An interesting comment from DDS underneath wbex.org’s revelation that The Windy City is hosting a gun control confab. The attendees are striving to close the proverbial “gun show loophole.” That’s the lack of national legislation requiring all firearms sellers to run all firearms buyers though the FBI’s criminal background check system. Aside from the fact that gun show sales represent a fraction of the ballistic weapons used in gun crimes, DDS points out that any such legislation would have to come from the Department of Redundancy Department . . .
There is no “gun show loophole”. The laws that apply to firearms laws apply to all firearms sales, the ones in your kitchen, your neighbor’s garage, the local gun show, a gun shop, or Wallmart.
The distinction is in whether or not the seller is “engaged in the business” per BATFE. If so they are required to have a Federal Firearms License and to run a background check through NICS, the National Instant Check System NO MATTER WHERE THE SALE TAKES PLACE!
Other sellers cannot run said background check even if they wished to do so, because the system requires the sellers FFL number for the check to be run. The irony is that many of the people described above as “private sellers” used to have FFL’s, but were required to give them up by the Clinton administration.
But you have to admit, “close the gun show loophole” sounds a lot more palatable than saying “require the federal government to involve itself in every private arms transaction in the US” even though that is absolutely their goal (and which, if you look at some of their literature, they freely state.)
Their intention, it seems, is to create two classes of guns and two classes of gun owners: Those who can show that they have “paper” on their guns (in the form of a 4473 or other document that links THIS gun to THIS sale), and are thus presumably “legal”, and all other guns which can be presumed to be “illegal” and thus subject the owners to forfeiture and/or prosecution.
Is this likely to happen? Doubtful, at least on a federal level. A state-by-state approach would be easier to enact. In fact, there are already a number of states that require every firearm transaction to be conducted through a licensed dealer, CA and NJ come to my mind, but I’m sure there are a number of other states that require this as well, primarily in the Northeast part of the country.
For gun controllers, the problem with the state-by-state approach would be that it would do nothing to prevent people from traveling to states without such laws in order to conduct sales transactions that are perfectly legal in that state, but which would be illegal in their home state.
Then again, that’s kind of the whole purpose of Federalism, isn’t it? It’s the whole “states-as-laboratories-of-democracy” thing that the founders were so adamant about.
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