Hillary Clinton Locks Up The Gun-Grabber Vote

On Thursday night, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence honored Hillary Clinton with the first ever Cuomo Visionary Award, named after the late New York Governor Mario Cuomo. The Brady Center gave her the award because “she has demonstrated a clear commitment in support of our efforts to ‘finish the job’” for the gun control and, “there is nobody who has done more to lead us there than Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton has surely fought for this recognition, making gun control a central issue of her 2016 presidential campaign. She has named the NRA as one of her biggest enemies. But the regulations she is pushing will disarm millions of Americans and primarily take guns away from poor blacks.

Her big focus is on enacting “universal” background checks, expanding checks to the private transfer of guns, with the vast majority of transfers occurring within families. In New York, where Hillary Clinton was being honored by the Brady Campaign, expanded background checks add about $80 to the cost of transferring a gun.

The cost imposed on gun transfers in other places have ranged from $60 in Oregon to $200 in Washington, DC. Drug gangs aren’t going to be paying these fees. It is the law-abiding good citizens who will go through these background checks who do.

• Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press, 2010).