Do We Really Need FBI-NICS Background Checks?
If there is one new gun law which everyone seems to
agree we should enact, it’s the law which would require a background check every
time that anyone transfers a gun. Right now, according to our friends
at Giffords, roughly half the American population resides in states where some
kind of background check beyond the initial over-the-counter check takes place.
But even in the states where some kind of additional background check occurs
after the gun has been sold for the first time, there’s no consistency and the
process varies from state to state.
As for
states which require no kind of background check when a gun owner sells or
transfers his gun to someone else, most of those states happen to be the same
states where a majority of the residents own guns. And don’t think for one minute that it’s only
a coincidence that states with lots of gun owners usually have fewer gun laws.
I have
no problem with universal background checks for guns if I thought for one
second that this procedure might result in less violence caused by guns. After
all, right now we Americans own somewhere between 260 and 350 million guns and
gun researchers have been telling us forever and ever Amen that we suffer from
an extraordinarily-high rate of gun violence, precisely because we have too
many guns floating around and they can easily move from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ hands.
So if we instituted universal background checks, so the argument goes, we
wouldn’t have less guns but at least they wouldn’t so easily end up in the wrong
hands.
This
sounds like a very logical and reasonable proposition, which is why Gun-control
Nation has gotten behind universal background checks (UBC) because the
process is, after all, reasonable, which happens to be a favorite gun-control
word. And UBC wouldn’t be a threat to 2nd Amendment ‘rights’
because everyone, even the nuttiest of the gun nuts agrees that only
law-abiding citizens should be able to own guns.
Mike the
Gun Guy doesn’t agree. Mike the Gun Guy
actually believes that deciding whether
or not to institute UBC shouldn’t be considered in terms of
reasonableness or 2nd Amendment ‘rights’ at all. In fact, Mike the
Gun Guy (that’s right, it’s trademarked) would feel much more
sanguine about the whole background check issue if his friends in Gun-control
Nation would stop proclaiming the virtues of UBC and try to understand
what the term ‘universal’ as in Universal Background Checks really means.
What it
means is that a lot of time, energy, paperwork and money is going to be spent
making sure that a lot of guns which have absolutely nothing to do with gun
violence end up being regulated simply because such items meet the legal
definition of the word ‘gun.’ When our friends at The Trace published
a list of more than 9,000 guns that were confiscated by more than 1,000 police
agencies between 2010 and 2016, I ran the entire batch through a word search
using the words Remington, Winchester, Savage, Marlin, Browning and H&R to
see how many times these words came up.
These
six words happen to be the names of gun companies who together probably
manufactured and sold 100 million hunting rifles and shotguns over the past hundred
years; most of those guns, believe it or not, are still in private hands. Know
how many times these words appeared in the list of more than 9,000 ‘crime’
guns? Exactly six times and in every,
single case, those guns were confiscated because the owner didn’t have a gun
license – that was the big, serious crime.
If we believe that background checks will reduce gun violence, why do most background checks involve guns that aren’t connected to gun violence? Sorry, but the idea that I have to drive forty miles round trip to a gun shop to run a background check on my son before I give him my old, single-shot Sears Roebuck bird gun just doesn’t make any sense at all.
