and their email inboxes full. NOW. From February 28, 2013
Politco:
The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a markup for new gun control legislation for one week, delaying action on a controversial proposal to ban assault weapons.
The postponement also allows more time for bipartisan negotiations between Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to reach a deal to expand background checks for all gun purchases. Those talks have stalled over Coburn’s objections to permanent record keeping of gun purchases becoming a part of background checks.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/gun-control-markup-delayed-88232.html#ixzz2MDnmG983
A national background check is not per se a problem; if it creates registration records, it is. The bigger problem is that because many states are not sharing involuntary commitment records with the national background check system, this is going to be a lot of expense with little or nothing to show for it. The gun control advocates have already admitted that they aren't bothering to prosecute people who lie on background checks; why would they bother to prosecute people who do transfers with background checks?
In my mind, the biggest problem is that if we create a requirement that every legal firearms transfer must have accompanying paperwork, we've reversed the presumption of innocence. Instead of having possession of a firearm being presumptively innocent, unless there is evidence of criminality, we'd have possession of a firearm being criminal, for which the existence of the proper paperwork would be an affirmative defense.
ReplyDeleteThis is not somewhere we want to go. Currently, it's only the class III collectors who've had to deal with felony prosecutions for no reason other than that the ATF had screwed up their records in their NFA registry. If we allow a universal background check to include a record-keeping requirement, we're all going to be at risk.