NRO: What Closing the Gun-Show Loophole Won’t Do

National Review, 1/16/2013 (Hat tip: J. Sinclair and John H. Detweiler) - Author, Clayton E. Cramer claims that, "It is an article of faith that closing the “gun-show loophole” would make America a safer place." He adds, "This might seem surprising, and at first glance, it is. Except for one little detail: Criminals appear not to buy guns at gun shows, because guns are expensive. It is so much cheaper to steal guns instead." Cramer presents details on gun theft as related to recent mass murders in the U.S. Read more at NRO...

Mr. Cramer teaches history at the College of Western Idaho. His most recent book is My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill (2012). Read More......

Madness, Deinstitutionalization & Murder

For those of us who came of age in the 1970s, one of the most shocking aspects of the last three decades was the rise of mass public shootings: people who went into public places and murdered complete strangers. Such crimes had taken place before, such as the Texas Tower murders by Charles Whitman in 1966,¹ but their rarity meant that they were shocking.

Something changed in the 1980s: these senseless mass murders started to happen with increasing frequency. People were shocked when James Huberty killed twenty-one strangers in a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California in 1984, and Patrick Purdy murdered five children in a Stockton, California schoolyard in 1989. Now, these crimes have become background noise, unless they involve an extraordinarily high body count (such as at Virginia Tech) or a prominent victim (such as Rep. Gabrielle Giffords). Why did these crimes go from extraordinarily rare to commonplace?

For a while, it was fashionable to blame gun availability for this dramatic increase. But guns did not become more available before or during this change

Read more at the Federalist Society Read More......