Willis Ross of the Florida Police Chiefs Association recently observed: “I think any working policeman will tell you that the crooks already have guns. If a criminal fills out an application and sends his application… he’s the biggest, dumbest crook I’ve ever seen.” Kansas City’s chief of police echoed this sentiment in testimony at a Senate hearing. He noted that drug criminals acquire guns by theft, by trade or by using legal surrogate buyers. Drug dealers do not purchase their guns over the counter.
Under current national law, anyone who wants to buy a machine gun has to be fingerprinted, fill out a federal license application and then wait three months. Yet drug dealers still have no trouble obtaining stolen or illegally imported machine guns. If a strict law can’t keep machine guns away from drug dealers, a less strict waiting period for handguns won’t matter either.
Can anyone really believe that an individual who buys pure heroin by the ounce, who does business in the highly illegal chemicals used to produce amphetamines, or who sells cocaine on the toughest street corners in the worst neighborhoods will not know where to buy an illegal gun?
Almost every study of waiting periods has found them to be worthless. An anti-gun scholar, Duke University’s Philip Cook, explains that criminals do not buy guns through normal channels, but instead “find ways of circumventing the screening system entirely.” Cook concludes: “There has been no convincing proof that a police check on handgun buyers reduces violent crime rates.” A Senate Judiciary Committee investigation found no evidence that waiting periods prevent crime.
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