“If Democrats really believe that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System doesn’t interfere “in any way” with people’s constitutional rights to own a gun, doesn’t it follow that the same system would not constitute an infringement on people’s right to vote? This would give Republicans a system for stopping vote fraud and Democrats a system that they have already vigorously endorsed.” John R. Lott Jr. in Apply background checks for gun purchases to voting [via chicagotribune.com]

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98 COMMENTS

  1. Actually, I have to laugh at the idea of liberal logic with DACA. They’re freaking out that these people have given their names to the government and now ICE can come pick them up. I thought registration didn’t lead to confiscation.

    • If we claimed the same concept of a “right” that Liberals claim, then any of us could walk into an ATF office and say “Gi’me a gun. I got it commin’ to me!!”

      They seem to think that a right means that the government must fulfill the right, not just protect it.

      • This is the fundamental problem with what we call government. Rather than being a very small structure designed to protect what we hold sacrosanct – our rights – it’s morphed into a superstructure that is designed to dole out benefits and rewards. This is disgusting.

        The whole house of cards is built on theft – taxes – to redistribute to whom they see fit.

        Until the people decide that they’d rather have true freedom and liberty rather than supposed provided safety and free stuff, nothing will change. Good luck.

    • That’s not a fair comparison. Gunowners’ concern about registration leading to confiscation implies a middle step: that gun ownership will be made illegal, thus justifying confiscation. That is, registration paves the way for a change in the law and a diminishment of constitutional freedom.

      Providing names to ICE, which may well facilitate deportation of illegal aliens, is materially dissimilar because the illegal aliens’ presence here is already illegal. A registry of sorts would not change that the way that gun registration is envisioned.

      Now, if the proposed registry were something like providing ethnicity to Census takers, that would be something. If Hispanic U.S. citizens feared it as paving the way for stripping them of their citizenship and deporting them, then you’d have a more fitting parallel. In that case, the fear would be that registration would make a looming change in the law more actionable.

  3. I like the idea of an on line background check for voting.
    If there is an instant check for gun purchase why not voting. 🙂

    • Why not then for mating?

      As you’re about to get down to business, just whip out your Snatch-Chat app and get the lowdown on all of her past partners, practices, medical conditions, and treatments?

      • I like that idea but corrupt Republican Businessmen would use it for determining who gets a job or who doesn’t. They always corrupt a good idea.

  4. Boba Fett
    That’s called logic, and it has no place in the gun debate. Next question.

    Boba Fett
    Correct,one can’t confuse Logic with the Feelings of the left.

  6. I’ve been saying this for years. I’d even add literary qualifications, as well as the submission of tax returns to determine voting eligibility. Why should someone who chronically never contributed have the PRIVILEGE of voting? I support a NICS check to obtain a voting ID.

    • Here, here!

      We need people voting who want to be married to America, and not just want to f*ck her…

      Garbage in, garbage out.

    • I am so onboard with this idea. I’ve also been saying that if you’re not filling the coffers, you should have no say in how the gov’t’s largesse (read: yours and mine) should be redistributed. Because that’s all the gov’t does with our money — sometimes for Constitutionally valid purposes, but far too often for stupid leftist idiocy.

      • You guys are nuts.

        How about rather than let our wealth be redistributed at all we just go back to keeping all of it and spending it how we wish voluntarily? What a novel concept!

        • Because some level of government spending is required to have a functional society. Private militaries, for example, give you Feudalism.

    • Traditional US requirement was PROPERTY ownership. If you didn’t own land you self-selected as a disinterested transient.

      Progs then demanded the vote for women and children. Greatgranddad apparently figured he’d get more if he GAVE the vote to Bertha/Martha/olebattleax. Or perhaps she would STFU. I doubt that either worked out for him.

  7. I find it very telling that the DNC blocks even the most common sense voter safety measures while ranting about being the party of “Democracy”. If Mexico can have a national voter database and biometric voter ID, why not the US?

      • 1. Requiring you to be able to prove you are who you say you are is not “voter suppression”. If you can’t be bothered to get a photo ID in 2017, you’re too lazy to vote anyway.

        2. Most states charge less than $10 for photo ID. I’m sure that fee can be waived.

        • I would tend to agree.

          A problem that I note from having lived in multiple states is that the individual states have no real communication with each other about who is and who is not eligible to vote where. It seems to be a reluctance to get caught up in a “voter suppression” scandal but it makes fraud very, very easy.

          When I lived in Ohio I wanted to buy a pistol but couldn’t thanks to my New Mexico ID. So I dutifully surrendered my NM license to get an Ohio license.

          Then I hit a DUI checkpoint and had to answer a lot of questions about having an Ohio ID but a car tagged and titled in NM. So the next time I visited my parents I got a new NM license.

          Long story short, a few years later I’m in Colorado with a CO license plus one from NM and Ohio. Thanks to “motor voter” laws I was also registered to vote in all three states.

          Now, after a few years of not voting in the state NM will send you a letter asking if you wish to be purged from the roles. I filled it out and was removed from the rolls. Ohio on the other hand was a multi-year battle to get removed. During that battle they sent me a couple absentee ballots (and maybe others that I didn’t know about!).

          At one point not only could I have voted in three states but one was sending absentee ballots, some of which may have gone to former addresses and been filled out by people who were not me.

          I don’t know if Mexico is the right model but out decentralized (to prevent wide scale hacking etc) voting system is ripe for abuse because the states really have basically nothing in place to prevent people with multiple ID’s from voting in multiple states in the same election.

        • In many states republicans will enact a voter ID law and then will shut down DMV locations in minority counties, or public transit lines that take people to places where they can get an ID. If you don’t realize that voter ID laws are about keeping legitimate voters from voting, you are not paying attention.

          Gerrymandering is just as bad.

          Where are the 3-5 million illegal voters that stole Trump’s popular vote win? Lol.

        • In many states republicans will enact a voter ID law and then will shut down DMV locations in minority counties,

          Now that a big sack of sheet accusation right there.

      • So, is it “clearly a way” to suppress firearm ownership, as well? Or is that somehow “different”?

    • Ignoring the entire validity of this discussion do we really want model ourselves after the Mexican government in any way, shape or form?

      Last I checked they aren’t exactly a model for a stable society

        • Are you making a case against voter id? Mexico has voter ID and look what gets elected and how it runs the gov’t

          I’m for voter ID, just don’t think mexico is the best reference.

        • The point is that even corrupt as hell Mexico has a more secure voting system than we do. Think about it. I don’t see a constitutional argument to be made against a central voter registration database and biometric voter ID.

      • Well, even a stopped clock is right twice per day.

        Just because a country is a basket case doesn’t mean they have no good ideas or have done nothing noteworthy. Their reputation matters only insofar as we rely on it as the basis for whether to adopt their practice ourselves.

        We don’t have to go by reputation and trusting the source. We can just evaluate the idea itself as it pertains to our circumstances, completely ignoring the source of the idea, and judge it on its own merits.

        For example, Jack the Ripper may have been a dreadful chap overall, but that’s not to say that he could not have been an insightful commenter on a The Truth About Knives blog, had one existed in his day.

        • Depends which interpretation of Jack you go with. Since “Jack” was never caught or even proven to exist…

          But back to the point, I think we agree that it is a disgrace that our voting system is more open to fraud than any other developed nation on the planet.

  9. There is plenty of evidence of extensive Voter Fraud to justify requiring a Voter ID obtained by passing a Background Check. Of course some measure will have to be implemented to prevent/deter the manufacture of counterfeit Voter Id’s, but that shouldn’t be a problem. POTG have had the Hell violated of their 2A rights in Democrat controlled States with “ID’s”, Certificates, Licenses and other illegal, un-Constitutional requirements in order to exercise their RKBA (which has its own distinct Amendment!).

    • [citation needed]

      Seriously, Republican Attorney Generals have gone looking, and found nothing. A few felons who didn’t realize they didn’t have the voting right (note that varies state to state, and is a relic of Nixon’s war on drugs (or, rather, people he didn’t think were likely to vote for him, as Erlicman has said)).

      If this is a real problem, that needs real ID to check, where is the assistance in getting it? The Republicans who pass this legislation have flat out said (dumb enough to say it in front of a mic) that it is to suppress voters they don’t like. In Wisconsin, for example, if you were starting with nothing to get an ID, you had to, among other things, go to an office that was only open on the 5th Wednesday of every month. That sounds reasonable to me, right?

      The solution to some rights being infringed is not to try to infringe other rights.

      • “The Republicans who pass this legislation have flat out said … that it is to suppress voters they don’t like”

        [citation needed]

        But seriously, it’s well known (at least around here) that a ton of criminal aliens are registered voters. Our betters in government just overlook it because of our sanctuary status, and the fact that the criminals vote the ‘correct’ way.

      • Just the number of same-day Election Day voter registrations in New Hampshire exceeded the margin by which Hillary stole, I mean, won, the state.

        Most of those surprise registrations occurred In college towns (read: liberal bastions.) Moreover, even if these were legitimate, who’s to say that these students didn’t also vote in their home states, too, and impact federal elections there, too?

      • Voting is not a right, it’s a privilege. But I would like to know how it’s possible to survive in a 21st century society without photo ID.

        • Most of the illegal voters do have a photo ID. Several of them. You see, what you do is start by taking mail out of other peoples mailboxes and then you………………

        • Wrong.

          “As Professor Epps makes clear, not only is there a right to vote in the Constitution, but it’s the single right that appears most often in the Constitution’s text – five times in all. In fact, four separate Amendments – the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th – even use the same powerful language to protect it: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . .” Of course, like every other constitutional right, the right to vote is subject to reasonable restrictions. Nevertheless, it’s just as much a constitutional right as any other embodied in our Constitution.”

          It’s why voter ID laws get shot down, they are unconstitutional Mr. Fascist.

        • If background checks are a “reasonable restriction” to the 2nd amendment then voter ID, being far less strenuous a restriction, is far more constitutional. Not everyone has the authority to vote. Everyone has a right to keep and bear arms.

        • If the ability to vote is granted to you by the government, then it is a privilege, not a right. I’d think there could be no argument with that, but feel free to try.

        • Wow Jim, I didn’t think commies were quite that retarded. The right to keep and bear arms exists regardless of government. A government can’t give it to you because you can exercise that right in their absence. Voting is a privilege, not a right, as you cannot vote in absence of government. Now do you get it, or should I hire a purple dinosaur to sing it to you in words simple enough for your communism addled brain to understand?

        • There is no Federal protected right to vote. Some states and localities may establish voting as a right, but that is why voting is not controlled by the Federal government. Someone brought up the various amendments that have the words “right to vote”, but again, the right to vote is established by the states and localities, and the Constitution was amended in that specific context so that voting could not be restricted due to certain age, race, creed or gender.

          From fairvote.org
          “American adults living in states typically can vote, but they do not have a federally protected right to vote enshrined in the Constitution. States protect the right to vote to different degrees based on the state’s constitutional language and statutes. The federal government traditionally only steps in to prevent certain broad abuses, such as denying the right to vote based on race (15th Amendment), sex (19th Amendment), or age (26th Amendment).”

        • You realize how absurd that is, right? Many of those are mistakes, and there is no widespread voter fraud going on. Furthermore, the database shows they were caught. The right wing argument is that there are MILLIONS of unfound cases, which simply has no basis in reality.

        • So… clearly drunk driving the is not a problem since so few drunk drivers are caught. We must then repeal all DUI legislation. That is the core of your argument commie.

        • See I’m not a commie, you are a fascist though.

          Your false equivalence fails by the way. Get out of your house and go give people helicopter rides while you venerate dictators, scumbag.

        • Whatever you say Jimbo. Don’t you have a cross burning to get to? I wouldn’t want you to miss out on your fine Dixiecrat traditions. The hilarious part is that you think fascism is not a form of socialism and therefore communism.

        • This sort of thing would only affect in person fraud. Not a huge % of that thousand cases (spread over years), dozens of elections, and well over 100,000,000 voters. Their DB covers all manner of fraud, but only in person would be impacted by voter id laws, and a national registry would only add multiple voting. Here is just one article on it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/iowa-voter-fraud_n_4455110.html

          I think we need paper ballots, laws that clearly specify what a valid vote is (Florida in 2000 was a problem in part because the state didn’t say what a valid vote was in their punch card system, leading to inconsistencies), and an open and auditable chain of custody for the ballots. As a computer security person, I don’t trust computers for this, especially if they don’t produce an audit trail (California’s make a paper audit trail you can see as you vote, red states are fond of doing it all in software, with not even a software audit trail).

    • This is good stuff, but most people will simply bypass it.

      It’s too easy to be seduced into the left/right paradigm and feel compelled one way or another.

      The bedrock problem is that people still believe in the con game. The foundation of our government is looting from people and giving it out to others. Most people like to tout their “law abiding, tax paying” ways. That amounts to bending over and taking it in the rear and saying thank you for it.

      And then they sit idly by and bitch about it when their stolen loot gets spent in a way they don’t like…total insanity.

  14. John Lott misunderstands the Democratic position. They don’t see the NICS as infringing a constitutional right to keep and bear arms in the same way it doesn’t infringe on dragon fire and unicorn farts. They don’t really believe there is any such right. In their eyes, the militia clause of the 2nd Amendment somehow turns the whole thing into an inkblot with no specific enforceable meaning whatsoever.

    • Precisely. Liberals operate on beliefs and not logic. Liberalism is a religion (belief system) filled with nothing but extemporaneous concepts which ebb and flow as the mob dictates.

      • That is adorable coming from people who listen to Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and deny climate change is occurring and regularly want to go back in time and take rights away from people.

        • “That is adorable coming from people who listen to Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and deny climate change is occurring and regularly want to go back in time and take rights away from people.”

          I am not people. I have never listened to RL or AJ. Climate change? Is that the latest liberal mumbo jumbo to describe the effects of human interaction with the environment? How can we have any reasonable converse on a topic when people like you can’t even settle on what to call it? And what’s with the Delorean stuff? IDGI

        • Jim is a female from elsewhere, don’t let her under your skin.

          Climate change is what the climate does, and will with or without us. The biggest known “climate change” in our history was back in 1816 and it was a “Year without a Summer” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer and lead a decade of lower temperatures. It was caused by a volcano. There are over 1,100 active volcanos around the world at any one time. The first five minutes (and every 5 minutes thereafter) of a volcanoes ‘eruption(s)’ create 200 x the amount of solid/gaseous/heavy metals/radiation/geologic shifting as that even possibly created by human existence. There are volcanos in Indonesia that CONSTANTLY spits out Sulfur Dioxide and poisonous Sulfur compounds. The sea floor around the world belches raw crude oil CONSTANTLY, the earth farts its own Methane gasses around the globe and from under the sea.

          We have a very small to NIL effect here and mother nature is constantly trying to turn us into fertilizer and erase our existence, and has very neatly done so throughout history.

          F the FING Climate Change MF hoaxers. Bury the carbon chit MF’s under a mountain of Bitcoin.

          F em all.

        • Trying to revert laws to the past to take away rights like Trump and Jeff Sessions currently do as well as most Republicans. Lets double down on the failed drug war, that will certainly work this time!

        • Are you calling me a female because you hate women or something? That isn’t even a hurtful insult, are you brain damaged old man?

        • “Trying to revert laws to the past to take away rights like Trump and Jeff Sessions currently do as well as most Republicans. Lets double down on the failed drug war, that will certainly work this time!”

          Trump and Jeff Sessions are not rights.

        • You keep saying that as if you know what fascism is. You’re addorable little commie. Run along now, the grownups are talking.

  15. One cannot use logic when arguing with liberals. They don’t believe logic exists. The whole logical (Boolean) thinking thing will cause their little heads to explode.

    • Look at it like this. Try convincing a Catholic that God does not exist using logic and scientific principles. Good Luck.

      • You can’t prove a negative.
        You can’t prove the non-existence of something,simply because it’s not physically possible to look everywhere, science not-withstanding.
        And that doesn’t even consider the whole spirit thing.

      • Use science and logic, you cannot argue that intelligent design doesn’t create a much smaller matrix of possibilities.
        “Consider the theoretical notion of evolution.
        In order to do so in-Truth, evolution must be considered in relation to not only the viewable state of man, but the state of the viewable universe. If the proper and requisite consideration is applied, it quickly becomes plain that the series of required coincidences necessary to support the notion of evolution, (that would bring us to the current state of man within the viewable universe), requires multiple exponents of infinity.
        By simple example, the common moth that bears the ability of variable coloration as a means of camouflage, in its avoidance of predators, does not begin to reach the complexity of its very continued existence, when viewing the branching of its faunal ancestors, when its very existence hinges, like everything in viewable existence, on how fast the universe cooled within absolutely minute fractions of a second after the big bang (or other postulate form of “beginning” that embraces the current knowledge of the iron truth of entropy).
        In the example of the moth, too, you must presuppose the reason for the variation (variegation) or ignore it. Un-ignored the reason requires adaptation in few enough generations to be effective, WITHOUT disruption of any other necessary bodily function, i.e., preventing the members of mating pairs from locating each other, and WITHOUT the (inherent possibility of) variation that created a contrary coloration that made itself more prominent to all predators (who are themselves in a supposed steady state of adaptation), or better flavor, more attractive smell,
        greater susceptibility to ultra-violet light etc.
        Now consider that the moth cannot choose the variation. The female moth lays its eggs (which must remain as perceived by the male ‘uncorrupted’) and the male moth follows behind, without futher perception of his “mate”, and fertilizes them. Thereby, the combination, from among the survivors, must not cancel out, or pollute the variation in the pairing. Therefore the changed moth can have no greater hand in the adaptation, than by continuing its standard daily existence, increasing by equal factor, that a beneficial adaptation would be cancelled out. Even more abstractly, consider: under such conditions, how does the moth’s adaptation reach the level of complex refinement seen, when one examines the implementation of the adaptation. The compilation of these two notions in juxtaposition can only be culminated in the singular idea of the moth,
        BUT MUST BE VIEWED AS WHOLLY SEPARATE AND DISTINCT IDEAS OF VARIATION, WHEN ONE CONSIDERS THAT THE MOTH DOES NOT CHOOSE THE FEATURES IN
        A D A P T A T I O N.
        The moth cannot know what it looks like when it alights on a particular surface, and only have the most minuscule perception of itself as not matching its surroundings. Further, it can have only an increasingly negative exponential value of knowledge of how it is perceived (detected) by any of its potential predators. Thereby, even if it were slow, or its movements unwieldy, it would be a foolhardy proposition for a natural thing to waste any resources in attempting to HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT (but that is what actually occurs).
        Consider now, the notion on a more macro-scale.
        Such adaptation needs to occur quickly enough to be effective, but slow enough to affect a change in population that would prevent the unchanged portion of the population from attempting to avoid the variegated-set, when nature typically abhors changes as they most often indicate defects and are more safely abhorred in the furtherance of a species. This is not to say that nature does not provide for enough opportunity to test every population’s ability to adapt. It is plain to note that the moth’s adaptation (by example) requires a ‘saw-toothed’ “stepped” adaptation requiring EQUAL buy-in by varying generations of parties within a moderately changing environment that also includes adaptation by parties that are adverse in interest, i.e., (in this instance) predators. OR IT REQUIRES NEAR INSTANTANEOUS ADAPTATION (unexperiencedin environments that can be readily discernible today).

        It is important to recognize, however, that there are “moths”, and that the required branching of the animal kingdom required to reach even the slightest fraction of the (probable) complexity necessary to allow for such an actuality is ENORMOUS. In truth, you cannot draw up a probability matrix that describes how the moth got to this point, much less how it moves forward from here.
        One could say that the problem must have probability removed from it, that the moth is what it is and only seems strange because the question was raised. However, EVEN if you can accept this view, you quickly depart from this point at an angle that is not merely tangential, when you consider (and you must) that the moth is not of itself a sole entity in existence, nor a sole viewable existence in the universe. Therefore, when viewing the compounding probabilities that brought us to the known viewable universe [as finite as that term is] the probability of our combined current existence far outstretches the considerably smaller probability matrix of a DEVINE CREATOR with an intelligent and absolutely deliberate design in mind. The authorhereby postulates, too, that even if life is found to be abundant in other parts of our universe, that this is not a reduction in the required probability, it is a compounding of the proof of the latter.” [J.M. Thomas R., TERMS, 2012, Pgs 155-158]

  16. NICS for voting isn’t enough. A license to vote is a good idea since actual fundamental rights can be licensed, restricted, and taxed.

    A class on the constitution and Austrian economics is needed to obtain a license to vote which should be valid for 4 years.

    Fingerprints and background checks would be required and the license would be $200 and $100 to renew with a 4 hour refresher course.

    No “crime punishable by more than one year” and no misdemeanor in the past 7 years.

  17. Democrats don’t wish to be confused by the facts or logic. They operate completely on emotion and a lust for political power.

  18. Bad analogy, voting is lots more people and lots less time for a check. Early voting NICS is a proper analog policy area.

    • “Bad analogy, voting is lots more people and lots less time for a check. Early voting NICS is a proper analog policy area.”

      Not sure how you determine that. Estimated voter turnout 2016 = 160 million. Estimated gun ownership = 100-150 million. Not a big difference.

  19. That will never fly. If you’re flagged for domestic abuse in the NICS database, you can’t buy a gun. If you’re a domestic abuser in the political world, you run for office! Same with drug convictions, and a whole raft of other crimes and infractions. You’d have a whole lot of legislators, judges, and executives who would fail a voter NICS check.

  20. Well if you had to have ID to vote then how would any democrat get elected? They’re only real back up is to scream even louder that your a racist for whatever policy you have in mind. Project Veritas’ videos in the subsequent mass firings of many people in the DNC proved that they use week voter ID laws in certain states as a major tool in bag of dirty tricks.

  22. Nowhere in the first ten amendments is voting enumerated as a right. A NICS check and ID should be mandatory, and who cares about the squalling from the Libtards.

  24. Well, i think that the pure existence of a way to verify that in fact you enjoy a right isn’t an infringement on said right. That is, if it is instantaneous, has no errors and no cost.
    So if they would have a instant voting right verifying machine that isn’t saving my data until they find a way to use it against me and that isn’t eating all my tax dollars i would be fine with that, because if it wouldn’t produce errors i could still fully enjoy my right.
    Same for guns. If there was a nics system that would instantly delete all my data after verification and keep no data from my gun purchase, that doesn’t make any mistakes and that doesn’t cost much, i’d be fine with that.
    Problem is, nics cost time, of course the govt keeps your data on some kind of storage, cost tax payers money and hell do these govt programms produce errors.

  25. Voting is a privilege with respect to a random person who happens to be in the US. It becomes a right when such a person can prove his US citizenship, a voter id being a way to do this. Same thing with entering the country – it’s your unquestionable right as a US citizen to get back home, but you have to show your passport first.

    It’s similar to cashing a check – it’s not your money until you prove you’re the person whose name is on the check.

    • 2J,

      Incorrect. Voting is not a right. It is a privilege. Rights, especially those that are enumerated in the BOR, exist simply by dint of existing.

      Every amendment after number 10 elucidated a benefit or privilege bestowed upon a new specialized class, the “Citizen.” Not that prior to amendment 14, there was no mention of the word Citizen. The 2nd reads “The People” (capitalization important), not “The Citizens.”

      Voting is a benefit privilege bestowed upon Subjects living under the auspices of The City (State) of DC.

  26. I think that one should not be “allowed” to vote until they have gone through all of their states requirements and regulations and obtained a handgun. One should then be required to show that handgun at the polling site.

    • : )
      Interesting.

      You mean like a quick flash? Or full on brandishing?

      There’d be a lot of groaning, if you took too long on your draw, or chiding if granny cleared her purse first,
      Could be helpful.

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