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Saturday, the voters of New Orleans elected businessman Ray
Nagin to be their next mayor. Nagin will take office on May 6,
succeeding outgoing Mayor Marc H. Morial. Nagin's platform
on crime said absolutely nothing about promoting more gun
control — quite a contrast from Mayor Morial, who was the
first mayor in the United States to sue American gun
manufacturers. But rather than reviling Mayor Morial, Second
Amendment supporters should be thanking him for helping to
transform the American gun industry — although the
transformations are precisely the opposite of those that Morial
and his gun-prohibition allies hoped to achieve.
Last month, the firearms
industry held its annual trade show, the Shooting
Hunting and Outdoor Trades Show (SHOT Show), in Las Vegas.
The business news from the SHOT Show is very bad news for gun
prohibitionists, but even worse, from the prohibition viewpoint,
is the new attitude of the American firearms industry, an
attitude for which New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial deserves as
much credit as anyone else.
On the business side, while
attendance has been sharply down at many trade shows (such as
the Outdoor Retailer Show), the SHOT Show enjoyed outstanding
attendance, only a few hundred people short of its all-time
record. Thirty-one thousand people participated in the show —
all the more impressive when one considers that show is for the
trade only, and closed to consumers and the general public.
On the product side, laser
sights for firearms are becoming inexpensive and increasingly
common. A laser sight puts a red dot on light on the target. If
the target is a human criminal, the red dot sometimes provokes a
very prompt surrender; if not, the dot makes it much easier for
the firearms user to hit the target, even at night, under the
stressful conditions of a home invasion. The gun-prohibition
groups, which morally oppose the use of firearms for
self-defense by people who are not government employees, find
the proliferation of laser sights very distressing.
Back in the 1980s, a new
company called Glock was the first to incorporate plastic
polymers in its firearms. Now, plastics have spread throughout
the industry. For example, Springfield Armory introduced is
"X-treme
Duty" (XD) pistol, which lives up to its name. The gun
is light, and hence especially suitable for defensive carrying,
but it is also extremely rugged. It can handle conditions of
abuse — like being immersed in mud, or run over by a truck —
which would prevent most pistols from firing. The increased
durability of these pistols means that, even if handgun
manufacture were prohibited one day, today's firearms could
literally be usable hundreds of years from now.
Spurred by the 1994 Clinton-Feinstein
ban on new magazines holding more than 10 rounds, and by the
spread of "shall issue" handgun-carry licensing laws,
manufacturers are continuing to invent new firearms which are
smaller and smaller, yet powerful enough for self-defense. For
example, the new North
American Arms "Guardian" pistol carries six rounds
of .380 ACP ammunition; yet the pistol is less than five inches
long and less than an inch wide. Thank you Senator Feinstein!
Because of the terrorist
attacks, interest has surged in frangible
ammunition, which is available from a variety of
manufacturers. Frangible ammunition uses pre-fragmented bullets
which shatter into many small pieces upon impact, thus
eliminating the risk that a bullet might over-penetrate its
target and hit an innocent bystander.
Frangible ammo is useful not
only on airplanes, but in any crowded venue, such a courtroom,
casino, sporting event, or airport. In addition, frangible
ammunition is safer for target shooting (no risk of ricochet)
and sometimes superior environmentally (since the bullets are
not made of lead). Better ammunition, not more gun laws, turns
out to be the firearms-related results of the terrorist attacks.
In the early 1990s, the
gun-prohibition groups hoped to make guns seem like cigarettes
— "dirty, dangerous, and banned," as one
prohibitionist put it. But instead, firearms are becoming even
more mainstream, thanks in part to leadership from the gun
industry's trade association, the National Shooting Sports
Foundation.
Hunting shows are already
well-established on cable channels, and now, other shooting
sports are getting television coverage, such as the annual Great
Outdoor Games in Lake Placid, which are featured on ESPN during
the summer.
The nation's lieutenant
governors have a lot of time on their hands, and the NSSF has
given them something constructive to do, making them the leaders
in the NSSF's Project
HomeSafe to distribute free trigger locks nationwide.
Of course the most direct
parallel between firearms and cigarettes was supposed to be that
the firearms companies would surrender to abusive government
lawsuits, as the cigarette companies did. The gun companies were
also supposed to follow the cigarette companies' foolish failure
to rally their own consumers. Back in 1998, New Orleans Mayor
Marc Morial launched the first of the dozens of government
lawsuits against firearms manufacturers in 1998. The suits were
invented by invented by predatory trial lawyers made cocky by
their tobacco victories, who were given the idea for a new round
of lawsuits by Dennis Henigan of the Brady Center.
The lawsuits were also
massively hypocritical. Mayor Morial's administration had made
itself a windfall by reselling
7,300 firearms which it had confiscated from criminals. The guns
which Morial put back on the street include TEC-9s, Kalashnikov
rifles, and various other so-called "assault weapons"
which Morial had demanded be banned.
When Moral's administration was
putting guns back on the streets, it did none of the things
which its lawsuit insisted that firearms manufacturers do —
such as sell guns only if they contained built-in locks, or
carefully monitor all retailers who acquire the guns.
The lawsuits were structured so
as to divide the firearms community. Only handgun companies were
sued. In contrast to well-established long-gun companies such as
O. F. Mossberg, Remington, Marlin, and Winchester, the large
majority of handgun manufacturers are quite thinly capitalized.
The lawsuits also excluded ammunition manufacturers, even though
all major manufacturers make very large amounts of handgun
ammunition. You see, the ammunition manufacturers are by far the
deepest pockets in the firearms business, and, unlike many of
the handgun companies, would have the resources to fight dozens
of cases in dozens of jurisdictions simultaneously.
The divide and conquer strategy
backfired, however. The entire firearms industry could see
perfectly well where things were going: most of the smaller
handgun companies would be destroyed; a few larger ones might
survive, but they would live under the thumbs of consent decrees
written and enforced by the gun prohibition groups. Then, the
time would be come for the rest of the firearms business to be
targeted.
One company, Smith
& Wesson, did surrender to the prohibitionist and
politicians, but that capitulation was forced by the British
conglomerate which owned the company (but no longer does). The
surrender was hardly popular with Smith & Wesson employees,
and the consumer backlash against Smith & Wesson likely
reinforced the inclination of the other firearms manufacturers
to hang together, rather than allow themselves to be hanged
separately.
Starting at the January 1999
SHOT show, the vast majority of the rest of the industry, under
the leadership of NSSF, decided to contribute a percentage of
sales to a Hunting
& Shooting Sports Heritage Fund, which helps pay
litigation costs arising from the abusive lawsuits, and which
engages in long-term public education about the positive side of
firearms. Contributors include not just manufacturers of
firearms and ammunition, but wide variety of companies in
related fields, such as manufacturers of scopes and publishers
of hunting magazines.
The NSSF public-education
campaign began in 1999, when firearms owners and manufacturers
came under an unprecedented attack after the Columbine murders.
Since then, polling indicates five to ten percent increases in
the number of Americans with favorable views of the shooting
sports and of firearms.
While the gun-prohibition
groups of works diligently to demonize manufacturers, 79 percent
of Americans believe that the firearms industry wants its
products to be used properly, and 67 percent believe that the
industry supports common-sense gun laws. One way that NSSF this
supporting commonsense laws is through its "Don't
Lie for the Other Guy" education program for firearms
retailers, to help them spot "straw purchases," in
which a legal gun-buyer purchases a gun as a surrogate for a
prohibited person. Attorney General Ashcroft has recommended
that the training kit also be sent to U.S. Attorneys to handle
firearms cases, and the "Don't Lie" education program
is being promoted in cooperation with the BATF.
For decades, the American
firearms industry shied away from politics, hoping that the
National Rifle Association would take care of everything. But
although the gun-prohibition groups pretend that the NRA is
primarily concerned with profits of gun manufacturers, the NRA
is actually a consumer group, controlled and run for the benefit
of gun owners, not gun makers. Whenever the interests of
American consumers and American manufacturers diverge-as when
the American manufacturers supported the first President Bush's
ban on certain firearms imports-the NRA always sides with
consumers against the manufacturers.
More fundamentally, the
firearms manufacturers have finally decided to grow up and
stopped counting on someone else to fight their battles for
them. No matter how effective the NRA, the NRA alone cannot
accomplish as much as the NRA plus the NSSF. Like the NRA, the
NSSF conducted a massive voter education campaign in the last
presidential election. While the NRA focused on people concerned
with gun rights, the NSSF directed its message more to hunters
and other active participants in the shooting sports. Given the
very slender margin of the Bush victory in Florida and some
other states, it is fair to say that without the NSSF, Al Gore
would be president today.
Ever since the modern
gun-control movement began in the mid-1960s, many of the large
American gun manufacturers believed that the real problem was
the California companies which sold small, inexpensive handguns.
The old-line companies couldn't believe that anti-gun
politicians really wanted to take away people's skeet-shooting
shotguns or their deer rifles, or their $1,500 target pistols.
The extremist positions of the Clinton administration — and
the gun-confiscation policies of Clinton allies in England,
Canada, and Australia — helped the firearms industry begin to
realize that the antigun agenda extended far beyond small
handguns.
But Pearl Harbor day for the
gun industry was the day that Marc Morial filed his lawsuit,
demonstrating to the industry that its scrupulous compliance
with extensive statutes and regulations was worth nothing to
anti-gun politicians. Mayor Morial and his fellow
lawsuit-abusing mayors awakened the sleeping giant. Because of
these mayors, George Bush is president.
Although Mayor Morial and
comrades were targeting the Second Amendment, they missed badly.
Many of the lawsuits have been dismissed,
and about half of state legislatures, including Louisiana's,
have enacted statutes to ensure that such abusive lawsuits are
never filed again.
Thanks to mayors like Marc
Morial, America now has an administration with the greatest
philosophical commitment to Second Amendment rights since the
days of Theodore Roosevelt.
Thus, the biggest losers in the
gun lawsuits turned out not to be the gun companies, but instead
the people who are the biggest victims of the Bush presidency:
the Taliban and the Axis of Evil.
The gun industry, of course,
wasn't thinking about freeing the women of Afghanistan when the
NSSF decided to fight back against the trial-lawyer bullies. Yet
as pistol-packing Eleanor Roosevelt knew,
when stand up for your own rights, you start a chain of good
events which helps you — and lots of other people too, in ways
that no one could foresee.
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