It’s never really made sense to me what “expanding background checks” means. Is there some part of your background they’re currently ignoring, but that they’ll start checking if Congress “expands background checks”?
Or is it just an excuse to foot-drag so you have to wait longer to buy a gun, while bureaucrats claim there’s some issue they’re having trouble resolving?
President Trump smells a rat in the latest Democratic bills coming through the House, and you will rarely go wrong there:
The House is expected to vote this week on separate bills requiring background checks for all sales and transfers of firearms and extending the background-check review from three to 10 days.
The bills are the first in a series of steps planned by majority House Democrats to tighten gun laws after eight years of Republican control.
The White House says in a veto message that the bill expanding background checks would impose unreasonable requirements on gun owners. It says the bill could block someone from borrowing a firearm for self-defense or allowing a neighbor to take care of a gun while traveling.
The other bill, extending the review period for a background check, “would unduly impose burdensome delays on individuals seeking to purchase a firearm,” the White House said.
The bill would close the so-called Charleston loophole used by the shooter in a 2015 massacre at a historic black church to buy a gun. But the White House said allowing the federal government to “restrict firearms purchases through bureaucratic delay would undermine the Second Amendment’s guarantee that law-abiding citizens have an individual right to keep and bear arms.”
Let’s deal first with the issue of expanding the background check time period from three to 10 days. Is that a wait just for the sake of waiting? Or are they currently running out of time only having three days to check? Where would they look, given the additional seven days, that they’re not looking at now?
Also, what currently happens at the end of the three-day check period? If they checked everything they could, but not everything they wanted to because they ran out of time, do you pass the background check and get the gun? Does that make sense?
If they have 10 days instead of three, is that really just a way to facilitate fishing expeditions in the hope they’ll find something that will justify denying the right to purchase the gun? And is there an appeal process available if the background-checkers say no for some sort of trivial reason?
As for the bill that requires the background check for all sales and transfers of firearms, that sounds somewhat more reasonable, but it depends how it’s applied. There’s an overarching problem with the idea that you have a constitutional right, but before you can exercise that right, you have to be approved by an officer of the government that is barred by the Constitution from denying you said right.
The Second Amendment doesn’t say you have the right to apply to the governmentfor the opportunity to own a gun. It says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Period. The Beltway/left/media scoff at the idea that this is envisioned with no regulation – because they think everything is better when they regulate it – but the Amendment doesn’t say that. It says the militias who will be comprised of the arms-bearing men will be well-regulated, but the right to keep and bear arms itself will simply not be infringed.
I understand the concern about letting murderous lunatics get their hands on guns, but I don’t see how background checks that take 10 days instead of three are really the answer, and no effort to regulate lunatic-gun-ownership out of existence has been successful to date.
I still think it’s better to arm the good guys, in numbers as large as possible. And teach them to shoot to kill.
Via WesternJournal
