By ROBERT J. SPITZER
IN the immediate aftermath of one of the worst mass shootings in American history, I sought information about what happened by googling “fully automatic weapons” and “Las Vegas.” Audio recordings from the scene had picked up the utterly distinctive sound of fully automatic gunfire. (It appears the gun was a modified semiautomatic weapon.) But instead of turning up details of the massacre, the top search results yielded multiple advertisements for sites like “Battlefield Vegas” (“Book Now!”) and M.G.V. (“Machine Guns Vegas”), where customers can purchase firing-range time with fully automatic “exclusive Las Vegas gun range packages,” according to the second website.
But what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas, and sometimes the line between fantasy violence and the real thing disappears.
The horror of the mass shooting in Las Vegas is demarcated by the sheer number of casualties inflicted by a single individual — more than 50 dead and more than 500 injured — made possible by the use of a modified semi- automatic weapon or weapons, meaning those that fire a continuous stream of bullets by depressing the trigger. Semiautomatic weapons fire one bullet with each pull of the trigger.
The Vegas shooting stands out because, for all of the gun crimes committed annually in America, fully automatic or modified semiautomatic weapons virtually never play a role, thanks to America’s first significant national gun law. America’s close-up experience with automatic weapons nearly a century ago culminated in the adoption of the National Firearms Act of 1934.
Prohibition and later the Great Depression fueled the rise of gangsterism that spread unregulated but powerful weapons developed for warfare, including the Tommy gun (“the gun that made the twenties roar”) and the Browning automatic rifle. By the start of the 1930s, more than half of the states had sharply regulated or barred such fully automatic weapons. In the summer of 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law a measure to bring these and other gangster weapons and equipment, like sawed-off shotguns and silencers, under federal control. The new law required an extensive and intensive background check, fingerprinting, registration with a national database and payment of a $200 fee.
The effectiveness of this measure, amended slightly in 1968 and 1986 to ban possession of full automatic weapons, or machine guns, manufactured after that year, put a lid on the spread of these weapons. According to government records, today only about a half-million such guns are in civilian hands. (To comply with the 1986 law expanding the 1934 Firearms Act, citizens are barred from purchasing any fully automatic weapon made after 1986. That includes weapons manufactured to fire in full auto mode and those altered to fire in full auto.) Of guns used in crimes subject to law enforcement tracing, only three of every 1,000 were machine guns.
This success story notwithstanding, mass shootings are on the rise, facilitated by weapons that can still deliver plenty of destructive power. In a study of mass shootings over a 30-year period, more than a third were committed with semiautomatic assault weapons (there are perhaps five million such weapons legally owned as of 2016).
Yet even as mass shootings rise, most of the nation has gone in the opposite direction, following the contrary notion that somehow we would be better off with fewer gun laws and more guns. For example, at the start of the 1980s, 19 states banned concealed gun carrying by civilians entirely, and 29 states had great discretion over whether to grant carry permits. Only one state, Vermont, imposed no permitting restrictions. As of this year, only nine states retain discretion over whether to grant permits (New York is one).
In 29 states, permits must be issued to applicants unless they are felons or mentally incompetent, and 12 states have abolished permitting entirely. In 24 states, no gun training is required to carry a gun. Congress is now considering a bill, called concealed carry reciprocity, to require that every state’s concealed-carry standard be accepted by every other state. This would have the effect of undercutting states with stricter laws since it would impose a national lowest-common-denominator standard.
A different effort to thwart a successful gun law is afoot in Congress: The House of Representatives was poised to pass a bill to remove the 1934 N.F.A. background check, registration and fee requirements one must satisfy to own a gun silencer (also called “suppressors”). Because of the Las Vegas shooting, that bill is now shelved, but when things die down, expect its progress to resume.
The reason for the change? Advocates argue that silencers are almost never used in crimes, and that silencers help protect the gun users’ hearing. Yet the very reason silencers were originally subject to registration regulations was because they were used in crimes, and because their chief utility was to conceal gun crimes and illegal hunting with guns. And while the modern idea of protecting the shooter’s hearing is laudable, the more effective method for doing so would be to subsidize gun owners’ ownership of proper hearing-protection devices, precisely so that innocent bystanders can tell where hostile fire is coming from — whether in the woods during hunting season or in the killing grounds of downtown Las Vegas.
The gun issue is virtually the only one where the default response is increasingly to shrug and say that laws don’t matter, since bad people do bad things, so why bother with new ones? That facile and false logic jumps over an obvious question: Shouldn’t the government do more to keep highly destructive weapons from the wrong hands? Sure, it’s a politically fraught question, but it’s no less important.
Admittedly, mass shooters tend to be individuals with little or no serious criminal past, making them hard to identify before they commit these acts. Recent research has suggested a high correlation with their abuse of intimate partners or family members, but a vast majority of abusers will never pick up a gun and shoot a bunch of people. Still, many mass shooters do give indications of impending violence to those around them, and only a few states have any measures in place to pick up on that. New York, as it happens, is one, with its extensive character background investigation for pistol permit applicants (a process I underwent). Other states would do well to follow its lead.
If we can’t settle on sensible gun regulations in the wake of Sandy Hook or San Bernardino or Orlando or now Las Vegas (or Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech before them), when will we? Maybe the answer will emerge when the nation’s cumulative gun violence toxicity level reaches a critical tipping point. Are we there yet?
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