Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, and newspaper editorial boards all seem to be echoing the same meme: guns should be traced:

The National Tracing Center database is an essential resource for law enforcement. Beyond enabling law enforcement to trace the history of a gun linked to a crime, it helps identify patterns of gun theft and trafficking. And that information can help local law enforcement — like the NYPD — in stopping illegal guns before they're used to commit crimes.

For instance, if police report a stolen gun used in a crime in New York to the ATF, local law enforcement could learn where that gun was first sold, and whether other guns sold by the same dealer were used in other crimes in other states. This helps law enforcement identify sources of "crime guns" so that they can cut the supply off at the source.

Yet the NYPD — along with every other branch of law enforcement in the nation — is being denied the information needed to get illegal guns off our streets: There is no requirement that stolen guns or guns used to commit crimes be reported to the National Tracing Center database.

New York state has a law requiring New York law enforcement to report guns used in crimes to the federal database for tracing — but the vast majority of states have no such requirement.

Are crackpot statisticians running amok in this country? And will someone please tell me what is a "crime gun"? Isn't any gun which is stolen by definition a "crime gun"?

I get so exasperated by these undefined terms. "Affordable housing." "Family." "Anti-family interloper." When will people say what they mean?

The Chuck and Hillary Show's theme is echoed in today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

Tracing also counts how many guns used in crimes came from which dealers. It also reveals what's known as "time-to-crime." That's the time elapsed between a gun's retail sale and the moment police retrieve it in connection with a crime.

Put those last two items together, and you'd get a pretty clear picture of which dealers in a community have been fueling - unwittingly or not - the illegal gun traffic.

Citizens need to be as informed as possible about the scope and shape of gun violence in their communities.

They need to understand all the factors that contribute to bloodshed so they can decide which policies should be in place to protect public safety while honoring the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

Back to Chuck and Hillary:

Worse, an obscure provision (surreptitiously passed into law in 2003 via an appropriations bill with little note or debate) requires that much of this vital gun tracing information — information that could save lives — be kept secret from the public and off-limits to police officers as they track guns used to kill police officers like Officer Stewart.

As a result, officers can only trace guns after they're used to commit a crime, and are shut off from information about other guns, sold by the same dealer and used in other crimes in other states.

This makes about as much sense as holding car dealers responsible for "any car used in a crime." I haven't seen the stats, but I'd be willing to bet that a small percentage of car dealers sell the majority of cars which later turn up stolen, uninsured, used in innumerable hit-and-run or "drive-by" crimes.

And I'll just bet that the majority of these car dealers are huge operations in large urban areas. The problem is that people don't see cars the way they see guns.

"Let the light shine," concludes the Inquirer. If guns are the culprits, and if both the shooters and those they shoot are victims of the guns, then why isn't a further statistical breakdown being done?

Don't we have an established legal doctrine in this country called "disproportionate impact"?

Let's do as we are told and assume that both shooters and shootees are victims of gun crimes. What if these victims of gun crimes were shown to be disproportionately young, disproportionately lower income, and disproportionately minority? If we are going to run the world based on statistics, shouldn't gun dealers be prohibited from "supplying" guns to "high risk groups" based on statistics? I mean, if they are supplying a product which has a disproportionate impact, shouldn't they be held to the same standard as everyone else?

This is supposed to be satire, but I hate it when satire resembles real life.

I also hate statistics. Here's another gun statistic we see bandied about all the time:

Residents of homes where a gun is present are 5 times more likely to experience a suicide(The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 327, No. 7,August 13, 1992, pp. 467- 472. ) and 3 times more likely to experience a homicide(Vol. 329, No. 15, October 7, 1993, pp. 1084-1001. ) than residents of homes without guns.

Years ago, I used to have regular arguments with a retired Berkeley school teacher. A very nice neighbor who was vehemently anti-gun, she held the all-too-common belief that guns possessed something close to what we'd call an evil animus -- which caused them to be a bad influence on their owners. She told me over and over again that sooner or later I would shoot myself or someone I loved. I finally told her that I had more respect for the Second Amendment than to be fodder for its opponents, and that therefore I had already decided that if I killed myself I would check into a motel and take a drug overdose (putting a plastic bag over my head before passing out to prevent failure), leaving a note apologizing to the staff but explaining that I didn't want my guns blamed. (Besides, it's less messy that way. A $100.00 tip accompanying the suicide note would cover the minimal cleanup involved.)

Despairing of getting anywhere with me, my neighbor finally confessed that her problem really wasn't with educated middle class people owning guns; it was with "the poor." Urban minorities. People "on welfare." But she quickly admonished me that she was not talking about race, and that laws had to be fair. And the only way to be fair was to take away all guns, from everyone. The "educated classes," in her view, should "set an example."

Sorry, but I consider that to be racist thinking, dissembled though it may be. It is based on the same statistics which gun control advocates want compiled so they can blame large urban gun dealers for the subsequent conduct of their guns.

My neighbor endlessly cited statistics like the above, and of course, similar statistical thinking lies behind almost every social engineering scheme I've seen. Consider this tidbit from the Cato Institute's Jeffrey Synder on the racist history of gun control.

While Northern states may have favored the discretionary licensing laws as a means of ensuring that Italians, Jews, labor agitators, or others with radical political beliefs did not obtain arms, Southern states favored such laws because the broad discretion permitted maneuvering room to deny permits to African-Americans. [10] The racist motivation for, and racist application of, such laws was noted in a 1941 court case involving Florida's old discretionary licensing system: "The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied. . . . [The] Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the [number of] unlawful homicides . . . and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. . . . There has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it has been generally conceded to be in contravention of the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested.

.... Watson v. Stone, 4 So.2d 700, 703 (1941) (Buford, J., concurring).

Today's social engineers blame guns.

UPDATE (03/05/06): Clayton Cramer, of course, has done an enormous amount of work in documenting the link between racism and gun control (most notably "The Racist Roots of Gun Control"). Recently, he links to a couple of newer articles: "The Perfect Is The Enemy of the Good," (why demanding ideological perfection from political candidates is a good way to elect antigunners), and "Washington State's Open Carry Ban which offers an intriguing theory that Washington's Open Carry Ban may have been originally directed against the Black Panther Party. Both are well worth reading!