The Tyranny of “Universal Background Checks” for Guns
Yesterday, the Senate committee charged with crafting new gun control laws designed to please Obama and the liberal media, passed S-374 (here’s a link to it), the bill designed to implement expanded — “universal” — background checks on gun transfers. It stands a chance of being approved by the full Senate next month. Besides requiring all buyers at a gun show (or in the parking lot) to undergo an NICS (instant background) check, the bill goes much farther than anyone expected.
You want to buy a gun from a friend. You know each other well. Too bad, you still have to go to the cops or to an FFL, pay a fee, and undergo the background check. Okay, now it gets even worse. This morning, Charles C.W. Cooke writes in the National Review:
If, for example, a gun owner leaves his home for more than seven days — leaving his firearms with his roommate, or gay partner, or landlord — he’ll be committing a felony that carries a five-year prison term. And while married couples are exempted from falling afoul of that provision, the family exemptions apply only to recorded “gifts” and not to “temporary transfers.”
Meaning that if you are the registered purchaser of a gun, you can’t loan it to your spouse if she’s going to leave your home with it.
What else would change? Well, it would be illegal to lend a gun to a friend so that he can go shooting. Want to give your pistol to your neighbor so he can pop down to the range for a few hours but don’t have time to go with him? Sorry, better make sure you look good in orange . . . Sharing guns between buddies on a hunting trip? Five years inside for you.
Want to teach your neighbor’s kids to shoot, or plink in the backyard with them? Don’t let them (even if you’re supervising) use your gun.
Oh, and you must report a lost or stolen firearm within 24-hours.
NY Sen. Chuck Schumer rammed through these provisions at the last minute before the bill squeaked through committee.
And remember, if S-374 becomes law, any violation of it would be a felony. You would lose your right to own a firearm.
Besides all of that, “universal background checks” pretty much requires registration of the guns being sold/transferred/etc.
Have a nice day.
8 Responses to “The Tyranny of “Universal Background Checks” for Guns”
Leave a Reply
(Be sure to answer the anti-spam question!)
on 14 Mar 2013 at 6:59 am # comatus
Plato, Republic, Book I, the Cephalus argument. See, this is why there should never be a “Philosophy 101.” It’s the very definition of “sophomoric.”
Now we have to stand witness as a profoundly uneducated electorate — and their duly elected masters! — bungle their way through a veritable Great Books program of the addled mind, with our lives and rights on the midterm and final. Again.
You know, if they’d start with the pre-Socratics like a rational man would, they’d at least busy themselves for a while with oil presses, bridge engineering, and naming highways. The pre-Socratics worked for their living.
Everybody wants to be god-king and lawgiver around here. And that’s what the Greeks had the word for: τύραννος. The Greeks could fire theirs. And others…may profit by their example.
on 14 Mar 2013 at 11:38 am # m m good
Plato’s Socrates always had the right answer up the sleeve of his toga, and led his admiring followers by the nose to his conclusion. Real life is full of conundrums and loose ends. Here, at this site, everyone knows who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. There are the honest citizens, defending themselves and their hapless neighbors, and then there are the criminals. I like it when the reality of conundrums sometimes pokes its nose under the tent of certainty, as in the recent discussion of guns and the (possibly) mentally ill. There are people who should’t have guns in their hands, at least at some times in their lives, but who gets to say who and when? The problem is a special case of the conundrum of preserving maximum freedom and autonomy while also preserving public order and mutual responsibility.
Maybe there is someone in your community who drinks too much, is physically abusive to his family, is overly disinhibited and aggressive when drinking, and keeps a gun in his nightstand. Good guy or bad guy? In my small city this week, one such regular guy engaged the police in a firefight when they were called by a neighbor due to his jumping up and down on the hood of his girlfriend’s car, and wounded three officers before being killed.
The legislation being discussed is probably a failed attempt at meeting a genuine public concern. It’s quite unlikely to become law.
Several of the points made here and in the article by C.C.W. Crooke are false: The proposed legislation explicitly exempts temporary transfers on one’s own “curtilage”; i.e. plinking with whomever you damn well please in your backyard. Sharing guns between buddies on a hunting trip? Explicitly allowed. That doesn’t mean that the legislation is really well thought out, just that the people who wrote it already thought of, and circumvented, some unwanted consequences.
What does “pretty much requires registration” mean? Does it require registration or not? Call in a legal expert. Looks to me like the record keeping requirement would be exactly the same as for a sale by a licensed dealer, except the name of the seller would also be recorded.
There are some activities I would prefer to have strongly discouraged either through criminal or liability law.
Leave your house for more than seven days and leave your guns in the hands of your roommate? Nope, totally irresponsible. You had better have a good gun safe. Should that be a felony? No, but it should expose you to serious liability in case something goes wrong. Loan a gun to a casual acquaintance who proceeds to the nearest shopping mall and shoots random people, as in Oregon last year? There’s a good moral case for an orange jumpsuit there. Not to mention the underground market in guns among genuine criminals. When criminal A provides a gun to criminal B who uses it in a felony, I would like to see criminal A be held responsible and get two lowlifes off the street, wouldn’t you?
So how would you write the law?
on 14 Mar 2013 at 12:34 pm # SPQR
This bill’s language is far far worse than people realize at first glance. We’ve been dealing with it in Colorado as we try to defeat it in the legislature (so far we are not succeeding).
The more you analyse it the more you realize that it is very oppressive.
on 14 Mar 2013 at 12:39 pm # SPQR
m m good, your attempt to defend this legislation is utter nonsense. The language would allow one to loan a firearm to someone to go hunting … but if you loaned it at the field you’d be legal, if you gave it to him at your home before leaving it would be a crime. If your buddy left one field, crossed the road to go to another field to continue hunting, it would be a crime (most states don’t allow hunting on a road - so the exemption expires in this ridiculous legislation). Your buddy leaves the field to go get lunch? Federal Felony.
Take a friend to the back of your own forty acres to do some plinking, let him shoot your gun, and you’ve committed a Federal Felony.
Leave a gun for your wife to use while you are gone from home? Don’t be gone more than seven days or be a Federal Felon.
There are many more scenarios. They all show the law to be completely ridiculous and only intended to trap the innocent into commiting crimes.
on 14 Mar 2013 at 7:43 pm # comatus
m m, you can’t mock platonists and be a platonist at the same time. You just did that. Don’t do that.
You don’t get the jokes in Plato’s drawing room comedies, do you. Note, no question mark.
on 14 Mar 2013 at 11:52 pm # m m good
Comatus, I like your comment. I’m philosophically completely unsophisticated, but a platonist by profession, more or less. It’s not too late to learn something, however.
on 15 Mar 2013 at 11:50 am # joated
One would almost think Schumer doesn’t want this bill to pass. Or, if it somehow does pass, to be upheld by the Supreme Court.
on 15 Mar 2013 at 4:54 pm # SPQR
joated, I actually think that Bloomberg’s MAIG (who I think are the source of the language) want it to pass. Its the same language that showed up in Colorado state legislature among Colorado Democrats obviously puppets of Bloomberg.