Like most of you, I am endlessly infuriated by the utter cluelessness of media talking heads when it comes to guns. But even those who are supportive of gun rights seem to allow themselves to fall into the linguistic traps set by gun control zealots.
“Republicans want to let terrorists buy guns!” shouts one anti-gun activist. The host merely asks a pro-gun-rights guest, “What about that? Doesn’t that seem reasonable to prevent potential terrorists from buying guns?” Instead of challenging the false premise behind the law, he weakly mumbles about “the Second Amendment” and “infringing on the rights of law-abiding gun owners.”
What he (we?) should be doing is pointing out that it will do nothing to prevent any committed bad actor from getting his (or her) hands on a weapon. Even the San Bernardino terrorists would not have been stopped by being on the list, because they didn’t buy their guns themselves.
We also need to attack the “watch list” itself. Far from being some sort of carefully documented intelligence report, it is composed mostly of people who were placed on it by some faceless bureaucrat sitting in front of a computer screen. As a result, it is peppered with people who have never even sat next to a terrorist in a Starbucks. Heck, even liberal icon Ted Kennedy was on it!
Worse, once on, the average person has almost no way to get off it—there is no set protocol for having your name removed. Even Senator Kennedy, with all of his power, spent more than SIX MONTHS getting his name taken off the list. What chance would you or I have?
My approach is to ask: “If someone is too dangerous to buy a gun, why aren’t they already being investigated by the FBI, the NSA, or any of the other agencies responsible for our safety?”
Then there’s the so-called “universal background check.” The current anti-gun talking point is to announce that “90% of Americans are in favor of it.” But this statement is extremely misleading. People surveyed were actually asked, “Do you believe that anyone buying a gun should pass a background check?” Well, naturally, most people, being unfamiliar with the reality, will probably answer “yes” because it sounds “reasonable.”
What they don’t understand is that no background check scheme will EVER be truly “universal”—unless you’re naïve enough to believe that Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, MS-13, and all the other violent street gangs are suddenly going to start buying their guns legally. And even a mentally ill psychotic killer can simply have someone with a clean record buy it for them, just as the Columbine killers and the San Bernardino terrorists did.
By the way, you didn’t think those background checks on private sales were going to be free, did you? Think about it; your police or sheriff’s office will not hesitate to charge a “processing” fee (or a “tax”), both of which will later increase.
And your local gun store will not do a background check on a private transfer for free. Since they aren’t profiting from the sale, they’ll likely want something for their trouble. Most estimates range from $25 to $50.
We should attack “universal background checks” (and all of these so-called “common-sense” measures) for what they really are: blatant attempts to incrementally increase costs to legal gun owners, hoping to make owning a gun just too expensive.
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