Naturally, the topic of gun control came up in the first Democratic debate, and Chuck Todd directed the first question on it to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke. How did he discuss this issue with Texans, who are known to be jealous guardians of their constitutional rights? O’Rourke’s response began with a few comments about universal background checks. The phrase that caught my ear was, “We know that they save lives.”
Sorry, but that’s one thing we do not know about them. In fact, it probably isn’t true, at least not with respect to any of the mass shooting events that we refer to, such as Sandy Hook, the Pulse nightclub, or the Las Vegas massacre. I’m not aware of any specific shooting that this would have prevented.
Mind you, I believe that universal background checks (or some version of them, I like this one) are probably attainable without running afoul of the Second Amendment. But they’re a solution looking for a problem. There’s no evidence that universal background checks would have saved any lives in any recent mass shooting, and although it’s probably happened, no one has pointed to any sort of petty crime epidemic resulting from the small number of sales that occur legally without a background check.
Mind you, we’re talking about shooters who used guns that were lawfully sold without a background check — that is, between private citizens of the same state, within those states that still don’t require background checks for private sales. Guns that are sold illegally are obviously never checked. Guns sold by dealers and within many states already have to be checked no matter what.
Politicians want to do background checks because it can probably be done, not because it would save any lives. Its a diversionary tactic.
If you want to get serious about guns, you start talking about handguns (not rifles) and you also talk about tightening up our background check system. The feds seem to mess this up again and again, allowing killers like the Charleston, Sunderland Springs, and Virginia Tech shooters to slip through the cracks when they should have failed their background checks.
Or you can go the more extreme route — gun licensing (as Cory Booker embraced tonight), gun confiscation, and repeal of the Second Amendment. Even then, you’re going to leave criminals armed (they’re criminals because they don’t follow laws), but at least you can claim you’re addressing the problem and not just giving the usual empty lip service to background checks.
