I'm just wondering what the opposition to background checks is. I will first freely confess that I do not yet own a firearm, but when I go to buy one I (personally) would not be opposed to having a background check run on me.
Why so much opposition? If I understand them correctly, you will still be able to purchase whatever you can already legally purchase, but you would have to wait for some period of time first. What am I missing?
I have to resist the temptation to write a massive rant.
Among my charters, along with being an electronics technician and a software engineer, is the title "business data analyst."
One of the things you have to do when analyzing a business -- especially in troubleshooting -- is ask the question, "when was this last working well, and what were we doing when it worked well?"
I grew up in the fifties & sixties. Until 1968, anyone could buy a gun, anyone could sell a gun as part of any retail outfit. Sears and Montgomery Ward sold guns. Hardware stores and gas stations sold guns. General stores and other random establishments sold guns. You could mail order guns, and they would be delivered to your door.
We didn't have school shootings and random massacres.
Whatever it was that we were doing in the fifties and sixties was
working.
And then in 1968 all that changed. Retailers who wanted to sell guns had to have a federal license to do so. And then some bright spark came up with the concept of "prohibited persons" to save us all from criminals having guns. Of course, even the most modest contemplation of that "solution" reveals that it can't work. Criminals don't obey the law, so laws restricting criminals are only complied with at the criminal's convenience.
However now a once-commonplace product was now bottle-necked into scarcity, and new barriers to acquisition put in place, and these barriers hindered only the law-abiding.
So now it's harder and more expensive to get a gun, and the agency entrusted with the regulation and enforcement of "saving us from bad guys having guns" imposes arbitrary new rules from time to time which -- you guessed it -- only hinder the honest and law-abiding.
And the bad guys still have all the guns they want. And violence has not abated. And people are still murdered with guns -- especially in places where guns have been heavily restricted and any kind of carry has been outlawed.
We now have more than 20,000 gun laws on the books, and not one of them saves lives, excepting perhaps the ones declaring that citizens shall be allowed to carry and that citizens shall not be required to retreat from violent attacks.
The AWB of 1994 saved no lives. None. Columbine occurred in the middle of that ban.
So we've gone from a culture where anyone and everyone was free to own and carry a gun to a "new, improved" culture where "only the right people" get to buy and sell guns. And in so doing we've gone from a culture where people kept themselves safe and mass shootings were rare to the point of statistical insignificance to a "new, improved" culture where we have running shootouts between rival gangs, home invasions in places where guns are "outlawed," and mass shootings in schools, malls, and theaters.
As a business analyst, my first impulse is to look at this and order the legislation, regulation, and random policy to be rolled back, federal licensing of retailers abolished, and the whole concept of "prohibited persons" purged from the system.
The ever-increasing layers of rules have not improved safety and have rendered thousands of victims defenseless.
The concept of "background checks" only has validity in the context of "prohibited persons," and that itself is a concept that only has validity if you buy into the idea that someone who is considered safe enough to walk among the general population is somehow "not safe" to own a gun. If you trust a man enough to release him, then do it and be done with it.
This fiction of "prohibited persons," who are "dangerous" but nonetheless allowed to roam free, provides a convenient foil against which to force the honest and innocent to continually prove their innocence.
In other words, if you want to buy a gun -- constitutionally enshrined right -- unless you submit to a "background check" you are presumed to be guilty of something, and therefore prohibited from buying that gun.
In one of my other personae, part of my software engineering background includes data warehouse management, and relationship analysis of various entities (customers, employees, etc.).
I have more than a little grasp of what is possible with databases.
I will promise you this: you do not want a database detailing where all the guns are and who owns them to
EVER fall into the hands of government.
A brief study of the fates of the various disarmed populations in the last century will be enough to make the point.
Whenever a government proposes to keep close track -- detailed records -- of the activities of its people, such records serve to benefit the needs of government -- the political class -- vastly more than the needs of the people.
Summary:
1) Things worked better when guns were unregulated, and increased regulation has improved nothing.
2) Detailed records in the hands of government serve only government, not the people.
Conclusion: A gun registry is a) unnecessary, and b) a bad idea.
