As someone with a not insignificant bourbon collection, you can imagine I'm a fan of bars. There's one that is doing everything it can to irk me, and that's the American Bar Association.
I know plenty of pro-gun lawyers, but the organization that purports to represent them has a problem.
They seem to want to drum up business for attorneys. I guess that's fine, in some cases, but the problem is that their latest stunt is another attempt to rally infringement on our right to keep and bear arms.
This time, it's by blaming the victim, something I'd thought they'd abandoned ages ago.
The American Bar Association (ABA) has voted to recommend American polities adopt criminal or civil penalties for people who do not “promptly” report the theft or loss of firearms. A paragraph was added to the resolution recommending the statutes, rules and regulation “include safeguards to protect a person’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination”.
The ABA has championed many infringements on rights protected by the Second Amendment, starting in 1965. The ABA lists 24 years of the last 60 where they advocated for more restrictions on the ownership and use of firearms.
...When people cite the ABA, they are citing a leftist (Progressive) organization. The ABA claims:
“Reporting stolen and lost guns to law enforcement is a proven way to reduce violent gun crime,” the report of the ABA Standing Committee concludes.
The American Bar Association’s claim is not correct.
The Rand think tank reports there is no valid study that shows mandating the reporting of lost and stolen guns reduces crime, or even just violent crime committed with guns.
And Rand isn't exactly The Heritage Foundation, you know?
The problem here is that reporting stolen guns doesn't actually stop criminals from stealing them. At best, it simply allows the police to know where the gun came from should they recover it. That's it, and while that might be helpful for the gun owner, it doesn't change anything for the criminal before his arrest.
More than that, how do you prove someone knew their gun was missing? Do you lay your eyes on every gun you own every day?
Well, you probably do, but the average Bearing Arms reader is a gun person. We're not typical.
A lot of people have a gun they throw in their nightstand or on the top shelf of their closet, knowing it's there if they need it, and don't really look at it all that much. Yes, they should train with it more, but they're not required to; even if they were, a lot can happen between range days. If they don't see it, how are the police going to prove they knew it was gone and failed to report it?
However, the bigger problem here isn't just that they're saying this works when there's absolutely no reason to believe any such thing. It's that they're pushing for criminal or civil charges against people over something they're just making up claims about.
And it's not the first time.
The ABA isn't representing attorneys so much as anti-gun activists who are just very, very loud. Nothing about what they've pushed has been in defense of the Second Amendment, which is part of the United States Constitution, the foundational law of this country. One would imagine that if they were really concerned with the law, they'd start there.
But they didn't.
Kind of telling.
The truth is that national professional organizations have been captured by anti-gun forces, which means they will continue to peddle pseudoscience as established fact, all in an effort to leave us disarmed.
Unfortunately, there's not much most of us can do about any of it, unless we happen to be members of these organizations. Even then, trying to recapture them is an uphill fight.
Of course, we can also just ignore the nonsense, which is what I'm mostly going to do after I hit publish on this one.
