Should ID Checks Be Required for Gun Sales?

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What’s wrong with an instant check?

Plenty. The first abuses under the Brady background check law were reported by the General Accounting Office in 1996 when it found that decent Americans were being illegitimately denied the ability to purchase firearms because of outstanding traffic tickets or administrative errors.  

And not too long after that, the Clinton administration found a way to effectively shut down gun shows -- as the NICS computer system would “conveniently” crash or be shut down over several weekends, preventing many gun sales from occurring.

Of course, Clinton’s crowning anti-gun achievement was to illegally deny gun purchases -- again, using the instant background check -- to military veterans suffering from things like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a practice that has resulted in almost 150,000 veterans losing their gun rights.

That practice illegitimately continued for almost a decade until it was “legalized” earlier this year when President Bush signed the Veterans Disarmament Act, a bill that passed without a recorded vote in the House and the Senate.

Perhaps one of the most dangerous aspects of background checks is the potential for gun owner registration. Every time a gun owner submits to a background check, government officials have the potential to identify (and record) such person as a gun owner.

The problem with registration is that it can easily lead to gun confiscation -- something that has happened in many countries, as well as our own. Take the administration of Mayor David Dinkins in New York City.

In the mid-1960's officials in the city began registering long guns, and promised they would never use such lists to take away firearms from honest citizens. But in 1991, the city banned (and soon began confiscating) many of those very guns.

In 1992, the Daily News reported that, “Police raided the home of a Staten Island man who refused to comply with the city's tough ban on assault weapons, and seized an arsenal of firearms. . . . Spot checks are planned [for other homes].”

The sordid record of background checks is that they become a portal to drive through additional gun control restrictions, thus making people less safe.