The other night on Hardball, Chris Matthews was interviewing one Larry Pratt, evidently the head of an organization calling itself Gun Owners of America. Matthews kept asking Pratt what would be the harm in requiring would-be gun purchasers to undergo a background check to make sure the person buying the gun is not a violent criminal, insane, or otherwise someone that no reasonable person would want to be in possession of firearms. And rather than give a reasoned answer to the question (it’s hard to imagine what such an answer would be, but it clearly wasn’t going to come from Pratt), Pratt repeatedly asserted that such checks would not keep criminals from getting guns. This was so apparently an article of faith with him that he did not seem to consider that it might actually be subject to challenge.
In Pratt’s mind, it seems, if Joe Criminal wants to buy an assault rifle such as the one used to murder children in Connecticut, and he can’t get it at the local Wal-Mart because a background check reveals him to be a convicted felon out on parole (or whatever), he will not be deterred. In Pratt’s reality, one imagines, criminals live in a parallel universe in which, if one cannot get a gun legitimately, one need only stroll down to the ‘hood, hook up with Hakim the Gun Merchant (of whom everyone in the criminal underworld is aware but who has managed to escape the attention of the police, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and so, is still in business and not in prison) plunk down his $500 (or whatever) and stroll away with the weapon of his choice.
Now, not being a criminal myself (nor, technically, is Pratt, I assume), I do not possess those specialized feral instincts that lead Joe Criminal unerringly to Hakim the Gun Merchant. But there seem to be a lot of guns in the ‘hood, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there were some real-life equivalent of Hakim with whom career gangsters routinely do business. So, we’ll accept that as given.
Now, the following may seem coldhearted (possibly even racist) of me, but while in the abstract I would much prefer that gang bangers in the ghetto not murder each other, I am inclined to feel that those killings are more or less the inevitable result of a chosen way of life for which the participants have volunteered (for reasons best known to themselves), and therefore, if they decide they want to stop being gangsters and shooting each other, they need only walk away. Maybe they can get a job at Wal-Mart not selling guns to convicted felons and certified lunatics.
Anyhow, I am less concerned with Joe Criminal and his desire to rob liquor stores than I am with people like Adam Lanza, who are not professional criminals, but whose mental health problems, if well-documented, would show up as a flashing red light and strident klaxon noises on any well engineered background check had he gone to Wal-Mart to buy, say, an assault rifle for the purpose of which we are all now too vividly aware. At that point, the person at Wal-Mart rings up the local FBI office (I guess) and says: “Mr. – uh – Adam Lanza, a certified lunatic, has been trying to buy assault rifles. Thought you’d like to know."
At this point one of two things happens: either 1) Lanza goes home, where he gets to know some real live FBI agents, who ascertain he is probably a very dangerous person and place him in the Home for Very Dangerous Persons (which was where his mother was planning to place him when she was murdered); or 2) (my personal favorite, and the one Larry Pratt needs to contemplate) he goes where Joe Criminal goes – to the ‘hood, in search of Hakim the Gun Merchant. Lanza does not know Hakim specifically, but he has a notion that there must be some such person somewhere in the ‘hood. I don’t know what ‘hood that would have been for Lanza – maybe New Haven - but we’ll say Harlem, since it’s somewhere in the same general region of planet earth and has been known historically as a Very Rough Neighborhood. This may no longer be the case. For all I know, Harlem has become gentrified, and impoverished tenements have been converted to trendy lofts and little boutique hotels and Michelin-rated bistros are springing up on every corner. So if my impression of Harlem is out of date or insensitive, I apologize. But this is not about Harlem per se. It is about Adam Lanza going to the ‘hood to buy an assault rifle from Hakim the Gun Merchant.
Of course, Lanza (like the majority of mass shooters) does not really exactly blend in the ‘hood. He’s a scrawny white kid with goggly eyes who mutters audibly to himself as he wanders the mean streets in search of Hakim. Maybe he approaches a group of local tough guys who are hanging out on a street corner getting high (or composing string quartets, or whatever they do). Lanza (who, bear in mind, is crazy – sane people don’t do what he has in mind; why would they?) says, more or less, “Excuse me, gentlemen. Can you direct me to the nearest merchant who sells machine guns to criminals and lunatics?”
I don’t know what the local tough guys say in response to this (it’s probably not printable - this is a family blog); I doubt it is very helpful to Mr. Lanza. But they get to thinking (after he has wandered away, muttering, to buy some more aspirin and No-Doz) that this guy is looking for guns, and he’s either a cop (they’ll take anyone, these days), or else he’s a potential customer, in either of which cases, Hakim the Gun Merchant would probably like to know about it. So they tell their cousin who was once in jail for a couple of days with somebody who claimed to know Hakim, that there’s an incredibly geeky white kid wandering around trying to buy machine guns. Eventually, word of this gets to Hakim who, having done a bit of basic research of the sort that gun dealers who want to stay out of prison get adept at, concludes Lanza is not a cop and goes looking for his would-be customer, accompanied as always by “Big Ernie” and “Bigger Ernie”, whose job it is to deal with anyone who is not a cop and tries to cause trouble for Hakim.
(Here I am reminded of a passage in the George V. Higgins gangster classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle in which Jackie Brown, himself a sometime gun peddler to the Mob, is trying to acquire military rifles from some naïve soldiers who seem bent on spending the rest of their lives in Leavenworth. The guy Brown is buying the guns from suggests they drive into a grove of trees to meet his colleagues who are bringing the guns. Brown declines the suggestion, explaining (approximately)
“…I ain’t so dumb as to go into the woods to meet some people with machine guns who know I’ve got money. This life is hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”)
But Adam Lanza wasn’t Jackie Brown. Not street smart. Not part of the criminal culture. And not capable of getting himself admitted to that semi-exclusive subculture. Too weird. Too crazy. Too utterly lacking in anything a criminal would respect, identify with or relate to. When he is approached by Hakim (assuming Hakim bothers to track him down, which is unlikely), and Hakim says “I understand you have an interest in a machine gun,” Lanza says “I have $500 for an assault rifle.” Whereupon Big and Bigger Ernie take his money, maybe kill him, and give him no gun, in part because, now that he’s dead he has no need for a gun, and in part because they are criminals, and this is how they deal with people who have money and no backup.
In short, I reject Pratt’s thesis – his bit of divinely revealed Truth – that creating obstacles to gun ownership won’t help stop gun violence because the criminals will get guns in other ways. And he’s right. Joe Criminal will get guns from Hakim the Gun Merchant. But Jared Loughner wouldn’t. James Holmes wouldn’t. Seung-Hui Cho wouldn’t. And neither would Adam Lanza.
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