Shotguns for sale. The one on the left has a high-capacity banana clip. The one in the center has a 25-shell drum.The Harrisburg show, held October 10-11, was put on by C&E Gun Shows from Virginia.The expo, held in a sprawling complex that also hosts farm exhibits and car shows, featured thousands of rifles, shotguns and handguns displayed on hundreds of tables.There were AR-15s, Glocks, World War II rifles with bayonets, Wild West revolvers, a 19th century elephant gun, a shotgun with a 25-shell drum, a hot pink hunting rifle, and high-caliber Barrett sniper rifles. Some dealers specialized in antiques; other focused on tactical guns or pistols.Steve Elliott, the owner of C&E Gun Shows, counted 149 vendors who rented a total of 650 tables for $70 each.Elliott said about 95% of the gun sellers at his show were federally licensed, which means they're required to conduct background checks before selling a gun at the show.' I wouldn't sell a gun to someone without knowing who I was selling to,' he said. 'The last thing you want to do is sell a gun that's used in a crime.' The law of background checks Alex Pierce doesn't need a license to sell his guns.Licensed gun dealers must, by federal law, run background checks on all buyers - whether the purchase is made in a store or at a gun show.The checks work like this: A buyer presents his or her ID to the seller andwith personal information such as age, address, race and criminal history, if any.
The seller then submits the info to the FBI, which checks it against databases. The process takes a few minutes.This is the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, also known as NICS.Some states have stricter rules about gun shows. Only 12 states require expanded background checks at gun shows for handguns as well as rifles and shotguns, according to the Brady Campaign, a gun control group.
Advocates of gun control call that the gun show loophole.At a gun show in Pennsylvania, it's legal for unlicensed dealers to sell rifles and shotguns without conducting a background check.At the Harrisburg show, CNNMoney spotted only five unlicensed sellers. They didn't have tables; instead they wore or carried handwritten placards advertising guns.Alex Pierce was one of those mobile sellers. He walked the floor, an NRA cap on his head and two 19th century guns - a rifle and a shotgun - slung over his shoulders. He had 'for sale' signs in the barrels like pennants.'
In Pennsylvania, the law is: long guns and shotguns you can sell to a person without running a background check,' said Pierce, who was selling the guns for $900 each.Rules of the Keystone StatePierce is right about Pennsylvania law. The Pennsylvania State Troopers say a seller without a federal license doesn't have to do FBI checks. (Only handguns, which are considered more deadly because they can be easily concealed, require background checks.)But buyers from outside of Pennsylvania must have guns they purchase at the show shipped to a federally licensed dealer in their home state, where a background check will be run, according to the NRA.The thing is, Pennsylvania law doesn't require unlicensed dealers to ask buyers of rifles or shotguns for identification. So some show purchases in Pennsylvania can be made without the seller knowing whether the buyer is from out of state.This is important, considering that Pennsylvania is bordered by six states. Four of them - New York, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware - have more restrictive gun laws than Pennsylvania.New Jersey, which doesn't allow gun show sales at all, requires background checks for all gun sales. And Maryland requires background checks for all gun sales, whether the dealer is licensed or not.
The Maryland state line is less than 40 miles away from Harrisburg.' There are people here who sell guns without a federal background check and to me that's wrong,' said Jami Nolan, a licensed dealer at the Harrisburg show.
'They're stealing business from us, if they're doing it for a living.' (For $10, Nolan will run a background check on a buyer for an unlicensed dealer who asks.)Knives, zombies and Kalashinikitty Guns are welcome at the gun show, of course. But not loaded guns.Gun shows aren't just about guns. Some sellers were offering a wide variety of non-gun products, including thousands of survival knives, ranging from $2 folding knives to deluxe models costing hundreds of dollars.Some tables were piled with survival rations. Others offered beef jerky or venison. One vender sold nothing but chocolate fudge.Other vendors sold and 'Don't Tread On Me Flags' with the yellow rattler. Others sold DVDs, mostly war movies, or books focusing on guns and military history.Tables were piled high with T-shirts.
Some were serious, with grim slogans and skulls. Some were political; one seller had shirts bearing Donald Trump's campaign slogan,And then there were the not so serious, like the stacks of pink T-shirts with a likeness of Hello Kitty holding an AK-47.The slogan?
MORE PERFECT: THE GUN SHOW FINAL WEB TRANSCRIPTRADIOLAB INTROJAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. A couple months ago, the More Perfect team and I released a doc called The Gun Show, which was sort of an off-angle look at the history that underlies how we talk about guns in this country. It landed right after the mass shooting in Vegas.
The Gunshow Anime Club
Unfortunately, here we are again. We noticed that a lot of More Perfect listeners were sharing this doc in the wake of what happened in Florida. So we thought we would share it with Radiolab listeners who haven't heard it yet.
It's reported by a guy named Sean Rameswaram. At the time, Sean was a producer at More Perfect. He's since gone on to start a daily podcast at Vox called Today Explained. I encourage you to check out that show. Sean is amazing. In the meantime, here's The Gun Show.SEAN RAMESWARAM: I think we should start with one of the most confusing sentences in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.JAD: Not 'We the people.' SEAN: Not that one.
No, I got a different one. 'A well-regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed.JAD: Say it one more time. Say - I'm sorry.SEAN: Okay.
From the top.JAD: And do it - do it with the commas again.SEAN: Sure. 'A well-regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, totally unnecessary comma, shall not be infringed.ADAM WINKLER: Is that the one that's about guns?SEAN: Adam Winkler, who wrote the book on the Second Amendment. And that book is called Gunfight.JAD: He's a journalist?SEAN: He's a professor of law.ADAM WINKLER: At UCLA.SEAN: He said.ADAM WINKLER: It's almost as if James Madison, the author of the amendment, had just discovered this wonderful new thing, the comma, and wanted to put it in there as many times as possible.SEAN: Which is like a nerdy, professorial joke. But like, seriously, what is it? And, like, it had to be this one? Couldn't it have been the amendment about, like, quartering soldiers in your house that was really confusing?JAD: Yeah.SEAN: No, it's the one about guns that they made, like, just indecipherable.ADAM WINKLER: And ever since, generations of Americans have been confused by the language of the Second Amendment.SEAN: So when this thing was written, we had just fought this war with the British, this Revolutionary War.
And they tried to win it right from the get-go by coming for our guns. So these new states are looking at this new federal government, they're going like, 'Meh, we don't know if we want to trust you quite yet.' So there's this second amendment that says, 'You guys can fight back.' JAD: Like, the feds aren't gonna disarm you. You can - your militias can keep your guns.SEAN: That's I think what we agree on. But then after that, you just look at the sentence, then it's not just the commas that are confusing.
If you look at the sentence as a whole.ADAM WINKLER: The pieces don't seem to fit together.SEAN: There's some noun confusion. I mean, it's obvious that the sentence is about someone's right to bear arms, but who?
Who gets that right? At the beginning of the sentence you get.ADAM WINKLER: A well-regulated militia.SEAN: The militia. States have a right to form militias, to assemble groups of people. And those people got to have their guns. That's easy enough. But then later in the sentence, there's.ADAM WINKLER: Comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed.SEAN: The people.
Which people? Those people over there in the militia? If you mean all people, why did you say militia? It's like the first clause seems to point to some sort of collective right to bear arms, and the second clause seems to point to some individual right to bear arms.JILL LEPORE: Like, this is supposed to be a popularly ratified document. It's actually not that easy to read. It's really not that easy to read. And it's not - it wasn't that easy to read then.SEAN: This is Jill Lepore.JILL LEPORE: A staff writer at the New Yorker Magazine.SEAN: She's also a professor of American History.JILL LEPORE: I study the 18th century.