This ought to be a safe statement; there are folks who shouldn’t be allowed to purchase a gun.  Perhaps they have a history of violent crime or they’re mentally ill – but reasonable people would agree those individuals should be somehow screened out and prohibited from buying guns.

But, in fact, it’s easy to get a gun.  One could be a serial murderer on a mass killing spree.  Tired of the old gun and want a new one?  No problem.  Or one could be a psychotic who thinks the shoppers at the Safeway down the street are plotting to kill you and decide to get them before they get you.  Want something special for the occasion?  No worries.  Go to the local gun show and get as many guns as you want, no questions asked.  Hell, if you want it today just shop the classifieds.  Easy as pie.  None of that silly background checking to contend with.  For Christ’s sake, you want…no, you need the goddamn thing NOW.

The issue isn’t the folks who purchase guns legally.  Though they do buy guns in staggering numbers (according to FBI statistics, there were 12.7 million background checks
on prospective gun buyers last year), the issue is the number of guns sold without the background checks that would prevent a bunch of innocent people being slaughtered year after year.

Eliot Spitzer and Peter Pope wrote a short piece at Slate arguing that, given that the federal government isn’t likely to enact any new gun legislation, a more pragmatic way to promote safe gun sales is to move up the supply chain and exercise some good old free market pressure.

Given that the government procures huge volumes of guns every year for sheriffs, highway patrol, police officers, FBI agents, intelligence agents, DEA and IRS agents, immigration and park services personnel, soldiers, airman, marines, and sailors, Spitzer and Pope suggest that government procurement be tied to the manufacturers commitment to safe gun sales.

What is striking is that the government buys guns from manufacturers who also sell them to criminals—either knowingly or by willfully overlooking the behavior of the retail outlets that the gun companies use as their distribution system.

This prompts a simple question: Why do we buy guns from companies that permit their products to be sold to bad guys?

If we can use a capital infusion to a bank as an opportunity to control executive compensation and to limit use of private planes, why can’t the government use its weight as the largest purchaser of guns from major manufacturers to reward companies that work to keep their products out of criminals’ hands? Put another way, if it is too difficult to outlaw bad conduct through statutes, why not pay for good conduct? Why not require vendors to change their behavior if they want our tax dollars?

Look, by all rights there are folks out there that have illegally obtained guns and have plans to use them in violent crime.  Those individuals are, for all intents and purposes, our enemies.  In the same way we would expect the power of the feds to come crashing down on a company illegally selling weapons to North Korea, for instance, we should expect the feds to pressure gun manufacturers from providing those individuals…our enemies… their weapons of choice.

It seems eminently sensible to me.

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