Tim Murphy

Reporter

Tim Murphy is a reporter in MoJo's DC bureau. Last summer he logged 22,000 miles while blogging about his cross-country road trip for Mother Jones. His writing has been featured in Slate and the Washington Monthly. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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New York Rep. Wants Ban on 3D-Printed Gun Magazines

—By Tim Murphy

| Thu Jan. 17, 2013 7:56 AM PST

When University of Texas Law School student Cody Wilson published a YouTube video last month of an AR-15 he'd made with the assistance of a 3D-printer, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) sprang into action. He announced new legislation (actually a reauthorization of the 1988 Undectable Firearms Act, which expires at the end of the year) that he said would "stop so-called 'wiki-weapons.'" As I reported at the time, Wilson's response was fairly understated. He believed his plan to make and test guns made with printed plastic parts—and then post all of the instructions online—was legally sound, and had no intention of backing down.

Last week, Wilson published a new video. This time, his AR-15 is outfitted with a different printed plastic component—a 30-round magazine, the same kind President Obama proposed outlawing in his new gun control package. Take a look:

Israel's response: ban plastic magazines too. Wilson's response:

WikiWeb DevBlog/Tumblr

If nothing else, it should make for a fun set of hearings—if it gets that far.

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Flashback: How Republicans and the NRA Kneecapped the ATF

Thirty years ago, the National Rifle Association saved its biggest adversary from extinction. It got just what it wanted.

—By Tim Murphy

| Thu Jan. 17, 2013 4:11 AM PST

When Charlton Heston said the federal government could take his guns from his "cold, dead hands," he was referring to the ATF.

Driven to act by last month's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, President Barack Obama on Wednesday called on Congress to pass new laws banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and targeting gun traffickers, and he announced 23 steps his administration is taking to better enforce existing law. With Republicans threatening to block any legislation—and some extreme GOPers calling for impeachment if Obama acts alone—reform, as could be expected, will not be easy.

But should Obama gets what he wants, he'll face another major challenge: his own Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Over the last three decades, gun activists and lawmakers have purposefully hindered the ATF and carefully molded the agency that enforces gun laws to serve their own interests, stunting the ATF's budget, handicapping its regulatory authority, and keeping it effectively leaderless. The bureau Obama is counting on to lead his gun control push is a disaster…by Republican design.

This Is How the NRA Lies to Gun Owners About Obama's Agenda

NRA's School Security Plan Cites Phony Shooting

This Collection of NRA Ads Reveals Its Descent Into Crazy

The NRA Myth of Gun-Free Zones

Gunmakers and the NRA Bet Big on Silencers. What Could Go Wrong?

Investigators Discover NRA Materials in Newtown Killer's House

EXCLUSIVE: Unmasking the NRA's Inner Circle

Meet the NRA's Board of Directors

The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys

How the NRA and Its Allies Helped Spread a Radical Gun Law Nationwide

See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

The problems are obvious. The agency that Obama said "works most closely with state and local law enforcement to keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals" has the same of number of agents as the Phoenix Police Department. Its budget has barely budged in decades (as the Department of Homeland Security has grown flush with post-9/11 funding). It has fewer investigators than it did in 1973. And its acting (and part-time) director, B. Todd Jones, commutes to work from Minneapolis, where he works full-time as a US attorney. It hasn't had a permanent director for six years. The NRA blocked Obama's earlier appointee, Andrew Traver, in part because Traver had once attended a meeting of police chiefs that focused on gun control. At the unveiling of his gun violence prevention package, Obama announced he would seek to make Jones the permanent (and presumably fulltime) chief of the ATF.

To understand how the ATF became the weakest of law enforcement agencies, you have to go back to President Ronald Reagan's first term.

The 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, the first major piece of gun control legislation since the Capone days, led the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the Department of the Treasury to sprout a third responsibility: handguns. With the market for moonshine collapsed—due to a global spike in sugar prices—the division's primary investigative responsibility for most of its history withered. The new mandate to regulate arms sales filled the void. It also made the bureau a natural foil for the nascent gun lobby, and the NRA, whose leadership was fast transitioning from a moderate coalition of sportsmen to a band of true believers, went to work to make the agency a pariah.

[Read the full article]

Obama's Wrong: We Kind of Are a Nation of Deadbeats

Selling problematic debt and laughing about it is the story of America.

—By Tim Murphy

| Tue Jan. 15, 2013 4:01 AM PST

President Obama said the United States is not a "deadbeat nation." We rate that statement "half true."

President Obama wanted to make one thing clear about the looming fight over raising the debt ceiling on Monday morning. "The issue here is whether or not America pays its bills," he said at a White House press conference that touched on control, Congress, and the loneliness of the human condition. "We are not a deadbeat nation."

"Deadbeat Nation" sounds like a great name for book. And as it turns out, it is a book. In A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters, William & Mary professor Scott Reynolds Nelson argues that American history consists of a never-ending string of defaults at the individual, municipal, and state levels. Credit bubbles alternately finance transformative policies like westward expansion and infrastructure improvements, and then remake the nation's political landscape when they invariably pop. Economist Tyler Cowen, in a New York Times Magazine review last July, needed just one sentence to summarize the book: "We have hardly ever had a well-functioning banking system."

I spoke with Nelson on Monday to discuss the president's statement, a hypothetical invasion of the United States by Chinese gunboats, and the role of credit crises in the rise of Mormonism.

[Read the full article]

Gun Group: We're Giving Away a Free Assault Rifle for Freedom!

—By Tim Murphy

| Mon Jan. 14, 2013 9:19 AM PST

Georgia Gun Owners

Most dangerous thing in our inbox this morning: the above promo from the Second Amendment group Georgia Gun Owners, which is giving away a free AR-15 assault rifle to one lucky member on February 7. You get a carbine! You get a carbine! You get a carbine! The AR-15 was the weapon used by gunman Adam Lanza in last month's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. It was also among the firearms included in the 1994 assault weapons ban (and subsequently legalized when the ban expired nine years ago). Per a press release, the GGO "hopes to alert, activate and mobilize gun owners in every corner of the state to oppose the Feinstein Gun Ban and others being touted in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere across the country." (The entry form adds: "Void where prohibited.")

In compliance with federal law, the lucky winner will be subjected to a background check—although the federal background check database is woefully incomplete. But the larger context, as the New York Times reported on Friday, is that rumors of impending gun control legislation are really the best thing that's happened to the firearms industry in a long time. Dealers across the country are running out of arms and ammunition, and background checks for new gun purchases—which tracks closely to overall gun sales—increased 58.6 percent in December 2012 compared to December 2011. As a gun seller in Des Moines, Iowa, told the Times: "If I had 1,000 AR-15s I could sell them in a week."

14 Ways Obama Can Push Gun Control Without Congress

Forget the House of Representatives. Here’s what the White House can do right now.

—By Tim Murphy and Adam Serwer

| Mon Jan. 14, 2013 4:06 AM PST

President Barack Obama hugs former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), who is leading a national push for gun control.

By Thursday afternoon, it was clear that Vice President Joe Biden's charms weren't going to be enough to persuade the National Rifle Association to get on board with gun control legislation. Following a 95-minute summit at the White House, the NRA issued a curt press release vowing never to surrender. "We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment," the organization said. Instead, the nation's leading gun group pledged to take its "commitment and meaningful contributions" to Congress.

Fortunately for the White House, there's a Plan B. Just one day earlier, Biden signaled that the White House might take unilateral steps on gun control, noting "there are executive orders, executive action that can be taken." What those steps were, Biden wouldn't say. But we've got a pretty good idea. Here are 14 proposals, all endorsed by leading gun control advocates—and in some cases, even the NRA—that the White House and its subordinate agencies could push through on their own:

[Read the full article]