The Brady Bill and Hunting: Issues to Carry Us into 2006
December 20, 2005

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

There will be several public policy debates related to firearms in 2006, what promises to be a hot congressional election year. Some are carryovers because the anti-gunners never give up on anything in their agenda. But you’d be surprised to learn that the Brady Act will be back on the front burner.

That’s due in part to the demand by some anti-gunners for the addition of more names to the National Instant Check System (NICS) database, including people on the terrorist “watch lists” and people who have been committed to mental health institutions. And the push is already on.

Two days after Thanksgiving, Associated Press (AP) claimed that mental records were missing from the FBI’s NICS database. Well, actually, AP called it a “gun database.” But that’s the state of journalism these days. As a matter of fact, they’re not “missing;” they just haven’t been added to the NICS files.

In Alabama, the AP report began, a man with a history of mental illness killed two police officers with a rifle he bought on Christmas Eve. In suburban New York, a schizophrenic walked into a church during Mass and shot to death a priest and a parishioner. In Texas, a woman taking anti-psychotic medication used a shotgun to kill herself.

Not one of their names was in a database that licensed gun dealers must check before making sales—even though federal law prohibits the mentally ill from purchasing guns, the AP story noted.

Pending Legislation
Most states have privacy laws barring such information from being shared with law enforcement. Legislation pending in Congress that has bipartisan support seeks to get more of the disqualifying records in the database, AP reassured us.

In addition to mandating the sharing of mental health records, the legislation would require that states improve their computerized record-keeping for felony records and domestic violence restraining orders and convictions, which also are supposed to bar people from purchasing guns.

Similar measures, opposed by some advocates for the mentally ill and gun-rights groups, did not pass Congress in 2002 and 2004.

According to AP, the FBI has not taken a position on the bill, but the bureau is blunt about what adding names to its database would do.

“The availability of this information will save lives,” the FBI said in a recent report.

More than 53 million background checks for gun sales have been conducted since (November) 1998, when the NICS replaced a five-day waiting period. More than 850,000 sales have been denied, the FBI reported; in most of those cases, the applicant had a criminal record.

A criminal record is the most common reason a prospective gun buyer would be rejected.

The Miami Herald

Less Than 2%
Gun Week would point out that the 850,000 denials amount to well less than 2% of all the guns purchased with NICS checks in the past seven years.

However, the anti-gunners, many in the media and several politicians are expecting to achieve a Utopian perfect world.

Among them is Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) who has sponsored federal legislation to deal with what she says are millions of records that are either missing or incomplete. “The computer is only as good as the information you put in it,” McCarthy said, according to AP.

“In the Alabama case,” AP continued, “police say Farron Barksdale ambushed the officers as they arrived at the home of his mother in Athens, AL, on Jan. 2, 2004. Barksdale had been committed involuntarily to mental hospitals on at least two occasions, authorities said.

“Facing the death penalty, he has pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of mental disease and defect.

“The shootings led Alabama lawmakers to share with the FBI the names of people who have been committed involuntarily to mental institutions. But just 20 other states provide NICS at least some names of people with serious mental illness, a disqualifier for gun purchases under federal law since 1968.

“Shayla Stewart had been hospitalized five times in Texas, twice by court order. Yet Stewart was able to buy a shotgun at a Wal-Mart in 2003 because Texas considers mental health records confidential.

“The same is true in New York, where Peter Troy was twice admitted to mental hospitals but bought a .22-caliber rifle that he used in the shootings inside a Long Island church in March 2002. Troy is serving consecutive life terms for the killings,” Associated Press continued.

As a result of the church shootings, AP reported that McCarthy and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation to close “the gaps in the background check system.” The bill would have required the states to give the FBI their records and provided $250 million in grants to cover their costs.

But you can also look for some good news in 2006, as more and more general media outlets begin to sound more pro-hunting, following the lead of the nation’s leading bell-cow newspaper, The New York Times. In its Sunday, Dec. 4 edition, The Times ran two pro-hunting items.

The first was an article by “Own Towns” columnist Peter Applebome in the Main News section which stressed that “one good argument for suburban Rambos to shoot deer” was that “Bambi is destroying the forest.”

Hunting Goes Green
Applebome stresses that he has never hunted and never plans to; that he wouldn’t know a Glock from a Remington. But his article, entitled “The Greening of Hunter Orange,” focuses on the idea that hunting is ecologically sound given the present state of the environment. He notes many reasons why animal populations, particularly deer and bear, have been getting out of control, especially the black bear in neighboring New Jersey. Taking all of the elements into consideration, Applebome offers his own rationale for supporting the benefits of hunting.

But that wasn’t the end of The Times’ surprises. In its popular “Week in Review” section, it carried an article on the ecological benefits of deer hunting. “For Environmental Balance, Pick Up a Rifle,” by Nicholas D. Kristof—perhaps one of the newspaper’s most anti-gun commentators—that points out that deer kill more humans each year than bears, wolves, cougars and other predators, primarily because of the road hazards they create. He also mentions ticks and Lyme disease and says that the answer to regaining an environmental balance is hunting.

Kristof also appeals to the dyed in the wool environmentalists and protectionists by advising them: “Go green: shoot to kill.”

He concludes with the following brief paragraph:

“So it’s time to reestablish a balance in the natural world—by accepting the idea that hunting is as natural as bird-watching.”

But The Times is not the only major paper to find a good side to hunting. USA Today, the nation’s largest daily newspaper, covered hunting from a dollars and cents’ perspective in “A-hunting we will go—after time at the spa” in its Nov. 30 edition. Coverage focused on the appeal of upscale hunting resorts and the pastime’s support from the mass market, evidenced by the many retail giants’ mushrooming destination stores. The article cited the 8% growth of sales of hunting and shooting products, industry wide, from 2003 to 2004, reflecting an increase to $2.9 billion, and it mentioned that additional tens of billions are spent on lodging, travel and other costs.

How The Times and USA Today will affect public opinion remains to be seen. But one thing you can count on: their columns will affect what other newspapers as well as radio stations say about hunting in the coming year—or years.

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