VPC - The Treasury Department Is Better Equipped than the Consumer Product Safety Commission to Regulate the Gun Industry

VPC

The Treasury Department Is Better Equipped than the Consumer Product Safety Commission to Regulate the Gun Industry

On March 2, 1999 Senator Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) and Representative Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) introduced the Firearms Safety and Consumer Protection Act (S. 534 and H.R. 920) to end the gun industry's exemption from federal health and safety regulation. The bill would grant extensive health and safety authority to the Department of the Treasury. The agency would be empowered to protect the public from unreasonable risk of injury resulting from the use of firearms or firearm products. The agency would be able to set minimum safety standards, issue recalls, and mandate safety warnings.

The Department of the Treasury is by far the best-equipped agency to regulate the gun industry.

The Department of the Treasury knows the gun industry. The agency already licenses firearm manufacturers, importers, and dealers.
The agency understands the products that gun makers produce. The Department currently does some limited safety testing of imported handguns and examines all imported firearms for suitability for sporting purposes.
The Department currently tracks gun industry production and compiles gun-tracing information. This type of information gathering and analysis is basic to identifying unreasonably dangerous firearms, a primary function of a safety agency.
The Department of the Treasury enforces the existing bans on the manufacture of assault weapons and machine guns. The Clinton Administration's fiscal year 2000 budget proposes to dedicate $24 million just to Department investigations of criminal gun traffickers.
The fact that the Department already performs these functions would allow the agency to quickly and efficiently add health and safety regulation to the duties it already performs.

On the other hand, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is ill-equipped to take on firearms regulation.

CPSC's budget and staff levels were slashed by nearly half during the 1980s. Those lost resources have never fully been restored. Its fiscal year 1999 budget is only $47 million.
CPSC already counts 15,000 consumer products within its jurisdiction. However, firearms kill almost twice as many American each year as these 15,000 products combined. Regulating the firearms industry would likely force CPSC to divert a significant portion of its meager resources to regulation of the gun industry and away from other products, a significant proportion of which are children's products.
CPSC has no experience with guns or the firearms industry. It would be forced to duplicate much of the research and information gathering currently performed by the Department of the Treasury.
Every major national consumer organization including Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, and U.S. PIRG opposes giving CPSC jurisdiction over firearms because of the potential drain on CPSC resources and the very real danger that the National Rifle Association (NRA) would succeed in slashing the agency's budget should it be granted authority over guns. There is historical precedent for this. In the 1970s, CPSC acted to regulate ammunition under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act and Congress quickly stepped in�at the behest of the National Rifle Association�to prohibit the agency from exercising any authority over ammunition. Moreover, in the 1990s the NRA succeeded in prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from even studying firearm-related injuries.

The Torricelli/Kennedy bill would also create stronger regulatory authority within the Department of the Treasury than that currently exercised by CPSC. The Consumer Product Safety Act contains many burdensome provisions that would hinder the agency's ability to aggressively regulate the gun industry. For example:

The procedure by which CPSC develops a consumer product safety rule is more cumbersome than that used by other federal safety agencies. Before issuing a proposed consumer product safety rule, CPSC must first publish an advance notice of proposed rulemaking for public notice and comment. This extra step prolongs the rulemaking process and would increase the opportunities for the gun industry to delay and weaken safety standards.

CPSC must defer to an existing voluntary industry standard if it adequately addresses the risk and there will likely be adequate compliance. Throughout its three-stage rulemaking process, CPSC must justify why a mandatory rule would address the risk and compliance issues better than a voluntary standard. This additional analysis is time consuming and burdensome.

CPSC must conduct a cost/benefit analysis as part of two of its three stages of rulemaking.

CPSC may not release any information to the public that identifies a specific manufacturer without first allowing the manufacturer the opportunity to oppose disclosure of the information. This provision could severely reduce the amount and quality of information available to the public about the gun industry and its products.
The Torricelli/Kennedy bill contains none of these onerous provisions. It would finally�and most effectively�end the gun industry's deadly immunity from health and safety regulation.

All contents � 1999 Violence Policy Center