WE MIGHT SUPPORT BACKGROUND CHECKS IF ...
Anti-gun advocates can’t understand why gun-rights advocates don’t support “common-sense” measures like background checks on gun transfers. There are reasons. It’s no mystery.
We might support background checks if — authorities arrested dangerous criminals they find after finding them.
Isn’t this the point? Isn’t this what new “red-flag” laws are about too? Nab bad guys before they can do harm — like when they’re trying to buy guns at retail. The FBI is on the phone. They’ve identified these dangerous desperados. Tell me you didn’t know that.
Picture this. A murderer, rapist, fugitive, jihadi, certified psycho, even a garden variety illegal alien who snuck into America, DACA student or other prohibited person walks into a gun store with a thousand dollars in cash and wants to buy the most (or least) dangerous gun there. As if the kind of gun matters, guns are guns, right? A foreign-exchange student or the worst badass, what is that guy buying any gun for, right? Call the cops! No need — they’re already on the phone.
The friendly honest gun-store owner has called the FBI after filling the required 4473 form with applicant’s name, address, ID and info provided to federal agents. The shopkeeper learns the person can’t buy guns, it’s banned by law. The FBI doesn’t say why — that’s also illegal — but only pretty bad dudes get on the list (in theory), that’s the plan. You don’t lose constitutional rights for parking tickets (though that’s been repeatedly proposed, and defeated). What next?
With the FBI on the phone, the customer standing there (a known location), money in hand, having just (probably) committed several federal felonies by handling a gun, trying to buy one and committing perjury on the form — they send the person away, with the cash. Out the door.
Have a nice day.
Is that what you support when you say, “I support background checks”? Find hardened criminals seeking guns, then send them away with their money? Do schoolkids screaming for background checks know that’s what they’re screaming for? That’s rhetorical. They don’t. I’ve asked many.
News Is Unaware
“News” media is doing a rotten job, they’re not making this clear. I’ve asked reporters, they’re not aware of it so of course they don’t say they don’t know. Most have never bought a gun, never had the experience. Americans wouldn’t support this, it’s crazy, but they don’t know. At least it’s insanely expensive, sapping law-enforcement resources urgently needed elsewhere.
In all fairness, the system does prevent some criminals from getting guns (at retail anyway), as my progressive friends insist. However, evidence shows more than 95 percent of denials are false positives — people denied aren’t really prohibited, or can’t be convicted of anything. In other words, their civil and constitutional rights get quashed without due process, without knowing why, with no chance to confront an accuser. Basically, they did nothing wrong. A clerk in a bureau blocks the Constitution, falsely. And a specious felony risk now hangs over the “suspect,” and any guns already owned! For anything except guns, the ACLU would be rioting — it’s intolerable. A firearm someone may desperately need for protection from domestic abuse or stalking is banned, illegally. Plus, frustrated denied criminals, humiliated, are free to take their cash to wherever they get drugs to get a street gun. I ask again — can you knowingly support billions for this?
We might support background checks if — inner-city gangs were included, where most American murders occur.
After two decades of background checks — they started in 1994 and in earnest in 1998 — gangsters are fully armed, committing roughly 6,000 rub-outs annually. Did you notice? There are no murder trials. Chicago is the poster child for this, overwhelmingly blacks killing blacks. That’s 6,000 murders and 6,000 murderers, but no spectacle show trials, because there’s little law enforcement. Democrat-controlled inner cities — what we used to call ghettos — are the shoot holes, immune to any sort of checks, or balances, including blind balances of justice.
What good are background checks — which society has proven work miserably on criminals — without law enforcement where crimes occur? Does this prove what critics insist, that black lives don’t matter? Where is “news” media on that problem? They’re at cocktail parties giving themselves journalism awards for reporting on “gun violence,” a propaganda term obscuring the real problem — crime. Next time you see “gun violence,” think “crime,” and watch how reporting changes flavor.
What About This?
We might support background checks if — they somehow addressed problems of psychopathic children who want to mass murder their classmates.
Background checks play zero roles in the spate of childhood killers seeking glory or revenge in schools. This applies whether they’re drug-addled youngsters on (or off) their psychotropic drugs, which apparently describes the majority (Big Pharma doesn’t promote stats), or twisted screen-addicted violent-video-game youths with no moral compass from a botched education system.
Everyone agrees school-age spree killers are a nightmare. Mass-media glorification of spree killers, for days and years after their killing sprees, is a prime motivator for so many of these monstrous sociopaths. Media moguls screaming intensely for checks adamantly refuse to check themselves, despite overwhelming evidence they either encourage or instigate spree murder. “Now everyone will know me!” — a common refrain of the villains — occurs one way only. With complicity from reporters in denial.
We might support background checks if — it wasn’t collecting names of more than 12 million innocent Americans every year.
Alan Korwin’s website features books and DVDs on state and federal gun laws for the public. Visit GunLaws.com
