I’m “sticking to my guns” on this one
I just watched the 60 Minutes piece on “The Way of the Gun. Leslie Stahl followed Philip Van Cleave, the president of Virginia’s largest gun-rights group, through a gun show in Virgina questioning him about how guns were sold and why the sale of guns and ammo have skyrocketed. She also inquired about background checks:
“Why not make it uniform and have everybody go through the background check?” Stahl asked Philip Van Cleave.
“Well, how about making it uniform and have nobody go through the background check?” he replied. The Second Amendment doesn’t say, ‘You can get a gun if you go through a background check.’”
Hey, that guy is absolutely right. The Second Amendment gives us the right to buy as many guns as we want with no strings attached. We can arm ourselves to the teeth, to apparently protect us from our next door neighbor when the economy totally tanks and we’re the only ones left with food for our families, we’ll have to kill anyone who threatens that food supply. Common sense. I kid you not!
“It’s a form of insurance policy,” Van Cleave said. “You could imagine if we truly had a collapse of the economy and it was hard to find food, those that did manage to hang onto food might find themselves in a precarious position.”
Paranoid citizenry. Did people shoot each other more during the Great Depression, or did they actually share a little more, whatever they had? Have we actually devolved into a society of every man for himself?
Oh, and here’s the other reason that sales are though the roof:
But the bigger reason for this gun rush is best summed up by one gun show commercial: “Buy! Sell! Trade up and cash in! Celebrate the Second Amendment and get your guns while you still can!”
“While you still can” is code for “Barack Obama wants to take your guns away and re-impose the ban on assault weapons.”
“President Obama, when he was a senator in Illinois, pushed for every gun ban he could,” Van Cleave claimed.
I’m not so sure that threat exists.
I’m also betting that Mr Scott wishes he had picked up a baseball bat instead.
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As a politically active gun owner I don’t have as much objection to background checks as I do many other aspects of gun control, with some conditions–The background check should just be a background check, and not an excuse to register guns, or a requirement that all sales go through a dealer, or an expensive additional tax on gun sales.
It would be relatively easy to set up a system for private sellers to do background checks that would NOT do these other things. The proposals I’ve seen all require sales to go through a licensed dealer. This adds around $25-40 to the cost, requires the buyer and seller to find a dealer that does transfers. The only public licensed dealer in my town is Walmart, and they don’t do transfers so I’d have to check the next closest towns, 6-10 miles away. Going through a dealer with no other legal option is defacto registration.
If it is easy to set up an inexpensive non-intrusive background check system, but the people making the proposals all promote far more expensive and intrusive systems, I tend to think the actual goal is something more than just background checks.