KRISTOF UPDATE: Leftie blogger Ted Barlow reports on his attendance at a gun show and his experience is at odds with Kristof’s, finding friendly normal people instead of crazed assassins — though Barlow makes a legal error that’s understandable, given that nearly all media coverage makes it too:

I’ve now been to one gun show. Big deal. They’re not for me, but there’s nothing wrong with them. But it seems silly at best, dangerous at worst, to have a special kind of room called a “gun show” where certain gun laws don’t count. I’d like to see the gun-show loophole closed on a federal level. That’s all anyone is asking for.

Fine — but there is no “gun show loophole!” Gun shows are not a “special kind of room” where “certain gun laws don’t count.”

Every law that applies anywhere applies at a gun show. But federal law allows people who aren’t in the business of selling firearms to do so without complying with the background check provisions, etc. If you’re a licensed gun dealer, you have to comply with those laws whether or not you’re at a gun show. If you’re not a licensed gun dealer, you don’t have to comply with those laws, whether or not you’re at a gun show.

This is why gun people get so angry at talk of the “gun show loophole.” There isn’t one. Federal firearms law was designed to treat guns as normally as possible where ordinary people are concerned, permitting the sorts of casual trades and sales that have historically gone on. Anti-gun groups, who want to stigmatize guns, hate that. The “gun show loophole” is part of a drive, largely admitted, to require that any transfer of firearms, anywhere, be run through the federal system. This may or may not be a good idea — I don’t think it would do much to prevent crime, for several fairly obvious reasons — but regardles of whether it’s a good idea or not, talk of a nonexistent “gun show loophole” is either ignorant or dishonest. In Barlow’s case, the ignorance (and I’m sure that’s what it is) is excusable, because he’s been bombarded with this propaganda via the Kristofs of the world.

In Kristof’s case, it’s inexcusable because he writes for the “paper of record” and he’s supposed to be neither ignorant nor dishonest. “Supposed to be” being the operative phrase here, of course.