“After looking at what happened in Aurora, Colo., who could be in favor of these high-capacity magazines?” It’s a question posed by Hubert Williams [above], president of the anti-reciprocity (surprise) Police Foundation and chairman of the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence. Posed to the LA Times, a not unsympathetic ear when it comes to gun control. To say the least. Which is what Mr. Williams would have been better advised to say, rather than this: “We cannot be … hiding behind the 2nd Amendment to justify weapons that the writers of the Constitution never imagined.” Asked about the resistance in Congress to gun control legislation, Hubert cited . . . wait for it . . . the difficulty in passing civil rights legislation. “You have to be persistent. It was tough, but we were right.” And now, he’s wrong. Go figure. [Press release after the jump.]

WASHINGTON, July 26, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence, an alliance of nine major national police leadership organizations, announced its call for background checks for all firearms purchasers and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines today at a news conference in Washington, DC. The group has been working with state law enforcement associations and leaders this summer in key states, pressing for expanded background checks for firearms purchasers and other public safety measures. But the Aurora theater shooting has intensified their calls for timely action . . .

“The nation is waiting for lawmakers to move beyond hand-wringing and shoulder-shrugging in response to these mass catastrophes,” said Hubert Williams, Chair of the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence and President of the Police Foundation. “These mass murders are neither acceptable, nor inevitable. There are numerous public safety initiatives – that are backed by the public and law enforcement – that will reduce the frequency and severity of this type of carnage. Our nation must establish as a top priority addressing this horrific gun violence that shatters our safety and security.”

The Partnership’s policy agenda includes background checks for all firearms purchasers and a limit on large-capacity ammunition magazines. The background check measure would complement the existing Brady Law, enacted in 1994, which established background checks for gun purchases at federally licensed gun dealers. But an estimated 40% of firearm transactions occur through non-dealers sales – leaving nearly half the firearm sales in the United States unregulated.

“Knowingly permitting four out of ten firearm sales to occur completely unregulated is irresponsible and counterproductive to public safety,” said James Johnson, incoming Chair, National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence, and Chief of Police in Baltimore County, MD. “Police do our jobs everyday patrolling the streets and protecting the public while putting their own lives on the line. Law enforcement needs the support of our lawmakers to enact policies that will keep officers and the public safer.”

While the Aurora shooting suspect reportedly passed background checks in obtaining his firearms, Williams emphasized the importance and effectiveness of background checks in keeping guns from other dangerous people, stressing that nearly 2 million prohibited purchases were stopped between 1994 and 2009. He noted that background checks will help reduce gun violence that touches dozens of Americans every day.

“Gun violence is impacting us all,” Williams said. “In 2011, gunfire was the leading cause of death for police killed in the line of duty, surpassing motor vehicles for the first time in 14 years. Gun violence occurs day in and day out, claiming 34 Americans every single day.”

Background checks are overwhelmingly supported by the public – and gun owners themselves: 86% nationally, including 81% of gun owners, support background checks for all firearms purchasers, regardless of seller or venue.

The Partnership has been collaborating with law enforcement leadership organizations in key states to educate U.S. Senate candidates and the public, building bipartisan support to expand background checks to gun sales beyond licensed dealers. In Virginia and Wisconsin law enforcement leaders recently met with U.S. Senate candidates in private sessions specifically focused on gun violence, emphasizing the need for strengthened background checks. The meetings were strictly educational in nature and candidates participated despite being told that there would be no endorsements made. The police leaders also held major press conferences in each state to publicize their calls for action.

Williams dismissed those saying action is impossible on gun issues, noting, that there were naysayers in the 80s and 90s when, “Law enforcement was pivotal in passing a string of federal gun laws:  the ban on cop-killer bullets; the ban on undetectable plastic guns; and the Brady Law requiring background checks for guns purchased through licensed dealers.  We know that common sense can prevail.”

The National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence is comprised of:

Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, Inc.
Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association
International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators
International Association of Chiefs of Police
Major Cities Chiefs Association
National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives
National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives
Police Executive Research Forum
Police Foundation

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39 COMMENTS

  1. I heard this guy talking awhile back. Trust me when I say this. I am very active in the National LE scene and Local (East Coast) LE scene and I haven been for 23 years. This guy commands nothing. His organization is a joke and he does NOT represent police officers, the majority of which do not support such bans at all.

    • I was going to say not one of those “organizations” appears to represent beat cops at all…..
      Am I right in thinking this?

    • he may not represent anybody, but his group is getting media coverage. i could never understand a black man or a jew who favors gun control. in this country at least, gun control started as a means to disarm freed men of color. i’m old enough to remember “whites only” and “colored only” signs in the south. rf may delete this but the only way to describe this man is”uncle tom”. that comes from an ofwg.

      • Well to that end, my grand parents escaped Nazi Germany. My parents hate guns, I have no idea why as my dad remembers Perl harbor, and Korea, and served in both.
        As a person of Jewish faith I tell myself never again. Hence why I served in the IDF.

        • san, i don’t want to get to nosey here but you’ve said you served in the idf before. were you there in 73 during the yom kippor war?

        • One of my ancestors died in the King David Hotel bombing. Apparently Irgun felt that my grandfather deserved to die for being English. As a victim of bigotry I say never again. It’s why I carry.

      • “i could never understand a black man or a jew who favors gun control”

        The JPFO (Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership) published a piece on the subject. They noted that the three most vocal anti-gun ‘groups’ have many members which perceive their group as a victim culture: women, blacks, and Jews.

        • that may be true for now. but i’ve noticed at the ranges i go to that of late there’ve been a lot of women there shooting. not just cheering their men on. just today i went to the range and there was a young woman shooting by herself and a couple of the range employees were women. i welcome this and hope it becomes more common.

        • DD, you know as well as I that no demographic is 100% for or against any damn thing. You’re at one end of the black spectrum, someone else is at the other. What this was discussing is the majority of those in between. Likewise, my wife is certainly not anti gun, she carried every day she went to college in Richmond, VA from 1965-1969. A quick check of the laws at that time will give you an idea of her mindset. Still, she would not argue that women are not in the forefront of the grabbers. My impression has been that Jews lean toward grabbers, but I’ve not had enough experience there to make a guess otherwise.

  2. The founders never imagined or intended the internet, movies, or radio as a means of free speech. Time to censor those too?

    Funny that he uses a civil rights example in an argument demanding we take away rights.

    In the end, police are no different from normal people. There are those that are good, honorable police who abide by “serve and protect” and are smart enough to understand the uselessness of gun control. And then there are tyrants who believe their job is to dominate and lord over the second-class masses and take away peoples’ rights for their own safety, because they’re more important. Take a crack at which one this Williams scumsucker is.

    The funny thing is I would never purchase some useless, jam-happy C-mag and in truth, I don’t understand why anyone would. But as an American, I don’t interfere in other people’s lawful purchases. I’m also intelligent enough to know that anyone halfway decent with a gun can reload and lose maybe one or two seconds over a high-cap mag.

    And the REALLY funny thing is that the use of a high-cap mag SAVED lives…the piece of crap jammed on him.

    • The funny thing is I would never purchase some useless, jam-happy C-mag and in truth, I don’t understand why anyone would.

      If I owned a full auto gun or a slide fire stock I would.

    • I own one. It is heavy, awkward and a lot of fun to shoot with one. It takes a while to lube and load too. Add the Slidefire stock to your rifle and slap a 100 round mag and have it. It is worth every penny and every minute of prep time.

  3. Background checks are overwhelmingly supported by the public – and gun owners themselves: 86% nationally, including 81% of gun owners, support background checks for all firearms purchasers, regardless of seller or venue.

    [CITATION NEEDED]

  4. Uhhh how do they expect to track guns if they did a wonder full job letting guns go over the border?

  5. Nobody “hides” behind the Bill of Rights. Nobody has to. They stand between us and tyranny.

  6. Forgive me if I am wrong here.
    If I got to a gun show, and go to a booth. That person happens to be an FFL dealer, don’t they have to do the sale with aback ground check anyways? Only if it is a private person who wants to sell some of his guns can it be processed as a private purchase or am I wrong here?
    High cap! huh I just want a normal CAPACITY mag here in CA.
    The last major shootings I have seen are Okios University, where he bought his pistol CA compliant, shot seven people, Aurora, also though an FFL dealer, and the large cap mag saved lives.
    VA Tech used two pistols with a 15 and ten round mag.
    So tell me again where all these criminals are running around with assault weapons??

    • Depends on the state. FFLs have to call it in for a background check, no matter what state they’re in. In some states, private citizens have to transfer via an FFL (who has to call it in). In other states, private citizens can transfer directly to another private citizen without going through an FFL. No call is made in such cases.

  7. Its too bad they banned those “undetectable plastic guns.” I remember I had one of those as a kid. It used to shoot jets of water at least 30 feet. Times sure have changed…

    • I’m pretty sure you can still get a Glock 7. That’s a porcelain gun made in Germany that can pass through metal detectors without setting them off.

      😉

  8. I have heard a few people touch on a counter-intuitive point that is worth mentioning again. Spree killers who use firearms would probably kill many more people if firearms were not readily available — especially with “high capacity” (whatever that means) magazines. As people noted on this site, the criminal’s 100 round capacity magazine failed. That was a bonus. More importantly, without use of a firearm, a maniac would simply blow up and/or firebomb an entire crowd of people. Heck all he had to do was chain the doors shut and set off a 2 gallon gasoline container in that theater: if the actual flames didn’t kill everyone, the ensuing smoke and panic would. Or if that is too complicated, simply drive a car at 70 mph through the parking lot of a Major League Sports stadium when the crowds are streaming out to the parking lot. You get the idea.

    Like it or not, a person determined to harm lots of people is probably going to be successful. Trying to prohibit firearms will not change that.

      • if you truly believe that he did it………………..as an explosives professional, I have to call you on that one. Can you spell, “cover up”?

  10. “Gun violence is impacting us all black communities… gun violence occurs day in and day out, claiming 34 black Americans every single day.”

    In 2011, gunfire was the leading cause of death for police killed in the line of duty, surpassing motor vehicles their own incompetence for the first time in 14 years.

    Fixed it.

    • and the main reason gunfire killed more cops in 2011 was several incidents of bad guys ambushing cops and killing multiple cops at one time like the Washington state coffee shop killings.

  11. To the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence:

    **** you.

    That is all.

  12. We can’t keep hiding behind the first amendment to defend forms of speech the Founding Fathers of this country could not have imagined, stop allowing free speech on the internet.

    We can’t keep hiding behind the Constitution to allow African Americans to be citizens. The Founding Fathers didn’t include them as people back then and surely that is proof it should not be allowed now.

    We can’t keep hiding behind the 4th amendment to protect searches the Founding Fathers could have never anticipated, back then you didn’t have electronic medical, financial, and personal records.

  13. What is he talking about: “Knowingly permitting four out of ten firearm sales to occur completely unregulated ” Is he talking about “private” sales? That’s true for any thing sold privately. If that’s not what he’s saying, then I don’t understand his argument.

    • flyboy: Yes, he’s referring to private sales. Read the last sentence in the preceding paragraph.

      And yes, it’s true of anything sold privately. But unlike anything else in the world, guns are unpredictably scary things, capable of willful and wanton destruction, so we can’t just have them running willy-nilly everywhere on their own. Hence, he wants more regulation on their travel.

  14. I have a distant relative thats part of the gun control movement, but he’s different than most because he’s truthful about it. During a Christmas dinner conversation in 2007 he told me point blank, ” America has to change with the times, and that won’t be easy for a lot of people in this country. The last thing we need is a bunch of yahoo’s running around with guns waving a 200 year old document”. He was never invited to dinner again by my family. His smarmy, we know best, attitude pissed off everybody within earshot of the conversation, but it wasn’t just his attitude. It was his absolute disrespect for Americans that hold the Constitution in reverence that made him persona non grata in my family.

  15. Yeah, actually the founding fathers did consider that weapons would evolve. They weren’t idiots. They included the 2nd Amendment based on the principle that the citizenry should always have the means to oppose tyranny. Which means being at least as well armed as the tyrant at the individual’s level. The constitution still applies even though technology evolves, or as the DC Court of Appeals decision in Heller, upheld by SCOTUS, put it:

    “The modern handgun—and for that matter the rifle and
    long-barreled shotgun—is undoubtedly quite improved over its
    colonial-era predecessor, but it is, after all, a lineal descendant
    of that founding-era weapon, and it passes Miller’s standards.
    Pistols certainly bear “some reasonable relationship to the
    preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” They are
    also in “common use” today, and probably far more so than in
    1789. Nevertheless, it has been suggested by some that only
    colonial-era firearms (e.g., single-shot pistols) are covered by
    the Second Amendment. But just as the First Amendment free
    speech clause covers modern communication devices unknown
    to the founding generation, e.g., radio and television, and the
    Fourth Amendment protects telephonic conversation from a
    “search,” the Second Amendment protects the possession of the
    modern-day equivalents of the colonial pistol. See, e.g., Kyllo
    v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 31-41 (2001) (applying Fourth
    Amendment standards to thermal imaging search).”

    Note, in the orals before SCOTUS the solicitor general for the US arguing on DC’s side conceded that under this reasoning he had a hard time justifying prohibiting true assault rifles, ie full auto weapons since they are those most commonly used by modern infantry.
    “…
    GENERAL CLEMENT: I think, Mr. Chief Justice, why one might worry about that is one might read the language of page 53a of the opinion as reproduced in the petition appendix that says once it is an arm, then it is not open to the District to ban it. Now, it seems to me that the District is not strictly a complete ban because it exempts pre-1976 handguns. The Federal ban on machine guns is not, strictly speaking, a ban, because it exempts pre -pre-law machine guns, and there is something like 160,000 of those.
    JUSTICE SCALIA: But that passage doesn’t mean once it’s an arm in the dictionary definition of arms. Once it’s an arm in the specialized sense that
    the opinion referred to it, which is — which is the type of a weapon that was used in militia, and it is it is nowadays commonly held.
    GENERAL CLEMENT: Well –
    JUSTICE SCALIA: If you read it that way, I don’t see why you have a problem.
    GENERAL CLEMENT: Well, I — I hope that you read it that way. But I would also say that I think that whatever the definition that the lower court opinion employed, I do think it’s going to be difficult over time to sustain the notion — I mean, the Court of Appeals also talked about lineal descendants. And it does seem to me that, you know, just as this Court would apply the Fourth Amendment to something like heat imagery, I don’t see why this Court wouldn’t allow the
    Second Amendment to have the same kind of scope, and then I do think that reasonably machine guns come within the term “arms.” …”
    http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/07-290.pdf

  16. To those that say they can’t imagine why anyone would need or want a higher capacity magazine I say: You’re either not trying very hard, you’re very unimaginative, or you’re being untruthful. The likelihood of needing a high capacity magazine for most of us is of course very low. But better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
    That’s the end of my sermon, you can take off your choir robes now.

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