Congressional Democrats are once again gearing up to pass a gun control bill. The two bills probably won’t win over the 10 Republican senators needed to send them to President Biden’s desk, in part because they punish law-abiding gun owners while having no appreciable effect on gun crime.
The first bill will mandate “universal background checks,” the magic phrase that polls well until people find out what it means. More than 90% of gun sales already involve a background check, while private sales and noncommercial transfers do not. Democrats contend that background checks should also be mandated for those transfers. But it isn’t clear how many, if any, gun crimes universal background checks would prevent.
Only 8% of criminals who used a firearm in the offense they were arrested for purchased it from a friend or family member, according to a Department of Justice study released in 2019. More to the point, criminals are the least likely to comply with such laws. Universal background check laws in Colorado and Washington did not measurably increase the number of background checks performed in either state.
The second bill would address what Democrats call the “Charleston loophole,” extending the FBI’s background check review period from three to 10 days. But there is no Charleston loophole. The gunman who killed nine people at Emanuel AME Church acquired his gun through a human error in the background check process, not because of the length of the checking period.
These two bills combine to form a de facto gun registry to which the federal government would have access, all the while further delaying the sale of firearms to law-abiding gun owners by a week because someone in the bureaucracy botched a background check and the FBI didn’t catch it in time to block the sale or retrieve the gun. All this for what is likely to have a negligible effect on preventing gun crime.
Democrats frequently praise Australia’s gun confiscation program and openly advocate for one in the United States. So is it any surprise that people oppose this sort of thing? Democrats have been clear about how far they are willing to go on gun control. They are constantly propping up groups and events such as the “March For Our Lives,” which oppose the Second Amendment itself.
The bills serve as reminders to Republicans how important election victories are to the preservation of fundamental rights. Each loss pushes these kinds of gun control efforts closer to reality. Luckily, there won’t be enough Republican senators to make these laws, but ideally, there wouldn’t be enough Democrats supporting them, either.
