Barbara Streisand: Great Entertainer, Sloppy Opinionist

On September 5, 2013, the Huffington Post published an opinion piece ostensibly authored by the eminent and accomplished popular entertainer Barbara Streisand entitled:

“Why Is It Easier to Get an Assault Weapon Than to Vote?”

Within the article, Ms. Streisand (for whom I have the utmost respect as an entertainer) makes a number of claims about both voting rights and firearms that are either wildly misleading or altogether false. Ms. Streisand cites a number of sources but does not seem to have spent much time actually reviewing their information or, if she did, has failed to fully understand it.

Here are just a few examples of what I consider to be Ms. Streisand’s extremely shoddy research and woefully shallow understanding:

“There have always been attempts by conservatives to restrict the (voting) franchise. It took women well over a century and painful struggle to get the right to vote.”

Ciment (2007) informs us that President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was typically seen -and actively protested- as the single greatest impediment to women acquiring the right to vote. Further when, in 1920, the U.S. Senate voted to consider the 19th Amendment to the Constitution (Women’s Suffrage), it was Senate Democrats who opposed it and, in fact, staged a filibuster in an effort to stop it. The Amendment passed with 83% of Senate Republicans approving compared with only 53% of Senate Democrats. The States, of course, eventually ratified the 19th Amendment and, in virtually every case, over predominantly Democrat, not Republican, opposition.

“For African Americans in the South, activists were beaten and killed before the federal government stepped in to end "Jim Crow" laws against voting. Then it took massive voter registration drives in an atmosphere of intimidation to fully extend the right and access to vote for all citizens.”

During Jim Crow, the South was comprised of states run exclusively by Democrats. The Ku Klux Klan was the de facto terrorist arm of the Democratic party of that day. Notorious segregationists like Governor George Wallace, Governor Lester Maddox, and many, many others were Democrats.

As a percentage of membership, more Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, during which Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat, staged a filibuster to try to prevent it.

“Many Americans suffer from the difficulty of voting on a Tuesday in November instead of the weekend -- a relic of an agricultural nation. But it wasn't enough for some conservatives.”

No one has to “suffer from the difficulty” of voting on a Tuesday. As a permanent absentee voter, I haven’t voted on Election Day in years. I get my ballot in the mail, conduct my research on the candidates and issues, complete the ballot at my leisure, and return it by postal mail by the due date. There is neither “suffering” nor inconvenience involved. Where some people have difficulty exercising their franchise, we should do whatever we reasonably can to assist them. I happen to believe we can do this while still enacting reasonable, nationwide, voter system integrity statutes that include requiring an acceptable identification card.

“(Voter integrity) laws vary, but all have the same impact. In these states, it is now more difficult for those Americans who typically have the least access to power in our democracy to participate. Some of the restrictions are particularly perverse.”

Streisand offers zero factual proof to support this opinion. Voter system integrity laws have but one true purpose…to improve the integrity of our entire voting process…not to burden or disenfranchise anyone or to deny them their constitutional rights. The only people resisting reasonable voter system integrity statutes are those who appear to desire a lesser degree of electoral integrity than we can otherwise reasonably achieve.

This, then, begs the question: Why would such people desire a lesser degree of voter system integrity than is otherwise reasonably possible? 

“Texas allows a state-issued "concealed carry permit" for guns to count as a voter ID but not a duly authorized ID from the flagship University of Texas. Tennessee and North Carolina also prohibit university identification from their own systems.”

Texas’ concealed carry (CCW) permits are photo identification cards issued directly through the State and, thus, more strictly controlled for validity. This is not the case with student I.D. cards. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, as of 2010 there were over 684,000 foreign nationals receiving post-secondary education in the United States. As non-citizens, none of these students are allowed to vote in our elections yet all of them no doubt possess some sort of college-issued student I.D.

“Congress failed to renew the assault weapons ban, but one can buy an assault weapon from an individual or a gun show without having to show any identification.”

Congress declined (not “failed”) to renew the ill-named “assault weapons ban” because subsequent Congressional research revealed that the previous ban had done nothing to reduce gun-related crime in the U.S. The ill-named assault weapons ban was a typical example of liberal emphasis on symbolism over substance in federal legislation

Further, Streisand’s claim that “one can buy an assault weapon from an individual or a gun show without having to show any identification” is only partly true. While it is generally legal for one private person to sell a firearm to another private person at a gun show, such sales account for only a small minority of the firearms transactions at these events. Anyone wishing to buy a firearm of any kind from a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) at a gun show or anywhere else still has to complete a Form 4473 and submit to a background check.

When it considered this question, Congress saw fit to exempt such private party firearms transactions, whether at gun shows or elsewhere. As with current federal tax law, one person's "loophole" is another person's "following the law as the lawmakers chose to write it".

Differences in perspective notwithstanding, those who complain about the so-called "gun show loophole" only seek to deflect from the larger issue...people misusing guns to commit crimes. No one should be concerned about the legal transfer of firearms between law abiding individuals. The challenge our society faces is not legal guns, gun transactions, or guns used in a legal manner. The true challenges are criminals and criminal conduct and these are what people like Ms. Streisand should devote their time to addressing in more meaningful, and less symbolic, ways.

"Ah but that's the point", some tend to argue, "criminals are buying the guns they commit crimes with *at gun shows*".

But are they really?

As reported in a Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study on 'Firearms Use by Offenders', Harlow (2002) found that just 0.7% of U.S. 'crime guns' came from gun shows, with repeat offenders even less likely than first-timers to buy guns from any retail source. This 2002 study was based on interviews with over 18,000 state prison inmates and is the largest such study the federal government has ever conducted.

As with ill-named "assault rifle" bans, those concerned about gun show transactions are fretting about an issue that is statistically insignificant.

The true challenge our society faces is violent crime, whether guns are misused or not. Fixating on the legal transfer of guns at gun shows (or anywhere else) does nothing to address that challenge in any meaningful way. 

Two other facts Ms. Streisand would no doubt find most inconvenient:

First: As defined in Senator Feinstein's ill-fated 2013 proposal, “assault weapons” operate no differently from any other semi-automatic rifle, shotgun, or handgun. They simply have accessories (detachable magazines, pistol grips, barrel shrouds, slings, etc.) which some people perceive as visually threatening. These accessories do nothing to change the operational functioning or potential lethality of the weapon itself but, because they “look” more threatening, that’s all that seems to matter to gun-ban proponents.

Second: In 1997, Democrat and ACLU member Professor Gary Kleck reviewed some 47 different academic studies and found that so-called “assault weapons” are used in just 2% of gun-related crimes throughout the U.S. (Kleck, 1997). So why the unreasonable emphasis on so-called “assault weapons” when they do not operate any differently from other semi-automatic weapons and when their misuse account for only a very small minority of gun-related crimes?

The answer seems clear: For people like Ms. Streisand, symbolism trumps substance and perception takes precedence over reality.

“A recent study by two professors at Cleveland State University estimated that Americans own between 262 and 310 million firearms. The U.S. population is less than 314 million.”

This sounds extremely alarming does it not? Yet, if we actually read the study, rather than merely relying -as Ms. Streisand appears to have- upon the title alone, we read, at page 3, that “These data are for guns entering the civilian market as well as for firearms intended for police forces.” (Emphasis added).

At the expense of factual accuracy, either intentionally or through ignorance, Ms. Streisand offers a statistic from a study she doesn’t appear to understand, in an effort to do nothing but alarm her readers and spread disinformation.

Hill and Levin, the authors of Streisand’s study, in turn quote data from Karp and Krouse, and state: “These data have limitations because they are not designed to track ownership, but they are the only data available.” (Emphasis added).

So when Streisand claims in her article that this study “estimated that Americans *own* between 262 and 310 million firearms” she is either being woefully obtuse or deliberately deceptive.

The study's authors readily admit that their figures lend themselves to “over-estimation” and attempt to offer information they believe mitigates this particular shortcoming in their study. They state: “Because many police departments sell their guns as part of their replacement cycle, we can assume that the amount sold to police departments will counterbalance a good deal of this overstatement.”

In other words, they are making an “assumption” that law enforcement agencies eventually sell, to the general public, at least as many firearms as they purchase for their own official use. Yet the authors offer no factual basis for this “assumption” and, indeed, conveniently make no effort to even attempt to quantify that number.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, as of 2012 there were almost 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the U.S., employing a total of over 765,000 sworn personnel. Add to this the thousands of federal sworn law enforcement officers in the nation, and accepting that many if not most of all of these officers are issued or own two or more firearms which they use for official purposes, and we quickly see that a large percentage of the firearms in the study Streisand cites are actually in the hands of law enforcement professionals and used for official business. They are not all in the hands of the general public as Streisand seems to imply, or being used in the commission of crimes.

“Over 30,000 Americans die every year from firearms…”

This is not correct. Not even according to the source Streisand links. No one dies “from firearms”. Some die as a result of firearms use and misuse, but no gun can cause the death of anyone all by itself. For Streisand and many other anti-gun advocates to phrase their arguments in this way seeks to shift the responsibility for gun-related deaths from the people who cause them to the inanimate object they choose to use to do so. Thus the focus of their corrective efforts likewise shifts from the true problem (people) to an instrumentality (guns).

Far more people are assaulted and injured each year with edged weapons and blunt instruments than guns yet, strangely, Streisand doesn't appear to be supporting bans on kitchen knives or baseball bats. Could it be because Streisand and those who think as she does simply don't like guns and, so, they seek to misuse the law-making ability of government to prevent law-abiding people from owning them or, at least, to make it more difficult for them to do so?

Well, I don’t like Streisand’s shallow logic and hollow obtuseness. Can I misuse government to prevent her from so blatantly displaying them?   

The figure from the Violence Policy Center which Streisand quotes is, itself, highly deceptive. It includes all homicides, many of which are ultimately deemed excusable or justifiable (and most of those are law enforcement-related). It also includes suicides which, while many would certainly consider to be selfish, are not, to any degree, unlawful.

According to Gun Policy.org, in 2011 there were 32,163 gun-related deaths in the U.S. Of those, 19,766 (well over half) were suicides. Typically, neither Streisand nor her source offers any reason to believe that those who chose to kill themselves with firearms would not have used some other means had a firearm not been available.

In summary, anti-gun activists like Ms. Streisand routinely offer information as fact, which is often anything but, and blatantly misrepresent information from sources they, themselves, choose to cite.

If organizations such as the Huffington Post really desire to be seen as credible, they should make at least a cursory effort to fact check the information offered by those whose editorials they agree to publish.