In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas this past weekend, most of us heard about Jimmy Kimmel’s emotional monologue in response. As a prominent celebrity with a wide audience and an increasingly vocal point of view, he is drawing the attention of conservatives who are all too eager to discredit him.
Recently, I was exposed to one such hit piece, written by Ben Marquis and published at the Conservative Tribune, entitled The 3 Massive Lies Jimmy Kimmel Told About Guns After LV Massacre… Everyone Needs to Read This. Simply put, this article is filled with spin, name calling and straight up misrepresentation of the content of the monologue.
The nickel summary is that the article claims Kimmel was misleading on 3 topics — the overturning of the late Obama era rule affecting social security recipients with mental disorders and their ability to purchase handguns; the “gun show loophole”; and the (currently on hold) silencer bill pending in congress.
Comparing the actual transcript of the monologue with the article’s description of those parts of it, it is clear the author of the piece is making some effort to misrepresent what was said in an effort to create an impression of dishonesty on Jimmy Kimmel’s part.
For the first topic, the article states:
His allegation about Trump letting dangerous mentally ill people purchase and possess weapons was actually in reference to the rollback of an Obama-era regulation aimed at banning gun possession by Social Security recipients who needed assistance with their finances — not people who had been adjudicated as mentally ill or dangerous, who are in fact still prohibited from possessing firearms under federal law.
Now here is what Jimmy Kimmel actually said on this during his remarks:
President Trump is visiting Las Vegas on Wednesday, he spoke this morning, said he’s praying for those who lost their lives. In February, he also signed a bill that made it easier for people with severe mental illness to buy guns legally.
First of all, the article adds the qualifier “dangerous”, which is not part of the transcript of the monologue. This disingenuously changes the implication of what Kimmel actually said.
The bill referred to by Kimmel is one of a series of bills brought before congress under the auspices of what is known as the Congressional Review Act. This allows congress to review recently enacted federal regulations and overrule them if desired. This particular rule is summarized as follows:
SUMMARY: These final rules implement provisions of the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 (NIAA) that require Federal agencies to provide relevant records to the Attorney General for inclusion in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Under these final rules, we will identify, on a prospective basis, individuals who receive Disability Insurance benefits under title II of the Social Security Act (Act) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments under title XVI of the Act and who also meet certain other criteria, including an award of benefits based on a finding that the individual’s mental impairment meets or medically equals the requirements of section 12.00 of the Listing of Impairments (Listings) and receipt of benefits through a representative payee. We will provide pertinent information about these individuals to the Attorney General on not less than a quarterly basis. As required by the NIAA, at the commencement of the adjudication process we will also notify individuals, both orally and in writing, of their possible Federal prohibition on possessing or receiving firearms, the consequences of such prohibition, the criminal penalties for violating the Gun Control Act, and the availability of relief from the prohibition on the receipt or possession of firearms imposed by Federal law. Finally, we also establish a program that permits individuals to request relief from the Federal firearms prohibitions based on our adjudication. These changes will allow us to fulfill responsibilities that we have under the NIAA.
The complete text of the SSA rule can be found here.
The above summary refers to section 12.00 — this is a section of the Social Security Administration (SSA) Disability Evaluation. This list of mental disorders includes neurocognitive disorders; schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders; depressive, bipolar and related disorders; intellectual disorder; anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders; somatic symptom and related disorders; personality and impulse-control disorders; autism spectrum disorder; neurodevelopmental disorders; eating disorders; and trauma- and stressor-related disorders. Full descriptors of these categories can be found here.
What does all this mean? According to the rule, the SSA would provide a list of SS disability recipients who 1) suffer from the mentioned mental disorders and 2) have their benefits received via a representative payee (in other words, unable to manage those affairs themselves). Those people added to the NICS database would need to actively seek a legal exception to be eligible to purchase firearms, if the rule were in effect. This effectively expands the pool of people with mental illness prohibited from purchasing firearms. Existing law targets those who had been “adjudicated as a mental defective”. According to federal regulations, a person has been “adjudicated as a mental defective” if a court, board, commission or other lawful authority has determined that he or she, as a result of marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease:
1. is a danger to himself, herself, or others, or
2. lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his or her own affairs (27 CFR § 478.11). (per this site.)
The rule effectively adds the SSA to the lawful authorities that can perform this adjudication.
The rule was published in December of last year, and went into effect in January 2017, with full enforcement to be required by the end of the year; in February congress voted to overturn this rule, and Trump signed the bill, preventing this rule from going into full effect, and as a result, making it easier for those suffering from mental disorders to buy guns.
Kimmel's description seems reasonably accurate; the author of the Conservative Tribune article obscures aspects of the overturned rule and mischaracterizes Kimmel’s statement to make it seem more divergent from the facts than it actually is.
For the second topic, the article states:
Kimmel also spoke of the mis-named “gun show loophole” to avoid background checks, which actually refers to the normal free market activity of buying and selling between two private individuals, an activity not governed by federal law, which occasionally takes place at or near a gun show.
In fact, people who purchase guns from licensed vendors at a gun show have to undergo a federal background check the same as a person buying a weapon at a gun shop, as the rules for licensed dealers remain the same regardless of the location in which they are conducting their business, be it a show or a shop.
And the relevant quote from the monologue:
Right now, there are loopholes in the law that let people avoid background checks if they buy a gun privately from another party, if they buy a gun online or at a gun show. So I want to show you something. These are the faces of the senators who, days after the shooting in Orlando, voted against a bill that would have closed those loopholes. These are the 56 senators who didn’t want to do anything about that.
So to start, the article indicates that Kimmel is misrepresenting what is commonly referred to as the gun show loophole. The point of the loophole is not that licensed dealers must perform the background check, but that private sales are unregulated. This is the loophole that legislators have been trying to deal with for many years, with nine bills introduced to close the loophole since 2001. Kimmel mentions the “private” nature of these sales, and since private sellers are allowed to operate at gun shows, he is not misrepresenting the nature of the loophole.
The bill Kimmel refers to is actually an amendment to a funding bill that was proposed in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting that took place in June 2016. Senator Chris Murphy proposed an amendment that would have expanded background checks to include private and internet sales. It failed.
For the third “massive lie”, the article states:
The late night host also touched on the topic of firearm suppressors, which have been misnamed as “silencers” by Hollywood and ill-informed leftists, as they merely suppress the sound of gunfire to a reasonable level, and are nowhere near actually being “silent.” They also have nothing to do with the gunman in the Las Vegas massacre, though Kimmel clearly implied it was relevant.
And Kimmel’s quote:
By the way, the House of Representatives is voting on a piece of legislation this week. It’s a bill to legalize the sale of silencers for guns, this is what they’re working on. We have a major problem with gun violence in this country, and I guess they don’t care. If I’m wrong on that, fine, do something about it. Cause I’m sick of it.
Silencers and suppressors are different names for the same thing. The term “silencer” is used not only by “Hollywood and ill-informed leftists”, but by the Department of Justice and the ATF as well. To the general public, silencer is the common term for these devices, so to fault Kimmel for using it is to fault him for relating to his audience.
Currently, suppressors are strictly regulated in the US. According to wikipedia:
In the United States, taxes and strict regulations affect the manufacture and sale of suppressors under the National Firearms Act. They are legal for individuals to possess and use for lawful purposes in 42 of the 50 states. However, a prospective owner must go through an application process administered by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which requires a federal tax payment of $200 and a thorough criminal background check. The tax payment buys a revenue stamp, which is the legal document allowing possession of a suppressor. The 8 states that have explicitly banned any civilian from possessing a suppressor are: California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. The states of Connecticut and Vermont allow for suppressor ownership but prohibit using suppressors while hunting. The federal legal requirements to manufacture a suppressor in the United States are enumerated in Title 26, Chapter 53 of the United States Code. The individual states and several municipalities also have their specific requirements. Federal law provides severe penalties for crimes of violence committed using firearms equipped with silencers: a minimum prison sentence of 30 years.
At the time of the airing of the episode in question, the bill H.R. 367 had been introduced in the house as the Hearing Protection Act of 2017. According to congress.gov, the summary of this bill is the following:
This bill amends the Internal Revenue Code to: (1) eliminate the $200 transfer tax on firearm silencers, and (2) treat any person who acquires or possesses a firearm silencer as meeting any registration or licensing requirements of the National Firearms Act with respect to such silencer. Any person who pays a transfer tax on a silencer after October 22, 2015, may receive a refund of such tax.
The bill amends the federal criminal code to preempt state or local laws that tax or regulate firearm silencers
This bill had already been postponed in the wake of the shooting at the softball practice in which representative Steve Scalise was injured. In the wake of Las Vegas and subsequent to the airing of the episode, it looks like the bill is on hold indefinitely.
To my reading, the point Kimmel was making in bringing this bill up had nothing to do with the Las Vegas massacre in and of itself, but rather that at a time in which mass shootings are disturbingly common, rather than acting to try anything to curb them, republicans in congress were acting to relax restrictions on firearms and their accessories in service to the NRA.
I understand the desire by guns rights activists to want to demonize any celebrity using their platform to advocate for something to be done to curb gun violence, but the claims of lying in this article are simply not borne out. By misrepresenting both what Kimmel said and the underlying topics he brought up, then wrapping it up with an outrage-inducing clickbait headline, I think it is fair to say it is Ben Marquis and the Conservative Tribune who are lying.