Reply #145: Why.

[gorfle]

Why increase the load on the NICS system by 20 fold to accommodate the 5 or 10 million private transfers, why not just a 2 fold increase to accommodate only those who wish to buy/sell a gun?

My state is closing schools and lowering Medicaid payments right now, if this costs anything at all at the state level, it won't be happening anytime soon, there just isn't any public support for adding this budgetary measure.

All the 'gun show loophole' hype and pressure is at the federal level where there is no way to make NICS mandatory on intrastate commerce. If it wasn't for this Constitutional inability of the feds to place requirements on personal transfers within a given state, it would have happened years ago. Now the only hope at the Federal level is to make enactment of NICS palatable to the masses. 1. It must not cost the state. 2. It must be acceptable to the masses of voters. 3. It must be acceptable to gun owning voters

Would you agree to using an ffl to buy/sell if doing so would insure that as a buyer, you are immune from civil or criminal actions for where the gun came from ie. a crime gun or stolen, and as a seller you are immune from prosecution and civil involvement if the gun is later used to commit a crime?

They "why" is simple.

The #1 prerequisite for any background check system is that it preserve firearm ownership anonymity. Firearm owners are not going to support any system that requires mandatory registration or creates a registry.

Everyone agrees that only doing background checks on people who buy firearms through FFL dealers completely misses all the people who purchase firearms privately.

So nearly everyone agrees that in reality, ALL firearm purchases should require that the purchaser undergo a background check.

However, if you devise the system so that only people who are buying firearms undergo a background check, you have just created a system that can easily identify and record who all the firearm owners in the country are. This is completely unacceptable.

The only option, then, is to screen everyone by default. I am willing to allow people to opt-out of screening. By doing this, just because you have screened someone through NICS does not mean that they are a firearm owner.

All states already have a procedure in place for generating state-issued IDs. It should be trivial to, at the time of application for the state-issued ID, also run the person through NICS. For most people, the NICS results are returned in seconds, and this information could be printed on their ID. For the people who are delayed, they could either be given a temporary ID until NICS comes through, or they could simply opt out (and thus be ineligible to own firearms).

Yes, there will be an added cost to closing the FFL-only-background-check loophole. This is a cost that society SHOULD be eager to bear as it will guarantee that virtually every firearm sold by law-abiding people will be sold to people who can lawfully own firearms. It should also deter even non-law-abiding people as they will know that any illegally-sold firearm will likely be used for ill purposes, and thus will likely turn up at a crime scene eventually, and be traced back to the last legal owner of the firearm.