The gun lobby's hobbling of rational gun control is perhaps the perfect instance of government corruption through lobbying, in that the lobby works not simply by buying Congressional reps but by whipping up a substantial, vociferous constituency that gives the corrupted reps political cover; they can cast themselves as defenders of liberty and rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The effect is to weaken the kinds of safeguards that even a large majority of gun owners say they support, such as criminal background checks for all gun buyers. The only credible motivation for legislation recounted by the Times' Erica Goode and Sheryl Gay Stolberg is to boost gun sales:
law enforcement officials and criminal justice experts who would like the A.T.F. to have greater latitude in fighting crime say its effectiveness in reducing gun violence is still hampered by a thicket of laws that limit the information it can obtain and constrain its day-to-day functioning.
The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, for example, prohibits A.T.F. agents from making more than one unannounced inspection per year of licensed gun dealers. The law also reduced the falsification of records by dealers to a misdemeanor and put in place vague language defining what it meant to “engage in business” without a dealer’s license.
