Saturday, September 28, 2019

Why Barr’s Expanded Background Checks Would Pave The Way For Gun Grabs

There are no two ways about it. As long as there is a background check system for gun purchases, Democrats will try to transform it into a firearm registry they can use to confiscate guns.
On September 18, Attorney General William Barr, who in 1991 testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he supported banning “assault weapons” and imposing a waiting period on purchases of handguns, circulated an “Idea for New Unlicensed-Commercial-Sale Background Checks” on Capitol Hill.
Federally-licensed firearm dealers—gun stores, department stores that sell guns, etc.—are already required to conduct background checks on their customers. By current appearances, Barr’s “idea” proposes to expand the check requirement to “advertised commercial sales” by non-dealers and all sales by non-dealers at gun shows, but not to sales arranged informally, at locations other than gun shows, between people who know one another.
By comparison, H.R. 8, by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), proposes to require a background check on transfers of firearms between non-dealers more generally, including merely handing a firearm to someone in many circumstances, including some circumstances related to self-defense. It also prohibits young adults from acquiring handguns and contains many other onerous provisions.
President Trump may reject Barr’s “idea” because it would move Democrats closer to their goal of transforming the background check system into a gun registry, while Democrats may reject it because it wouldn’t move them there fast enough. In any case, instead of expanding the background check system, we should be working to get to the point at which the federal and state governments will be less certain, not more certain, who owns guns and which guns they own, thus less able to confiscate them.
As long as there is a background check system for gun purchases, Democrats will try to transform it into a firearm registry that can be used to enforce gun confiscation, which, in the case of semi-automatic rifles like the ubiquitous AR-15, five of the 10 leading Democrat presidential candidates publicly advocate. In fact, Democrats have been trying to transform the background check system into a gun registry since before the system was established.
The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Step
If the last sentence of the previous paragraph is confusing, some background is in order. The first civilian disarmament activist groups—other than the Democratic Party, most of the major TV news networks, news magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post—were formed in the 1970s, hoping to capitalize on the momentum they believed was generated by imposition of the Gun Control Act of 1968.
Read the rest from Mark Overstreet HERE at The Federalist.

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