Bump Stock Ban: Not Just Bad Constitutional Law, But Also Low-Caliber Policy

Nearly 15 months ago, Las Vegas experienced the worst mass shooting committed by a single individual on American soil. The gunman murdered 58 people, as well as injuring over 800 people. The mass shooting brought up the discussion of mental illness linked to mass shootings. My analysis on the matter found that there is not a solid link between mass shootings and mental illness. The Las Vegas shooting brought up another topic in the gun debate: bump fire stocks. The bump fire stock, simply known as a bump stock, is a device attached to a semi-automatic rifle that allows for more than one shot to be fired when the trigger is pulled. Although the bump stock allows for mimicry of an automatic fire, it still requires multiple pulls of the trigger to have the desired effect. Essentially, it allows the semi-automatic rifle to act more like an automatic in terms of the amount of rounds one can fire in a minute. The gunman of the Las Vegas shooting used the bump stock to wreak havoc on those people.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because over a year after the shooting, the Trump administration's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) amended gun regulations to have guns with bump stocks categorized as "machine guns," and thus illegal. While President Trump issued a memorandum in February in response to the Parkland mass shooting to allow for such categorization, it took a few months to reach this moment. The point of amending these regulations is to show that the Trump administration is serious about curtailing gun violence.

There is a matter of constitutionality. The Cato Institute argues that the legislation should have been brought through Congress, not shoehorned into old pieces of legislation by executive agencies (also see National Review argument). There is also the argument that the Ninth and Tenth Amendment prohibit such legislation from being passed on the federal level, i.e., it should be done by state governments. Allowing for such a precedent would not only erode the separation of powers, but it could allow for semi-automatic rifles to be categorized as automatic rifles, as the American Enterprise Institute argues.

Let's forget the constitutionality argument for a moment. Even if it were constitutional, I would have a problem with it on a policy level. The National Rifle Association (NRA) was actually in favor of banning bump stocks, and I had to ask myself why. Some thought it as a step that the NRA was in support of "common sense" gun legislation. I will take the more cynical route and say that the NRA wanted to come off as less extremist as it does in the mainstream media by showing that it supports gun control. How so?

Prior to the Las Vegas shooting, the bump stock was considering something of a novelty. While it allows for a semi-automatic to de facto become more of an automatic rifle, the bump stock considerably sacrifices accuracy for a more rapid fire. The Las Vegas shooting was unique in that the shooter was 1,200 feet away and indiscriminately firing on a crowd with the sole purpose of maximizing damage. This would explain why I had such trouble finding empirical research on the effectiveness of a bump stock ban. Bump stocks had not been used in previous mass shootings, and have not been used since the Las Vegas shooting. Their lack of usage in homicides would explain why researchers would not bother analyzing the effects of such a ban.

This does not consider gun violence in the grander scheme of things. Rifles are not responsible for a majority of homicides. Quite the contrary! From 2013 to 2017, rifles only accounted for 1,582 homicides, which amount to 2.3 percent of all homicides (FBI Crime Statistics). The vast majority of homicides are committed by handguns, which would make a bump stock ban ineffective since bump stocks cannot be used for handguns. A bump stock ban would not affect nearly 98 percent of homicides. As for the other 2.3 percent, bump stocks are not used in homicides, as previously stated. Even the New York Times asked gun experts for their opinion on various gun control policy options, and their conclusion was that a bump stock ban would be ineffective (see chart below).

To recap, bump stocks have a high tradeoff between speed and accuracy. The vast majority of homicides are not committed with rifles. As unfortunate and tragic as the Las Vegas shooting was, the use of bump stocks for the purpose of homicide is an anomaly. It goes after a symptom rather than any of the root causes of gun violence. Therefore, there is no logical argument illustrating how a bump stock ban would be effective in reducing gun violence. Since most gun enthusiasts have little to no need for bump stocks, a bump stock ban is a low-hanging fruit for Democrats and Republicans alike. All a bump stock ban is going to do is create the illusion that the government is doing something about gun violence without actually doing anything.

DOMA Ruled Unconstitutional

The Defense of Marriage Act (H.R. 3396), or DOMA for short, was a law written up by Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) that was passed overwhelmingly by Congress back in 1996.  The bill stated that no state needs to treat a same sex marriage as a marriage, and that the federal government defines marriage exclusively as a union between one man and one woman.  This piece of federal legislation has defined the legal definition of marriage in our modern time.  However, a federal judge, Joseph Tauro, in Massachusetts has undone that by ruling that the legislation is a violation of the Tenth Amendment.

For the sake of the Constitution of the United States of America, this judge deserves kudos for standing up for the Tenth Amendment.....you know, the amendment that states that anything not explicitly delegated to the federal government goes to the States or the people.  Many of those on the Religious Right just love using the Tenth Amendment to argue against Roe v. Wade, which they rightfully should.  But when that argument comes right back at them with regards to same-sex unions, they go ballistic.

I think what many people [like to] forget is that the purpose of the judicial system is judicial review, a practice in this country that is extracted from Article III of the Constitution and dates back all the way to Marbury v. Madison.  Judicial review, which is not to be confused with judicial activism, is one of the primary balances that the judicial branch has on the legislative branch.  It gives the courts the power to rule whether an enacted law is constitutional or not. 

That is what Tauro did--he did his job by ruling that DOMA is unconstitutional.  Whether it was Tauro's intention to bring balance of power between the state and federal government is moot at this point.  This case brings the Tenth Amendment back to the arena, thereby discontinuing the centralization of power at the federal level.  The judge also ruled that it violates the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which essentially is the equivalent of an equal protection clause, which is an interesting argument that is expounded upon here, along with more descriptive about how it violates the Tenth Amendment. 

Regardless of your opinion on the matter, I think one thing that everybody can agree on is that the resultant of this federal court decision is going to play a huge role in how laws regarding the definition of marriage will play out in future legislation.

Arizona's Immigration Law: My Two Cents on the Whole Matter

One of the brouhahas in the news lately has been about a recent bill passed in Arizona (SB 1070), that states that Arizona police can question somebody about their immigration status upon “reasonable suspicion.” I would first like to state that the federal government already has such laws on the books. What Arizona has done is made it a crime on a state level, and what’s more, is that because Arizonians are fed up with illegal immigration, they’ll actually enforce the law. Second of all, Arizona is able to do so within the scope of Ninth and Tenth Amendments (i.e., since it’s not explicitly stated within the Article of the Constitution for the federal government to handle the matter, it goes to the states).  Plus, the law was supported by 70% of Arizonians.  For some reason, I would imagine that living on the border and having to deal with it day-by-day gives a little more credence than some putz on the Left by grossly offending people by erroneous analogizing this law with Nazi Germany, thereby diminishing the horrors that those in the Holocaust went through.  But I only digress.....slightly.....     

Personally, I am glad that somebody is saying ¡ya basta! to the fact there are millions of people who are here illegally. Yes, we’re still a nation of laws, and if you break a law, you are a criminal. Is it really any different if you’re pulled over by the police and you don’t have your driver’s license? I don’t think so!

I find a few issues with the approach of the whole immigration issue, and it has nothing to do with the state of Arizona actually deciding to actually confronting the issue rather than pretending as if one didn’t exist.

The biggest issue I have is with a lack of border enforcement. We’re worried about some non-existent enemy in Afghanistan while in the same breath, we cannot even defend ourselves when an even bigger problem sits right on our Southern border, especially in light of the narco-terrorism that is plaguing Mexico. Put up a huge fence and make sure that nobody crosses. If the defender in a soccer game is doing his job, there theoretically is no need for a goalie.  Or here's another way of saying this: if we had a fence up in the first place, none of this would have become an issue.

This, of course, is only a short-term solution.

Securing the border needs to be coupled with a temporary worker program. Why do I say that? Because the United States has had this issue in its recent memory—during the 1950s. During the mid-1950s, there was rampant illegal immigration. When border security was combined with a temporary worker program, illegal immigration dropped 95%. If we did this, we’d see a shrinking underground economy. Furthermore, by making the Mexicans citizens, it would force them to pay taxes, at least in theory.

The reason why these two initiatives wouldn’t work in practice is because of how our already-burdensome tax system is set up. The lower half of Americans does not pay any taxes. If we absorb newly arrived Mexicans into our economy, they will expand upon the lower half because just about everybody who crosses the border to begin with is unskilled labor. At least with the immigrants that came into Ellis Island in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were actually skilled labor, i.e., they were able to make positive contributions to the advancement of America. The reason why I make a distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is that skilled labor is more likely to advance upward [i.e., they won’t be stuck in poverty anymore].

Although a temporary worker program with secure borders sounds nice, it has to contend with one huge obstacle that they didn’t have back in the 1950s—dependency on government. Thanks to schmucks like LBJ, and more recently, Obama, we have created a society which is dependent on such “services,” if you can call them that, as Medicare, Social Security, welfare, free public education, the list goes on. Since these hypothetically absorbed workers would be lower-class because they are unskilled, the only thing they would do is expand the Nanny State’s already pervasive role, thereby causing further debt for America.

A temporary worker program with the status quo will only exacerbate the situation. Until more Americans get furious at a much higher furor about dependency on government, expanding deficits, and increasing invasiveness of the government, most Americans will view the Mexicans coming over to the United States as a socio-economic burden rather than people who just want a decent life for their families.

Some REAL Alternatives to ObamaCare

Many of my friends who are supportive of ObamaCare either accuse people on the Right, especially Republican congressmen, of merely being finger-pointing nay-sayers who don't care about the state of health care in America or merely want to see Obama fail. Well, the second part is true--honestly, who wants to see socialism ruin America? On a personal level, I've been accused of not caring about people with financial woes due to health care, which essentially portrays me as a "cold-hearted bastard."

Fallacious accusations set aside, I can definitely state two things. First of all, ObamaCare, whether in the form of a government option or insurance reform, is nothing more than a Trojan Horse for a single-payer system, something that he has promised since the campaign trail. This would unquestionably cause rationing, politicizing, long wait lines, and a significant decrease of quality in health care. I don't care how good of an orator the President was last night; this false Messiah doesn't have the ability to suspend the laws of economics.

Second, one of the bigger myths surrounding this debate is that conservatives or libertarians don't provide alternatives. This is patently false! After about an hour of research and talking to one of my fellow libertarian friends, this a compilation of alternatives I came up with:

1) Personal responsibility! This is my personal favorite, no pun intended. Sometimes, I'm truly surprised at how unhealthy the "American Way of Life" can be. You know the percentage of health-care spending linked to bad diet, lack of exercise, and other risky behavior, such as excessive smoking and drinking? 70%! This should be no shock to people. Two-thirds of America are overweight, half of which are obese. One in six Americans smoke.  Half of Americans don't exercise enough to have an impact on their health.  Instead of focusing on treatment (rather than prevention), how about encouraging healthy behavior instead?  If people are taught how to eat healthily, learn how to exercise, and embrace preventative health care as a part of their daily life, the demand for health care would be considerably less.  So I provided a simple, but nevertheless nifty formula:

Healthier lifestyle = Less health care bills

 

2) Tort reform! America is a sue-happy country, mostly because if you can get a whole lot of money for doing virtually nothing, why not? But guess what? This causes doctors to be scared to practice without a lawsuit, which leads to higher insurance premiums and overtesting. Between overtesting and the ridiculous paperwork that needs to be filled out, we're talking up to $500 billion (yes, that's billion!) in wasted money. (Actual savings are closer to $54B over ten years. Please see my addendum in the comments section as to why I changed my figures; edited 4/7/2014). Putting a cap on malpractice suits will decrease a need for paperwork, as well as decrease insurance premiums, which ultimately leads to a decrease in inefficient health care spending.

3) End the distortion of the supply of the doctor labor market: The AMA limits how many doctors can be certified, thus altering the medical labor market. With less doctors, the AMA creates a shortage of doctors and a net diminution of overall care, not to mention $40 billion spent. Instead of the government condoning this action, maybe the government should help increase the amount of doctors admitted by the AMA. That way, there are more doctors in this country. More doctors in the labor market means they don't have the ability to make outrageous charges anymore.

4) Stop employer-mandated insurance: The reason why health care has become a hot-button issue in the first place is because our unemployment rate is high. What exacerbates this fact is the fact that the costs of health care are hidden. How much does an office visit cost? Or double-bypass surgery? Nobody knows! "Who cares what it costs? My insurance company covers it," says Joe Schmo. No wonder we have an over-consumption in health-care services. It's easier to spend other peoples' money than spending your own. If we ended employer-based insurance, a few things would happen. One, over-consumption of health care would desist. Two, there would be transparency of health care costs. Three, health care could be bought like any other good, and it wouldn't matter if you're employed or not. That means, like any other good, health care will be more competitive. Competition creates incentive to offer better health care at a lower cost. A win-win for everybody!

5) Allow insurance to be carried across state lines: This would be feasible once we stop employer-mandated insurance. If we permit this interstate exchange, not only would this bring about the advantages inherent within [interstate] competition, but it would also cover 17 million uninsured, and here's the catch--it wouldn't cost a penny!

6) Stop discriminating against workers without employer-provided health insurance. Provide workers with the same tax breaks as those with employer-based insurance.  In this day in age, less taxation is a good thing.

7) Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).  An HSA is a high-deductible medical savings account in which the savings are drafted before taxation.  Not only is the premium much lower (simply because you're not paying for preventative health care), but the other advantage to this program is that whatever you do not use for the current year rolls over into the next year.  This concept works together very well with my next proposition, which is.....

8) Less health insurance. Yes, I know this concept seems foreign to you. "Health care" and "health insurance" have become interchangeable terms in everyday vernacular, although history tells a different story. Until the designing of Medicare in 1965, only a small minority of Americans even had health insurance. On average, it costs $500 a year just to administer health insurance, which comes out to about $1.6 billion. On top of that, insurance comes with filing claims. Guess how much this costs? About $210 billion! We use health care to cover just about everything. Insurance plans have many procedures that most Americans don't use, and we have to pay for it. If you walk into a hospital and have insurance, it's essentially applied that someone else is footing the bill. I recently watched a John Stossel special where he talked about the hypothetical, but nevertheless ridiculous notion of what would happen if groceries had their own insurance. Remember the aforementioned Joe Schmo? If Joe had grocery insurance, he'd go with a $300 bottle of wine. But if it were his own money he were spending, maybe he'd go with the $8 bottle of wine, or better yet, realize that he doesn't need the wine at all. With less health insurance, there is less needless consumption, which ultimately leads to, you guessed it, lower health care prices.
 
9) Cut out federal and state level benefits.  Here's another example of "government is the problem" rather than "government is the solution."  Programs such as acupuncture, alcohol treatment, pastoral counseling, massage therapy, marriage therapy, and even breast reductions, are government mandates.  Although the 2,100 benefit mandates are small unto themselves, when they're added up, they raise premiums up 20-50%.  Although some of these benefits have good intentions behind them, I couldn't care less about good intentions if it cranks up the cost of health care.  By eliminating these mandates, we're one step closer to lowering costs and empowering people with their own health care decisions.

10) Transparency in health care costs.  If the government isn't going to totally self-deregulate, the least it should do is deliver consumer-oriented data that informs Americans the costs of health care services.  As I brought up in my fourth point, nobody knows the costs of health care.  If Americans know how much a given procedure costs, at least they would know if they're being ripped off or not.  That way, they could look at other practices that offer cheaper prices, thereby encouraging competition, and ultimately, lower prices.

Many of these suggestions don't cost anything, some cost a bit, but nothing compared to what ObamaCare would cost. Either way, in the end, it leads to a substantial net gain.  Financial empowerment leads to competition.  Competition leads to provide doctors with an incentive to deliver better health care for less.  Less money spent on health care expenditures makes Americans happy and free.  Now isn't that what we all want?

Gay Marriage Won't Cause The Sky To Fall In Vermont

Today is the first day that the state of Vermont has allowed "gay marriage" to be permitted.  After reading some conservative websites and blogs today, I was amazed at the amount of alarmism--it was like I was listening to a liberal environmentalist discuss global warming.  "If we allow gays to get married, it'll bring down the institution of marriage, which will bring down society as a whole."  This hot-button issue, of course, is not one to take lightly, especially since I'm a practicing Jew.  Nevertheless, it raises important questions.  I'm not going to start a discussion here on Judaism and homosexuality--I'll leave that for another day just because it would take up twice the ink that a secular/civil argument would.  Plus, America is not a Jewish state, so in the case of Vermont, it's moot.  One thing I will say regarding that, though, is that in order to truly be tested, you truly need to be free, free to do a mitzvah as well as free to commit an issur (trasngression), G-d forbid.

The question at hand is the one of whether or not this civil (not religious, but civil) institution dubbed as "gay marriage" will cause ruin to society.  As always, I have my two cents.

First of all, we do live in a society where we have the freedom of religion, as guaranteed by the First Amendment of our Constitution.  But we also have an implicit freedom from religion, because if we didn't Fundamentalist Christians would be able to force their religion upon me.  As a religious minority, I fear that prospect as much as an atheistic government taking away my G-d-given right to practice Judaism.  The Religious Right, of course, will say that the institution of marriage predates the creation of the nation-state and government.  But guess what else does?  Homosexuality!  Look at any ancient society, minus the Israelites, and you'll find that there are varying degrees of homosexuality that were either tolerated, or even more glaring, accepted.  It's not as if homosexuality is anything new.  What's new is how we respond to the issues at hand.

Second, the notion of freedom is at stake in this discussion.  When I used to be a conservative ideologue (admittedly!), "freedom" was a buzzword that was often used, as was the phrase, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." When it came to discussing freedom and abortion, I argue[d] that because there is more than one life at stake, the life of the fetus superseded the mother's temporary inconvenience.  When I came to the issue of civil unions (or gay marriage), I was stuck because this did not, in any way, violate the libertarian principle of non-aggression.  A homosexual couple co-habiting doesn't violate a heterosexual's couple to commit themselves "until death do them apart."   As such,  they should be afforded that freedom.  As Kinky Friedman so eloquently stated, "I support gay marriage because I believe they have the right to be just as miserable as everybody else!"

Third, gays cannot, from an objective standpoint, be blamed for the downfall of heterosexual marriages.  Homosexuals make up roughly 5% of the population.  Even if every single one of them married and ultimately divorced (which is such a statistical unlikelihood it's not even funny), that still would leave 90% of divorced couples unaccounted for.   If  religious people were in any way sincere about ameliorating the current state of marriage, they would identify the real problems to marriage: no-fault divorces, promiscuity, male womanizing, and workaholism.  It's clear as day that homosexuals are such a negligible threat to marriage,  If you want to improve the institution of marriage rather than partake in scapegoating, you first need to be intellectually honest in terms of identifying the real root problems.

Finally, and I say "finally" only because I don't want this to be longer than it already is, but this is a fine example of how the Tenth Amendment, that being the amendment regarding enumerated states rights, should be used.  If Vermont wants this institution and Alabama doesn't, fine!  Oddly enough, Alan Keyes would actually agree with me on this point.  In addition, I truly think the Founding Fathers were genius in creating this amendment because it gives America the chance to be innovative and try new things.  Prohibition would have worked out much better if it hadn't become the 18th Amendment.  Let's say that a few states had tried prohibiting alcohol, and it was a complete disaster.  The other states would know not to implement it.  If it had worked, then the ban on alcohol would have become more widespread.  In short, it gives this nation to try something new, and if, for whatever reason, it doesn't work, at least the damage is more isolated.  The analogy also implies to gay marriage.  Let's face it--we don't have enough studies proving or disproving it.  And even the studies we do have to be taken with way more than a grain of salt simply because this is such a hot-button issue.  Even though this has already been tried in Scandinavia, Netherlands, and Canada without the sky falling, the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution gives us the objectivity to test and see if it works.  For those who are against it, if it doesn't work, then it's isolated in one state, and you'll have all the empirical evidence you'd need.  And odds are that it's a "blue state" anyway, so do you honestly think it's a huge loss?  If it does work, however, other states can say, "Oh, it worked there, let's see if it'd work here, too."  Not only do we get to find the answer to a highly controversial topic, but we also preserve freedom and constitutionality in the process.