A whole slew of budget cuts took effect on Friday. I’m a little peeved that NASA’s losing another $970 million. The beleaguered ATF will be taking a $60 million dollar hit, which would conceivably hamper their ability to enforce all those new gun-control laws folks keep proposing. Additionally, the FBI is losing $480 million, at least some of which is going to have an impact on NICS background-check processing. Expect delays.
Frankly, the whole thing reminds me of Gingrich’s boondoggle in 1995, but I don’t think the current President has the savvy to turn it to his advantage in the manner than Clinton did.
It goes without saying that this is going to be the political headliner for the near future. As such, the push for gun control in Congress is going to fade from public view and lose momentum.
That doesn’t mean it’s over, though.
As it stands, we have three bills headed to the Senate Judiciary Committee next week:
- S. 150: Dianne Feinstein’s Assault Weapons Ban 2.0. There aren’t 60 votes in the Senate for this, no matter how you do the math.
- S. 54: Leahy’s “Stop Illegal Trafficking in Firearms” Act. This one levies more stringent penalties on the straw purchase and trafficking of illegal guns. Some of this I’d like to see effected, and if they lose all else, this might be the beachhead the gun-control lobby settles on.
- S. 374: Schumer’s “Protecting Responsible Gun Sellers” Act. This is the backdoor universal background check bill, and this is the one that concerns me.
So far, we don’t have the bill text. Why? Because they’re going to write it in committee. Thus far, we have only the findings, which are as follows:
(1) Congress supports and respects the right to bear arms found in the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
(2) Congress supports the existing prohibition on a national firearms registry.
(3) There are deficits in the background check system in effect before the date of enactment of this Act and the Department of Justice should make it a top priority to work with States to swiftly input missing records, including mental health records.
(4) If the citizens of the United States agree that in order to promote safe and responsible gun ownership criminals and the mentally ill should be prohibited from possessing firearms, it should be incumbent upon all citizens to ensure weapons are not being transferred to such people.
Sure, it seems harmless on the front, but the part in which “it should be incumbent on all citizens” is the catch. There is simply no way to enact any sort of effective private background-check system without a registry of civilian firearms. Schumer despises the Tiahrt Amendment, and if he can invalidate it, he will.
The concept of universal background checks is a hard one to fight politically. After all who doesn’t want to make sure criminals and the insane don’t get guns? We don’t want to ban guns OK maybe we did last month but we promise we don’t mean it anymore and if it just saves one life even though we’ll never be able to prove it did and ohmigod why won’t you annoying gun zealots compromiiise?
There are three fundamental counterarguments. The first is that the law will turn well-meaning, law-abiding citizens into criminals. Did you get a background check done when you inherited that shotgun a couple of years back? If not, expect jail time. Ignorance and negligence are not excuses when the ATF is involved, and otherwise harmless citizens are the low-hanging fruit for easy prosecutions.
Second, why bother passing a law if it’s going to be enforced in an apathetic and inconsistent manner? Prosecutions for gun crimes are down, and we’re not enforcing the laws we already have. How is adding new laws going to help?
The third comes down to money and logistics. How is such a scheme even going to work, and how much will it cost? Allowing Joe Bob to use the NICS system to run nuisance background checks on his neighbors (which is what will happen) is going to drag the whole system to a dead stop.
And remember: that’s the system that just lost a great deal of its funding.
Since I’m tired of people yammering at me about things when they do nothing to prevent them, I am going to make this as easy as possible. Fill in the information below and hit a damn button. If you can’t be troubled to do even that much, you’re part of the problem.