Gun control hucksters - just modern-day snake oil salesmen

by Bill Cawthon

6:00am Thursday, July 24, 2025

Snake oil was made by boiling rattlesnakes and skimming the oil that rose to the surface. Hyped as a miracle cure, rattlesnake oil doesn’t have any real medicinal value at all. Nonetheless, hustlers and conmen peddled untold numbers of bottles labeled as snake oil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gun control is similar. The entire gun control spiel was created for the gullible. Bold, completely unsupported claims are coupled with words like “commonsense” and “reasonable” to soothe any doubts and overcome reluctance.

This is particularly true of universal background check laws.

“Background checks save lives,” gun grabbers assert as if it had been engraved on stone tablets and brought down from Mount Sinai. However, there’s little objective evidence that background checks deliver on the promises.

In 2000, Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig published “Homicide and Suicide Rates Associated With Implementation of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They were studying the impact of the federal background check requirement that went into effect in February 1994 and the waiting period imposed from that month until the FBI’s NCIS program went live in 1998.

Related article: Think you support universal background checks, red flag laws? Let's test that

Cook and Ludwig concluded, “implementation of the Brady Act appears to have been associated with reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or older but not with reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates.”

In 2017, Dr. Garen Wintemute, Director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California’s Davis campus, was one of the authors of “Comprehensive background check policy and firearm background checks in three US states,” a study of the impacts of universal background check laws in Colorado, Delaware, and Washington. The study looked for increases in the number of background check inquiries and concluded people in Colorado and Washington ignored the laws. Delaware did show the expected increase in background check inquiries but It also had the largest increase (45%) in the rate of firearm homicides. Colorado had a 42% jump and homicides rose 31% in Washington.

Not a glowing testimonial, given all the hype about background checks.

The chart above compares 12 states that passed universal background check laws and 20 states that went for constitutional carry in the years from 2003 to 2021. Measuring each state from the year their laws were passed to 2023, the constitutional carry states were the clear winners, refuting all the gun controllers’ dire predictions.

Universal background checks are supposed to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. The gun control faithful claim background checks have prevented 4.9 million prohibited people from getting a gun. However, a 2019 Department of Justice survey of 256,000 inmates in federal and state prisons showed the overwhelming majority of criminals don’t get their guns from licensed dealers, pawn shops, gun shows, or flea markets. In fact, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s 2021 manual, 88.8% of those convicted of new weapon offenses were already prohibited from possessing a firearm.

The final nail in the background check coffin is that they’re unenforceable.

In 2013, Dr. Greg Ridgeway, acting director of the National Institute of Justice, published “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies.” Writing about background check laws, he said: “Effectiveness depends on the ability to reduce straw purchasing, requiring gun registration and an easy gun transfer process.”

Creation of a federal gun registry is prohibited by the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986. Moreover, anyone believing Americans would willingly register their guns probably also believes in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and unicorns (or the efficacy of gun control laws).

New York state experienced the futility of gun registration laws in 2013. The Safe Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement, or SAFE Act, included a requirement for owners of certain firearms to register them with the New York State Police by April 2014.

When the NYSP was ordered to release the number of guns registered, the total was just 44,000 — out of an estimated 250,000 to one million. In the best possible case, the compliance rate was less than 18 percent.

While the snake oil charlatans knew their product was fake, most of the gun control faithful have an unshakeable belief in their dogma. Despite the RAND Corp.’s finding most gun control studies are junk, zealous gun control evangelists still trot them out whenever they’re challenged.

But they can’t escape the numbers — and they can’t evade the tough questions, including the big one: Why pass a law that doesn’t work?

Republished with permission from AmmoLand.