Category: reason

The anti-crime agenda that President Joe Biden announced yesterday is heavy on gun control measures that cannot reasonably be expected to have a substantial impact on surging homicide rates. In particular, the benefits of cracking down on “rogue gun dealers” are bound to be slight, since only a small percentage of criminals buy firearms from federally licensed retailers.

Under the Biden administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy, gun dealers who “willfully” violate federal law will automatically lose their licenses “absent extraordinary circumstances.” That includes dealers who “willfully violate the law by failing to conduct required background checks, falsifying records, failing to respond to trace requests, refusing to permit ATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] to conduct inspections, or transferring firearms to persons who are prohibited from owning them.”

One glaring problem with that plan: According to a 2019 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), just 7 percent of criminals who use guns buy them “under their own name from a licensed firearm dealer.” Furthermore, such transactions are legal as long as the buyer is not disqualified from owning guns. A licensed dealer who sells a gun to someone who does not yet have a felony record, even if that person later uses the gun to commit a crime, is not violating federal law, let alone doing so “willfully.”

A dealer is violating federal law if he fails to conduct a background check or if he knowingly sells a firearm to someone who is legally disqualified. But even assuming the Biden administration’s new policy deters the “rogue gun dealers” who deliberately sell firearms to illegal buyers, people with felony records can always enlist people with clean records to buy guns for them. While such straw purchases are illegal, the dealer is willfully violating the law only if he knows that the buyer is acting on behalf of someone else.

In any event, the “zero tolerance” initiative will have no impact at all on the vast majority of guns used in crimes—something like 93 percent, according to the BJS study, which was based on a 2016 survey of prison inmates. The survey found that 43 percent of inmates who had used a gun obtained it “off the street or from the underground market,” 25 percent got it “from a family member or friend, or as a gift,” 7 percent “found it at the scene of the crime,” and 6 percent stole it.

The Biden administration plans to attack the underground market through “multijurisdictional firearms trafficking strike forces.” That attempt to prevent illegal gun sales probably will be about as effective as the government’s efforts to prevent illegal drug sales. With hundreds of millions of guns already in circulation, there will be far more than enough to supply every criminal in America even if the feds manage to snatch a few of them.

Biden wants to “strengthen our gun background check system” by expanding it to cover private sales, which would require new legislation. Needless to say, underground dealers who specialize in serving illegal gun buyers are unlikely to follow that requirement. So are millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans who simply want to sell a gun or two without the hassle and expense of going through a licensed dealer so a background check can be completed. The experience of states that already notionally require background checks for all gun transfers suggests that compliance would be the exception rather than the rule.

Biden claims “we know that if there is a strict enforcement of background checks, then fewer guns get into the hands of criminals.” Based on blocked purchases, he says background checks “have thus far kept more than 3 million guns out of the hands of…convicted felons, fugitives, domestic abusers, and others prohibited from being able to purchase a gun.” But the categories of prohibited gun buyers are absurdly broad, encompassing millions of Americans who have never demonstrated any violent tendencies. And judging from what typically happens after a purchase is blocked, few rejected buyers pose serious threats to public safety.

According to a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), background checks “resulted in about 112,000 denied transactions in fiscal year 2017.” Someone who tries to buy a gun even though he knows he is not legally allowed to own one is attempting a felony. If he lies on the ATF form that people have to fill out when they buy guns from federally licensed dealers, that’s another felony. But in fiscal year 2017, the GAO reported, the ATF thought just 12,700 of those 112,000 blocked buyers were worth investigating, and U.S. attorney’s offices had prosecuted only 12 of them as of June 2018. Justice Department officials told the GAO “prosecuting denial cases can require significant effort and may offer little value to public safety compared to other cases involving gun violence” (emphasis added).

A 2004 report from the Justice Department’s  inspector general sheds further light on the sort of gun buyers who are typically flagged by background checks. If the FBI cannot complete a background check within three business days, the dealer is allowed to complete the sale, so the ATF is sometimes tasked with seizing guns after the fact from people who are not legally allowed to own them. The inspector general noted that there were often delays in retrieving weapons from prohibited buyers, partly because “ATF special agents did not consider most of the prohibited persons who had obtained guns to be dangerous and therefore did not consider it a priority to retrieve the firearm promptly” (emphasis added).

Presumably some would-be gun buyers who fail background checks plan to use the weapon for criminal purposes. But contrary to what Biden seems to think, stopping someone from buying a firearm at a gun store is not the same as preventing him from obtaining one, as the data on sources of crime guns demonstrate.

The “assault weapon” ban that Biden once again urged Congress to pass is even less plausible as a response to rising homicides. The firearms covered by such laws account for a tiny fraction of the guns used in homicides, and there are plenty of equally lethal alternatives, as Biden himself has conceded.

Biden also mentioned banning “high-capacity magazines,” meaning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, which come standard with many of the most popular handguns and rifles sold in the United States. He obscured that point by saying “there’s no possible justification for having 100 rounds in a magazine.” In practice, the real issue is whether standard-capacity magazines holding, say, 12, 15, or 20 rounds are useful in some self-defense situations. The current and retired police officers who always insist that they be exempt from state restrictions on magazine capacity certainly seem to think so.

Biden is not even willing to acknowledge that the Second Amendment has anything to do with self-defense. “No one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something,” he said. Biden thought that comment was so clever that he repeated it: “Like I’ve said before: What do you think, the deer are wearing Kevlar vests?”

Biden’s lame joke is of a piece with his previous remarks about legitimate gun use, which suggest he thinks the Second Amendment is mainly about hunting rather than the fundamental right to armed self-defense. That misconception makes it hard to give him the benefit of the doubt when he touts new gun controls that have little or nothing to do with the problems he claims to be addressing.

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The culture-warring between Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and progressive educators reached a new level this week as the governor signed a bill to evaluate “intellectual diversity” at public colleges.

Or did it?

Certainly that’s what this story in the Tampa Bay Times suggests. The Washington Post also presents it that way. But this is more than merely a partisan fight over ideology on campus.

On Tuesday, DeSantis signed the Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Assessment into law. DeSantis commented at a press conference that day that colleges have become “hotbeds for stale ideology.” He added, “It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas. Unfortunately, now the norm is, these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted, and other viewpoints are shunned or even suppressed.”

The Times notes that DeSantis didn’t provide any examples of this happening when he signed the bill. But Reason‘s Robby Soave just noted a training session at the University of Oklahoma that encouraged professors to stop students from saying things others might find offensive; the trainers even claimed that free speech does not apply in college classrooms. DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are not just inventing a problem here.

And while the coverage might give readers the impression that this law is of a piece with the governor’s well-publicized assault on Critical Race Theory and his push to make schools develop civics programs that teach kids that communism is bad, the Florida bill’s text shows that it isn’t bad, shouldn’t be particularly controversial, and probably wouldn’t have gotten as much attention if it hadn’t emerged amid all this fighting about what schools teach.

The bill does not mandate or punish the teaching of any particular point of view. Nor does it ask students or teachers what their personal views are. It requires state universities to conduct an annual survey to determine “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented and members of the university community, including students, faculty, and staff, feel free to express their beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom.”

Schools could conceivably face financial punishment someday if the powers that be decide that they aren’t intellectually diverse enough. But there’s no actual penalty in the bill. This is not like Idaho yanking funding from colleges that allegedly teach Critical Race Theory. It’s not even like Florida’s own ban on teaching Critical Race Theory (or rather, what the Board of Education defines as Critical Race Theory) in secondary schools.

The Times piece gets a little bendy attempting to convince readers that this bill could be used to reward or punish individual professors for their views. The reporter insists that one of the bill’s proponents, Sen. Ray Rodriques (R–Estero), is wrong when he says professors can’t be punished because the bill “offers no assurances that the survey’s answers will be anonymous, and there is no clarity on who can use the data and for what purpose.” Except there’s the entire First Amendment—and a bunch of Supreme Court case law—protecting professors from punishment for what they say as long as it’s within the scope of their duties. That specific protections aren’t included within this bill doesn’t mean they don’t already exist.

Over at The Volokh Institute, Jonathan Adler, law professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, also takes issue with how the Tampa Bay Times has decided to characterize the bill’s contents:

If the surveys called for in this bill facilitate actual assaults on academic freedom, any such assaults should be condemned. But the problem in such instances would be the actual assaults on academic freedom, not the effort to determine whether state educational institutions actually provide open learning environments. In recent years we have seen political activists abuse open records laws to pursue academics they did not like. The problem in such cases was not the existence of open records laws, but their political misuse. The same would hold true here.

The bill also expressly says that schools may not “shield students, faculty, or staff at state universities from free speech protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” This wording would seem to by its nature to preclude firing faculty for their positions .

There may be a certain hypocrisy to banning Critical Race Theory from discussion in public schools while at the same time passing laws aimed at ensuring intellectual diversity on campus. But that doesn’t make this new bill bad. If anything, the ideas behind it underline how wrong it was to try to control how public schools talk about racism in the first place.

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The BBC buried the lede when it reported that the number of millionaires increased by 5.2 million last year, bringing the total to 56.1 million globally during 2020. The bigger news in the BBC’s source—the 2021 global wealth report by the financial services company Credit Suisse—is that membership in the global middle class has exploded over the last two decades.

The report defines the global middle class to include adults whose assets amount to between $10,000 to $100,000. This group, the report says, has more than tripled in size in this century, “from 507 million in 2000 to 1.7 billion in mid-2020. This reflects the growing prosperity of emerging economies, especially China, and the expansion of the middle class in the developing world.” Meanwhile, the number of upper-middle class adults—with wealth ranging from $100,000 to $1 million—has more than doubled since 2000, from 208 million to 583 million.

These wealth trends track the trajectory of rising per capita global incomes. Back in 2018, Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas and his colleagues reported that half of the world’s people lived in households that qualified as middle-class or rich. The Brookings researchers defined the global middle class as people earning, on a purchasing power parity basis, anywhere from $11 to $110 per day.

Brookings also reported that the percentage of people around world living in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $2 per day per person) dropped from 42 percent of people (1.9 billion) in 1981 to under 8 percent (600 million) in 2018. Sadly, the share of people living in extreme poverty ticked up in 2020 to more than 9 percent (715 million) of the world’s population, thanks to the economic effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The fall in extreme poverty is likely to stall for the next several years, as the pandemic continues to batter poor countries’ economies.

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Remember the battle over trigger warnings? These classroom devices—reminders that students were about to encounter material that might upset, offend, or traumatize them—were all the rage a few years ago, prompting significant public debate over whether professors were coddling their students.

They haven’t exactly fallen out of fashion, but it seems that we hear less about them. Researchers have also produced numerous studies showing that they don’t work—in fact, they may make people even more anxious.

Brandeis University has now turned on trigger warnings as well—because the word trigger is, well, triggering.

“The word ‘trigger’ has connections to guns for many people,” notes Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center (PARC). “We can give the same heads-up using language less connected to violence.”

PARC maintains an “oppressive language list” that includes trigger warning. Also on the list is rule of thumb, (which does not have offensive origins, despite the list’s assertion), killing it, (PARC wants students to say great job! instead), and take a stab at something.

The university does not require students and staff to cease using such language, it just recommends softer vocabulary. I’ve long made fun of universities for taking such a broad view of what counts as offensive language, but the fact that trigger warning—a concept designed to prevent offense—has itself landed on such a list is fairly amusing.

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A federal judge has ordered the FBI to halt its attempted forfeiture of the contents of 369 safe deposit boxes after finding that law enforcement has provided “no factual basis” for the seizures.

The temporary injunction, issued Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner, is the latest blow to the FBI’s attempt to seize millions of dollars in cash, jewelry, and other valuables from the safe deposit boxes once held at U.S. Private Vaults in Beverly Hills, California. When the FBI raided the facility on March 22, agents were armed with a warrant that explicitly forbade them from seizing the contents of the safe deposit boxes kept there. But the FBI took them into custody anyway, and in mid-May filed administrative forfeiture proceedings against 369 of the nearly 800 boxes seized—including more than $85 million in cash and other valuables.

The FBI contends that the contents of those boxes are the ill-gotten gains of criminal activity. Plaintiffs in the case say they’ve been unfairly targeted by an unlawful search and seizure that violated their Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights.

Klausner sided with the box owners on Tuesday, writing that the FBI failed to respect due process by seizing the contents of safe deposit boxes without even identifying which laws the owners supposedly broke. Instead, the FBI has tried to claim a wide range of different criminal acts, including everything from forgery to counterfeiting and smuggling to bank fraud, in order to take everything in one fell swoop.

“This list of purported statutory bases for forfeiture is anything but specific,” writes Klausner, noting that the FBI cited a portion of the U.S. criminal code that includes 35 different sections. “This notice, put bluntly, provides no factual basis for the seizure of Plaintiffs’ property whatsoever.”

None of U.S. Private Vaults’ clients have been charged with any crimes, even though the FBI has argued in court documents that “the majority of the box-holders are criminals who used USPV’s anonymity to hide their ill-gotten wealth.” The FBI has returned the contents from some of the seized safe deposit boxes, but only after brazenly rifling through private documents and potentially misplacing some box-holders’ valuables in an apparent attempt to find evidence of criminal activity.

“Hundreds of innocent people have had their lives turned upside down by the government’s $85 million cash grab,” says Robert Frommer, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian law firm that is representing the four plaintiffs at the center of Tuesday’s injunction. “This order squarely rejects the government’s ‘anemic notices’ as an unconstitutional attempt to take box holders’ property for no good reason.”

Even though Tuesday’s injunction applies directly to only four of the victims of the FBI’s raid, it effectively applies to everyone caught up in the forfeiture mess, according to IJ.

“Judge Klausner’s ruling is just another nail in the coffin of this ill-conceived administrative forfeiture gambit,” Benjamin Gluck, a California attorney who is representing several of the other people caught up in the FBI’s raid, tells Reason. “The government cannot proceed because it cannot even articulate, much less prove, why these people’s property should be forfeited.”

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