Look, I've been in this business long enough to know when politicians are playing word games. The gun control crowd loves to wrap their most extreme ideas in words like "reasonable" and "commonsense" — and a new research paper shows exactly how dishonest that game really is.
Del Schlangen from the University of Wyoming's Firearms Research Center documented something fascinating: eleven states have passed laws requiring gun industry members to implement "reasonable controls" on our products. Sounds fine, right? Problem is, nobody — not the legislature, not the courts, not the activists — can tell you what "reasonable" actually means.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation tried to challenge New York's vague law, but the Second Circuit basically said "reasonableness is a well-established legal standard" and waved it away. But Schlangen's research proves that's nonsense. He found 170 different examples of gun control groups applying "reasonable" to everything from handgun bans to ten-day waiting periods. Giffords called an outright ban on handguns a "reasonable regulation." The same people call mandatory training "reasonable." The word means whatever they need it to mean that day.
Here's why this should terrify every FFL holder: under these laws, if a straw purchase happens at your store despite your best efforts, you didn't have "reasonable" controls. If criminals break into your shop, you didn't have "reasonable" security. If someone you lawfully sold a gun to commits a crime weeks later, that proves your practices weren't "reasonable" enough. None of those outcomes necessarily mean you did anything wrong — but under these vague laws, all of them become ammunition for lawsuits.
The Supreme Court unfortunately declined to hear the NSSF's case, but other challenges are working through the courts. These "firearm responsibility" laws aren't about responsibility — they're designed to bury the firearms industry in litigation until we can't afford to exist anymore.
That's the real agenda, and now there's academic research to prove it.