Now that everyone has seemed to forget about what happened in Vegas on October 1^st, the noise machine is gearing up on both sides about what appears to be the possibility that the national concealed-carry bill will get to the Senate floor for a debate. The law easily floated through the House in December, but any piece of NRA-backed legislation is guaranteed to get out of the lower chamber. The question for Republicans is whether they can not only secure every red Senate vote, but grab a bunch of Democrats from gun-rich states who might be feeling a little vulnerable going into the midterm vote.

             An interesting media piece about this issue surfaced last week in, of all places, The New York Post.  If there is one newspaper in the United States which has slavishly pumped up Trump, it’s the Fox-owned Post, whose fawning coverage of Trump has been going on for years. But instead of using the gossip space on what is called Page Six, the tabloid usually gives Trump the front-page headline, and goes out of its way to make the headline read as positive as it can.

So here’s a big story about concealed-carry but the headline is a quote from the NYPD Commissioner, Jim O’Neill, describing the national CCW as ‘insanity’ and “a disaster for major cities around the country.” The Manhattan DA, Cy Vance, also chimed in, saying that he wouldn’t presume to tell the residents of West Virginia what their gun laws should say, but neither should anyone take a law written for West Virginia and apply it to New York. Vance was referring to the narrative started by Mike Bloomberg who blamed high levels of gun violence on the movement of illegal guns up the I-95 “iron pipeline” from states with lax gun laws to more restrictive states like New York.

Thank you, Cy Vance, for that quick lesson in federalism.  But with all due respect to the idea that everything would be hunky-dory in gun land if we could just figure out a way to keep those guns from the South down in the South. Back laat May, the Brooklyn DA, Eric Gonzalez, announced the biggest gun “bust’” in the borough’s history, with indictments of 24 Virginia residents who had brought more than 200 guns into the Big Apple, including a Thompson sub-machine gun, you know, one of those rat-tat-tat bangers used by the Al Capone gang. Actually the so-called machine gun is actually a semi-automatic rifle but it looks like a machine gun.

The Brooklyn press conference was quite entertaining, because in addition to all the guns lying around, DA Gonzalez also played a taped conversation between two of the crooks, one of whom was bragging to the other about how he could walk around to 10 different gun shops, buy a legal gun in each one, bring the stash up to New York and unload the guns in the street.

If someone can buy a gun legally in Virginia, they were able to pass the FBI-NICS check. A legal gun purchase is a legal gun purchase no matter where it’s made. So how come all these ‘legal’ guns only seem to come to New York from Southern states? I’ll tell you why.

If you look at the number of federal dealer licenses in Southern states  and compare to the FFL numbers in states like New York and New Jersey, there are three times as many gun licenses per capita in the South as opposed to the North. Gee, what a surprise, given the fact that per-capita gun ownership is also three times higher in the South than in the North. The movement of legally-purchased guns from one section of the country to another is a perfect example of the way the market responds to an imbalance between supply and demand. It’s not the ‘lax’ gun laws which bring Southern guns up to New York; it’s unmet demand, and laws don’t prevent the market from responding to demand.