In some states, you still have to wait several days to pick up a firearm after you’ve bought it from a dealer. The idea is that you might need a ‘cooling-off period’, if you were considering using the firearm in some illegal way — to commit a robbery, to confront an ex-spouse, and so on.
Basically, if you were thinking about doing something stupid, you get a little time to reconsider. Ten days, say. Time to let reason catch up with emotion.
These waiting periods are pretty pointless when buying guns. Most people who buy a gun already have at least one. And according to ATF, the average purchase-to-crime interval is around nine years.
The waiting periods are also dangerous to people who need the guns immediately for self-defense — to protect themselves from stalkers or domestic abusers, for example.
But waiting periods would be appropriate when considering new laws or regulations.
That is, whenever some legislature is thinking of enacting some legislation (or some regulatory agency is thinking of issuing some regulation) in response to that we have to do something feeling that so often follows a tragic event, it should have to go through a cooling-off period first.
Basically, if it’s thinking about doing something stupid — whether unconstitutional, or unlikely to have the intended effect, or untethered from reality — it should get a little time to reconsider. Six months, say. (Or until after the next election.) Time to let reason catch up with emotion.
For example, New York is about to enact a law increasing, from 18 to 21, the age at which someone can buy an AR-15 rifle. But just a couple of weeks ago, the same kind of law in California was ruled unconstitutional by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
By the time New York’s law is also declared unconstitutional, in addition to whatever lives it’s ruined, it will end up having wasted a lot of time and energy that could have been spent looking at what might be done to identify and help protect us from dangerous people, instead of obsessing over scary guns. That is, the state is taking what could be an opportunity, and replacing it with an opportunity cost.
Short-circuiting the rush to just do something is one of the main reasons to have a constitution — to take certain kinds of ‘solutions’ off the table before they can even be considered. In that sense, a constitution embodies the ultimate cooling-off period.
That is, if you’d like to infringe the right to keep and bear arms, or abridge freedom of speech, or further encroach on the right to refuse searches, you first need to get 2/3 of both houses of Congress, and 3/4 of the state legislatures on board with a constitutional amendment to let you do that. That takes time — the kind of time that serious measures deserve, but do not get, when politicians and bureaucrats leap before they look.
You know how when feel yourself getting angry, you can tell yourself to count to ten before saying or doing anything? This is sort of like that. But first, you count to 290 (representatives), then you count to 67 (senators), and then you count to 38 (states). And then, if you still want to pass that law, or issue that regulation, you can.
