What a genuine compromise looks like is that each side gives some things, and each side gets some things. And both feel like they net-benefitted.
Ok, so what would that look like?
(I should note that this give-and-take idea isn’t an argument for how things ought to be, it’s a description of how things are. Because of the incentives here, this is the only way a major gun law for either side can pass at the federal level. There is an outside chance that given the right emergency, a one-sided law could pass by force. But that could — for these same game theoretic reasons — set off a chain-reaction of backlash that gets arbitrarily bad. Like anywhere from Waco bad to civil war bad.)
For the gun control side: Swiss-style universal background checks
Yup, the big enchilada. Gun rights people often worry that UBCs will turn into the government tracking (and later confiscating) everybody’s guns. Statistically, most of the states that have created a registry have indeed gone on to use their registry to ban certain guns (specifically: California, Connecticut, DC, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York), so this system prevents that while still mandating that every gun purchase goes through a background check. It’s modeled closely on Switzerland’s system. Here’s how it works:
- Any gun buyer can log into the NICS background check system and enter their personal information. The system gives them a check number that expires in 1 week. (For reference here is ATF Form 4473, the background check form.)
- The buyer can then buy firearms from any legal seller. They have to meet face-to-face (or ship the gun to a licensed dealer for the buyer to do the check with), and the buyer shows the check number. The seller verifies the buyer’s ID, enters the check number into the NICS system, and the system returns just one word: “approved” or “denied”. If the check is approved, they can proceed with the sale.
- The system doesn’t collect any information at all on the item(s) being sold/transferred (type, make, model, quantity, etc.) — its only job is to check on whether the buyer is legally allowed to purchase firearms. After one week, when the check number expires, the system doesn’t retain any records. (That information is already archived for 20 years on the Form 4473 for all gun shop sales.) The system collects no information about the seller, as it’s designed to work without even knowing the seller’s identity.
- Transfers between family members are exempt. Firearm loans of up to 14 days are also exempt — this is to accommodate a situation where, say, two people are on a backcountry hunting trip and one needs to lend the other a gun during the trip. They need some way to do that without committing a felony.
This has a number of things going for it. First, it hands gun control groups the item at the very top of their wishlist. A background check on every single gun sale in the country. It opens up NICS to private individuals, which gun owners have long wanted — it’s nice peace of mind to be able to run a background check if you’re selling a gun to someone you don’t know well. And it does all of that in a way that preserves family transfers, respects temporary loans, and makes a registry technologically impossible.
For the gun rights side: reform Depression-era laws on barrel length and silencers
Because of an 85-year-old law (the National Firearms Act, or NFA), rifles and shotguns in the US must have a minimum barrel length (16″ and 18″, respectively). So you can go to the store, pass a background check, and buy a rifle with a 16″ barrel. But possessing that same exact rifle with a 15″ barrel is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison.
To buy a short-barreled rifle or shotgun (SBR or SBS) legally, you pay a $200 tax to the ATF, and then you wait. Currently the average wait time is 11 months. Many people incorrectly believe that the long wait is for some kind of James Bond background check that takes 11 months to do. It’s not; SBRs/SBSes are subject to the exact same background check as all firearms are. The 11-month wait is literally just for the ATF to get through its paperwork backlog. Also, if you loan your SBR to a family member, that loan is a felony punishable by 10 years in federal prison. To stay out of jail, you’d have to do the $200 tax + 11-month wait again just to loan the gun to your dad. Then when he gives it back to you? $200 tax + 11-month wait again. All NFA items have to go through this same process. Legally, an SBR is treated identically to a grenade launcher.
As an illustration of how arbitrary that is, a well-meaning gun owner who cut his gun in half as a form of renunciation unknowingly broke this law — his video shows him red-handed doing what the NFA describes as “illegally manufacturing a short-barreled rifle”. For the harmless act in that video, he can be jailed for 10 years.
Contrary to popular belief, the barrel length law has nothing to do with dangerousness; the shorter the barrel on a rifle or shotgun, the less powerful and less accurate it is. The law is actually an interesting relic of how the NFA came to be. The first draft of the NFA included all handguns — in 1934 the $200 tax was equivalent to $3700 today, and it was designed to effectively ban all handguns.
The bill’s writers added the barrel length rules to stop people from buying a rifle, cutting down the barrel and the stock to make it almost as short as a handgun, and then saying, “It’s a rifle, not a handgun.” There was only one problem: there was no political support to include handguns in the NFA. The law wouldn’t pass in that form. So the writers removed handguns from the NFA, but they never removed the barrel length rules that were only there to close the handgun loophole. That is why today a 16” barrel is fine while a 15” barrel is 10 years in federal prison.
Also because of the NFA, silencers, aka suppressors, are currently in this same legal category. What do suppressors do? Well, apart from an explosion or a rocket launch, a gunshot is quite simply the loudest sound you will ever hear. It is deafeningly, dangerously loud, around 165 decibels. Decibels are a logarithmic scale, so every 10 dB is 2x as loud. A jackhammer is 115 dB. A jet airplane taking off 25 yards away is 130 dB. The OSHA standard for sound that will instantly damage your hearing is 140 dB. Guns are another 4-6x louder than that OSHA cutoff.
A silencer lowers a gunshot to about 130 dB. That’s still 3x louder than a jackhammer. Extremely loud, but just quiet enough to not instantly damage your hearing. Gunshot detection systems like ShotSpotter still pick up silenced gunshots, because they listen for sound signature in addition to volume. Silencers are the only way to avoid hearing damage in situations where there’s no chance to put on hearing protection — that’s why in countries like Norway, silencers are completely unregulated and it’s considered unsafe to hunt without one.
(We have an in-depth article about silencers if you’d like more details on them.)
This is a proposal to remove short barrels and silencers from the NFA. Instead of putting them in the same category as grenade launchers, treat them like any other gun — available to adults who pass the background check, denied to those who don’t.