crime, and leads to more incarceration than all the illicit drugs combined. The fact that drugs are still available no more proves prohibition a failure than the fact that murder still exists proves that murder laws are futile.

We could certainly run drug prohibition more effectively, with greater benefits and lower costs. But that’s another story : my book, rather than yours.

It’s worth noting, in response to the oft-repeated claim that gun control laws are intended to deprive minority groups of their capacity to defend themselves against non-minority aggressors, or actually have that effect, that black people who shoot white aggressors often find themselves on trial for murder. Abolishing gun control laws is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for abolishing racism. And of course the vast majority of violent acts are intra-racial.

And, as you note in the book, the NRA was not only the proud possessor of a Congressional charter, but the beneficiary of repeated handouts from the Federal government.

Perhaps, if reality checker is no longer honoring us with his presence, some other defender of gun rights might respond in his behalf. Are there no legitimate limits on the right to bear arms? If so, what defines them?

[Please show respect for the author and his book - mod]

I’m glad that my insult, in response to yours, didn’t miss its target. I’m always happy to reciprocate courtesy with courtesy, and conversely.

If you have a quarrel about atomic weapons, it’s with Brett, not with me. He asserted that any regulation of weapons ownership was per se unreasonable. You seem to disagree about atomic weapons. How about full automatics: i.e., machine guns? They’re routine military weapons. But they’re effectively banned for private ownership in the U.S. Should that law be changed? Is it unconstitutional, because it denies citizens the weapons used by soldiers?

Yes, please don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
If it’s an act of war to send guns to Mexico where they’re illegal, then what is it to allow private citizens to send those same guns to Mexico? Fast and Furious was a (bungled) attempt to prevent gun trafficking into Mexico. The people now trying to make political hay out of it oppose all efforts to prevent gun trafficking into Mexico.

So, Brett, the law forbidding me to own a machine gun is per se unreasonable?
How about a nuclear weapon?

Notice that on the “gun rights” theory the Fast and Furious operation – which allowed gun trafficking into Mexico in an attempt to make criminal cases against gun traffickers – was completely benign. All it did was supply weapons. But guns don’t kill people; people kill people. If the bad guys hadn’t gotten guns from the undercover agents, they would have gotten guns from somewhere else. No harm, no foul.

Fast and Furious was only a scandal if you think that arming Mexican drug gangs is wrong. But the very people who are now scalp-hunting around Fast and Furious also want to make it impossible to enforce the law against U.S. gun dealers who are cheerfully and profitably arming the Mexican drug gangs.

And, as Adam points out, frontier cities such as Dodge decided that it was a reasonable regulation to forbid the carrying of firearms within city limits. Why were they wrong to do so?

Adam, isn’t it inflammatory to call the Klan a “gun control organization”? It was in fact an armed and lawless private army, using its weapons to disarm others. That’s really not the same as advocating for gun control laws.

Question for all the gun-rights advocates in the conversation:

Most of the same folks who hate gun control also claim that the government should be subject to the same rules it imposes on citizens.

So: Do you believe that the Second Amendment allows me to bring my semi-auto rifle with sniperscope and high-capacity magazine into the Vistors’ Gallery in the House of Representatives? Into the Oval Office? To the Republican National Convention? All three of those areas are gun-free zones. Why not allow citizens to bring their weapons, and (e.g.) Congressmen to arm to defend themselves?

Another question for Adam:

One of the most fascinating stories in the book – against tough competition – is the story of the NRA trying to derail the Heller case. Could you tell that story briefly?

A bit of reality-checking here: most countries in Europe allow far less private gun ownership than is allowed in the U.S., and have far lower rates of homicide. The claim that governments in the United States have abandoned their obligation to protect citizens from criminal violence strikes me as absurdly over-stated.

There are a couple of papers floating around suggesting that exports of semis with high magazine capacity to Mexico soared right after the AWB expired. How confident are we that those papers are wrong?

“X is based on a foundation of racism, and therefore X is substantively wrong,” seems to me like very bad logic. Cocaine prohibition was based in part on Southern fears about “cocainized Negroes.” That doesn’t mean that cocaine is a benign drug.