Another view on PICS vs NICS

[PAMedic=F|A=]

http://www.shallnot.org/all_federal_..._and_bear_arms


In the debate over gun rights, one issue that even some gun owners will concede on is the concept of background checks. It is seen as a diplomatic gesture towards compromising for the sake of unity.

First and foremost, the claimed "benefits" of background checks are irrelevant, because the feds don't have the authority. The Second Amendment is pretty clear on their lack of authority, as we've written on this site previously.

But a lot of gun owners and so-called gun rights groups don't see it that way. Not only are they supportive of background checks at a state level, but the federal level as well.

No other right in the Constitution requires a background check before you may exercise it. Some may say this is because owning a firearm can lead to violence, but this is silly. People can cause riots after speaking at a political rally, start religious cults that end in mass suicide, or say terrible things about other people on the Internet that can cause harm to one's reputation.

A background check essentially preempts your right to own firearms. You are not allowed to exercise this right until you have proven you meet standards set by the government.

While no one is in favor of criminals being able to hurt other people, the reality is that if a criminal wants a firearm, they can get it the same way they get their drugs, untaxed cigarettes, and prostitutes. Also, one of the greatest weaknesses of background checks is they assume only convicted criminals commit crimes. It completely ignores first-time offenders.

As a Humphrey Bogart film character remarked about Prohibition, it's one thing to pass a law and another to make it stick. Trying to get background checks to work is like trying to make jello stick to the wall.

But the real problem with background checks is that the government gets to set the criteria a person must meet in order to pass. As the final authority in this situation, they decide who can and who cannot keep and bear arms.

This creates a perfect, indirect means through which gun control proponents can restrict gun ownership of ordinary Americans. Because the process preempts our rights, all they need to do is tack on more and more requirements. Or, they can allow for the mere accusation of a crime as a reason to fail a background check. In a day and age when due process and presumption of innocence is fading, the use of preemptive tactics will become easier to carry out.

Backgrounds checks ultimately pervert the relationship between the people and their government. It is the people, not the government, who are sovereign. The government, therefore, does not get to decide what we are allowed to do. We are supposed to decide what government is allowed to do.

The fundamental reason why gun ownership is critical to maintaining liberty is that it provides a check against tyrannical government. Background checks allow government to subvert this.

It is the federal government government that needs a background check, and that is done by the armed population it claims to serve. The day it fails that check, those guns make it possible for the people to remedy the situation.

Many groups claim to defend your right to keep and bear arms, but few stay true to the spirit and meaning of the Second Amendment. An example of this is when they support background checks so they can placate our political opponents.

ShallNot.org, on the other hand, makes no compromises. Through anti-commandeering legislation, we are working to prevent any potential federal background check system from being implemented in the states.

http://www.shallnot.org/petition

[Bang]

^^^^ Excellent. One thing though. I have to wonder about the effectiveness of an armed citizenry uniting (good luck right there) to undo an illegally-operating government today. The concept of citizens being armed and able to effect change was formed when the defenders of the capitol had the same weapons as the citizens, with the exception of cannon, and were outnumbered.

[PAMedic=F|A=]

^^^^ Excellent. One thing though. I have to wonder about the effectiveness of an armed citizenry uniting (good luck right there) to undo an illegally-operating government today. The concept of citizens being armed and able to effect change was formed when the defenders of the capitol had the same weapons as the citizens, with the exception of cannon, and were outnumbered.

I don't want to derail by having that discussion. But our government does not really secure things very well and everyone has family. It'll get really bloody, really ugly, really quick, because it well have to.

If you look at what happened during the revolution, especially in States like Pennsylvania that has lots of experience fighting with Indians Nations/Tribes and against them it would make you skin crawl. Barbarism on the level of the worst of the Mexican drug cartels or moslems. Burning people's homes down & casting them into the wilderness in winter was far kinder than what many loyalists or "americans" received. I have no doubt that despite the fact that tribes like the Tuscarora fought with the americans (one of the few) it is a major reason why their are no tribes in our commonwealth.

[ungawa]

^^^^ Excellent. One thing though. I have to wonder about the effectiveness of an armed citizenry uniting (good luck right there) to undo an illegally-operating government today. The concept of citizens being armed and able to effect change was formed when the defenders of the capitol had the same weapons as the citizens, with the exception of cannon, and were outnumbered.

10,000 disorganized Iraqis had quite a go at 110,000 US combat troops for a number of years.

[GunLawyer001]

However you look at things, it's hard to argue that the position "no limits on anyone, anywhere" is not an "extreme" position. By definition, if there's no position even further along from that, then that places you at the extreme. I suppose that if you went further and demanded that every person be provided with free guns and ammo at taxpayer expense, that might be more extreme. But as a practical matter, the position of "no delays, no checks, no bans on anyone, no matter what" is at least asymptotic.

Barry Goldwater said that extremism in defense of liberty is not a vice; he never had a chance at being elected president. Do the math.

We as a society can either identify those who have no ability to respect the rights of others and obey the law, and then sequester those folks someplace safe until they are rehabilitated (if that's really possible); or we can decide to allow the worst of us to roam free most of the time. In the worst case, they end up running the IRS and Justice Department.

We seem to have chosen the latter course. We identify and convict people whose defective souls allow them to rape and rob and pick fights and otherwise do bad things, and then we give them a "time out", an arbitrary time in the penalty box, during which time we all agree that almost none of them are improved as citizens.

This practice of recycling most of the worst criminals and wackjobs means that we can't follow a strict "all gun rights, all the time" practice. As has been noted, the Constitution is not a mutual suicide pact.

Comparing gun rights to speech or religious liberty is disingenuous. Free speech has caused some deaths, but each one is so unusual that it is newsworthy. Al Sharpton and mayor de Blasio both spoke in ways that encouraged the deaths of 2 cops in 2014. Guns in the hands of the wrong people facilitate around 30,000 deaths in this country last year (including the 2 cops shot in NYC, plus all the other suicides and murders.)

Guns are not the same as newspapers or TV stations or blogs. Let's not be frivolous, you are more likely to be killed by a gun in the hands of a violent felon or loon than you are likely to be killed as a result of everything else in the Bill of Rights combined. When was the last religious jihad in America? The last time someone was killed by a soldier quartered in his home? (There is an argument that the Exclusionary Rule, based in the Bill of Rights, has released bad guys who went on to kill again; I'll accept that as true.)

That being said, and acknowledging that "some" infringements on the extreme position are probably going to pass even Strict Scrutiny...that doesn't open the floodgates for every "reasonable" restriction. The Brady whiners are just as extreme in their irrational fear of ALL guns in ALL non-uniformed hands...and they are even more wrong. A LOT more wrong.

We go way, way too far in what and whom we regulate. Keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal teens is NOT justification for the bans on "assault weapons", or for keeping lists of who owns what guns and where they live. It's not enough to say "we need to err on the side of caution" to justify lifetime bans on every person who had a bad weekend as a teen, every person with a federal conviction theoretically punishable by more than 1 year, every person who shoplifted in the 1960's, every person who committed a victimless violation of a malum prohibitum statute.

It's cruel and irrational to prosecute people who make mistakes on the 4473, when we do background checks EVERY TIME on them. It's medieval bias to impose lifetime bans on everyone who was ever "touched in the head", as though legions of psychiatric professionals are just pretending to heal their patients, and nobody ever gets better after a 5-second lapse in judgment 30 years ago.

Compromise just for the sake of compromise is a bad thing, when it comes to Constitutional rights and the "cake theory". But we look absurd when we argue in favor of the seriously and currently mentally ill being able to buy guns legally, or that being paroled after 7 years in prison is enough to trust a murderer to carry a gun 24/7. That punk kid who shot up the school in Newtown shouldn't have been free to walk around, let alone acquire guns. The fact that he got them by killing his mother is irrelevant, if your argument is that he SHOULD have been able to buy them at WalMart with no questions asked.

There really are people who have anger management issues, and the Constitution doesn't require us to arm them, or stand by while they arm themselves. If the US Constitution allows us to deprive a bad actor of liberty, to imprison them or seize and restrain a person who is predatory or insane, then why would it be impermissible to let them walk free but without guns?

We need to eliminate all "waiting periods" and gun registration. We need to repeal all blanket bans on some types of guns and magazines and bullets. We need to provide a path back to the full rights guaranteed by the Constitution for everyone, a lot more than we're morally obliged to offer a "path to citizenship" that rewards law-breaking foreign trespassers. We need easier expungements for the now-law-abiding, easier expungements of old mental health records. We need statutory time limits on how long most prohibitors will remain effective. These are basic truths.

But it's not unconstitutional to recognize the other basic truth, that people are all different, and some of them can't be trusted. Either lock them up, or put up barriers to the worst things that they might do; we have to do one of them, or some combination. But all barriers should be against them PERSONALLY, not against the citizenry at large. No bans on AR-15's for you and me and a Scoutmaster and a corporate CEO and a really good welder and a soccer mom who raised 3 good kids and an art student with no arrests, just because a drifter with a history of psychotic violence might misuse one.

Cops and soldiers can and do misuse guns, pretty much every week. So what. The government not only permits them to be armed, it provides the arms. Apparently, a minority of bad outcomes will not trump the compelling arguments in favor of the government being armed.

The same applies to the sovereign citizens of these United States. There should be NO LAWS that significantly infringe the gun rights (or other rights, for that matter) of citizens who have behaved themselves; no barriers more significant than the fact that every citizen pretty much needs a driver's license and to attend school and to pay taxes, for example.

Not everyone behaves himself. Those who don't, earn some infringements. Like jail, fines, infamy, loss of voting rights and ability to hold public office.

I honestly don't understand the refusal to accept any gatekeeping at all, if it could be done without infringing the rights of the majority of us who obey the laws and respect the rights of others. Yes, I reject every mandatory background check that incorporates gun registration. It's bullshit that we can't enforce background checks without gun registration. We enforce the drug laws without illegal drug registration, don't we? We catch murderers without requiring them to be registered, don't we? It's EASY to enforce a background check. Just like the DEA catches drug dealers. You have them try to buy guns from private sellers, and if the private seller doesn't call the 800 number or check the website with his phone in the parking lot or whatever, he's in violation. We don't actually need to have every gun registered and traceable by Big Brother, if the only goal is to interdict sales to bad guys. No law stops every violation, the goal is to deter and discourage violations. Remember, seat belts and air bags don't stop all car deaths, but they're worth using anyway. Reducing crimes is worthwhile, even if it doesn't eliminate all of them (but it's not worth a major infringement of an enumerated right, I agree.)

You can already go online to check for criminal convictions of strangers, if you have their name. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine a similar website that would allow you to plug in a name and DOB and get a GO/NO-GO decision on a gun transfer.

In short: Gun registration is bad, it tempts the govt to seize your guns. Arming career criminals is also bad. We should entertain options that prevent both of these, to the extent possible.

[yukon375]

If the government gets to decide if you can have guns, it's not a right, it's a privilege by definition. PICS and NICS turn your right into a privilege. that's fact. Last time I checked, rights are for everyone, not just the upper class.

[phillyd2]

Those like me who are prisoners of reality understand that background checks will never ever go away.

While its fun when young to advocate for a utopian free paradise, at some point we should all mature enough to accept that drunks should not be on the road, pedophiles should not teach our kids and violent felons should not own guns.

[Holden23]

It's bullshit that we can't enforce background checks without gun registration.

Suppose Jim is stopped for speeding (or whatever) on the way home from the range and in Jim's car is a gun that was clearly manufactured after the date this new background check system [that doesn't turn into gun registration] was implemented. The officer wants to verify that Jim passed a background check before the gun was transferred to him, but the only relevant information the officer has is:
- Jim's identifying information
- the make/model/serial number of the gun

How does the officer match these data points together without a searchable database that matches these data points together (aka, a registry)? Or if Jim is required to have a printed approval (or something) showing that the background check took place, how does the officer verify that this approval is tied to Jim and this specific gun, and not some other person, or another one of Jim's gun - or that the approval isn't a forgery?

If not for the desire to avoid creating a registry, the obvious way of doing these things would be to do just that. I don't believe it's possible without a registry, though I haven't seen every idea put forward either. But if someone did come up with a system that accomplishes all of this without creating a registry, I don't think it would be so hard to find.

Are you aware of such a system that works and doesn't create a registry? Or is it more of a "We can put a man on the moon, so why can't we..." kinda thing?

[PAMedic=F|A=]

However you look at things, it's hard to argue that the position "no limits on anyone, anywhere" is not an "extreme" position. By definition, if there's no position even further along from that, then that places you at the extreme. I suppose that if you went further and demanded that every person be provided with free guns and ammo at taxpayer expense, that might be more extreme. But as a practical matter, the position of "no delays, no checks, no bans on anyone, no matter what" is at least asymptotic.

Barry Goldwater said that extremism in defense of liberty is not a vice; he never had a chance at being elected president. Do the math.

We as a society can either identify those who have no ability to respect the rights of others and obey the law, and then sequester those folks someplace safe until they are rehabilitated (if that's really possible); or we can decide to allow the worst of us to roam free most of the time. In the worst case, they end up running the IRS and Justice Department.

We seem to have chosen the latter course. We identify and convict people whose defective souls allow them to rape and rob and pick fights and otherwise do bad things, and then we give them a "time out", an arbitrary time in the penalty box, during which time we all agree that almost none of them are improved as citizens.

This practice of recycling most of the worst criminals and wackjobs means that we can't follow a strict "all gun rights, all the time" practice. As has been noted, the Constitution is not a mutual suicide pact.

Comparing gun rights to speech or religious liberty is disingenuous. Free speech has caused some deaths, but each one is so unusual that it is newsworthy. Al Sharpton and mayor de Blasio both spoke in ways that encouraged the deaths of 2 cops in 2014. Guns in the hands of the wrong people facilitate around 30,000 deaths in this country last year (including the 2 cops shot in NYC, plus all the other suicides and murders.)

Guns are not the same as newspapers or TV stations or blogs. Let's not be frivolous, you are more likely to be killed by a gun in the hands of a violent felon or loon than you are likely to be killed as a result of everything else in the Bill of Rights combined. When was the last religious jihad in America? The last time someone was killed by a soldier quartered in his home? (There is an argument that the Exclusionary Rule, based in the Bill of Rights, has released bad guys who went on to kill again; I'll accept that as true.)

That being said, and acknowledging that "some" infringements on the extreme position are probably going to pass even Strict Scrutiny...that doesn't open the floodgates for every "reasonable" restriction. The Brady whiners are just as extreme in their irrational fear of ALL guns in ALL non-uniformed hands...and they are even more wrong. A LOT more wrong.

We go way, way too far in what and whom we regulate. Keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal teens is NOT justification for the bans on "assault weapons", or for keeping lists of who owns what guns and where they live. It's not enough to say "we need to err on the side of caution" to justify lifetime bans on every person who had a bad weekend as a teen, every person with a federal conviction theoretically punishable by more than 1 year, every person who shoplifted in the 1960's, every person who committed a victimless violation of a malum prohibitum statute.

It's cruel and irrational to prosecute people who make mistakes on the 4473, when we do background checks EVERY TIME on them. It's medieval bias to impose lifetime bans on everyone who was ever "touched in the head", as though legions of psychiatric professionals are just pretending to heal their patients, and nobody ever gets better after a 5-second lapse in judgment 30 years ago.

Compromise just for the sake of compromise is a bad thing, when it comes to Constitutional rights and the "cake theory". But we look absurd when we argue in favor of the seriously and currently mentally ill being able to buy guns legally, or that being paroled after 7 years in prison is enough to trust a murderer to carry a gun 24/7. That punk kid who shot up the school in Newtown shouldn't have been free to walk around, let alone acquire guns. The fact that he got them by killing his mother is irrelevant, if your argument is that he SHOULD have been able to buy them at WalMart with no questions asked.

There really are people who have anger management issues, and the Constitution doesn't require us to arm them, or stand by while they arm themselves. If the US Constitution allows us to deprive a bad actor of liberty, to imprison them or seize and restrain a person who is predatory or insane, then why would it be impermissible to let them walk free but without guns?

We need to eliminate all "waiting periods" and gun registration. We need to repeal all blanket bans on some types of guns and magazines and bullets. We need to provide a path back to the full rights guaranteed by the Constitution for everyone, a lot more than we're morally obliged to offer a "path to citizenship" that rewards law-breaking foreign trespassers. We need easier expungements for the now-law-abiding, easier expungements of old mental health records. We need statutory time limits on how long most prohibitors will remain effective. These are basic truths.

But it's not unconstitutional to recognize the other basic truth, that people are all different, and some of them can't be trusted. Either lock them up, or put up barriers to the worst things that they might do; we have to do one of them, or some combination. But all barriers should be against them PERSONALLY, not against the citizenry at large. No bans on AR-15's for you and me and a Scoutmaster and a corporate CEO and a really good welder and a soccer mom who raised 3 good kids and an art student with no arrests, just because a drifter with a history of psychotic violence might misuse one.

Cops and soldiers can and do misuse guns, pretty much every week. So what. The government not only permits them to be armed, it provides the arms. Apparently, a minority of bad outcomes will not trump the compelling arguments in favor of the government being armed.

The same applies to the sovereign citizens of these United States. There should be NO LAWS that significantly infringe the gun rights (or other rights, for that matter) of citizens who have behaved themselves; no barriers more significant than the fact that every citizen pretty much needs a driver's license and to attend school and to pay taxes, for example.

Not everyone behaves himself. Those who don't, earn some infringements. Like jail, fines, infamy, loss of voting rights and ability to hold public office.

I honestly don't understand the refusal to accept any gatekeeping at all, if it could be done without infringing the rights of the majority of us who obey the laws and respect the rights of others. Yes, I reject every mandatory background check that incorporates gun registration. It's bullshit that we can't enforce background checks without gun registration. We enforce the drug laws without illegal drug registration, don't we? We catch murderers without requiring them to be registered, don't we? It's EASY to enforce a background check. Just like the DEA catches drug dealers. You have them try to buy guns from private sellers, and if the private seller doesn't call the 800 number or check the website with his phone in the parking lot or whatever, he's in violation. We don't actually need to have every gun registered and traceable by Big Brother, if the only goal is to interdict sales to bad guys. No law stops every violation, the goal is to deter and discourage violations. Remember, seat belts and air bags don't stop all car deaths, but they're worth using anyway. Reducing crimes is worthwhile, even if it doesn't eliminate all of them (but it's not worth a major infringement of an enumerated right, I agree.)

You can already go online to check for criminal convictions of strangers, if you have their name. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine a similar website that would allow you to plug in a name and DOB and get a GO/NO-GO decision on a gun transfer.

In short: Gun registration is bad, it tempts the govt to seize your guns. Arming career criminals is also bad. We should entertain options that prevent both of these, to the extent possible.

I agree with gate keeping.

After a crime. Evidence. A jury Trail. Conviction. Incarceration, banishment or execution. I also believe that once a person is released they must be expected to return to society and be a productive citizen. We can hardly have this expectation if we have life long penalties of obviously free men.

Is the criminal justice system broken? Of course it is. We have so many laws no one can follow them, and the SCOTUS has ruled that cops do not even have to know them, just believe they know them. Clearly we need to go back to the chalk board and erase everything except the constitution.

[Bang]

SCOTUS has ruled that cops do not even have to know them, just believe they know them

I'm thinking that this is missing its full context^^^