Broad Bipartisan Support for Expanded Background Checks, Poll Shows

[Frodo]

Including 80% of Republicans:

Continued Bipartisan Support for Expanded Background Checks on Gun Sales

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[Antonio the Sixth]

Really a testament to how powerful the guns lobby is.

[Free Bird]

Really a testament to how powerful the guns lobby is.

Says the European

[Antonio the Sixth]

Really a testament to how powerful the guns lobby is.

Says the European

Uh, yes? What's your point?

[Blue3]

There was broad bipartisan support when President Obama and the Democrats were actively pushing this too, when the Democrats still had the Senate. If it didn't pass then it won't now.

Also, gun control laws are about to become outdated by 3D printing, which is advancing every day. I think the solution should be more focused on mental healthcare.

[Marokai Backbeat]

There's always been broad support among the public for more gun regulations. For various unfortunate reasons that never translates into actual legislative action, though.

[useful idiot]

Each of these statements is problematic, and the answers one gets to the questions depends on how the questions are worded

1) There are backgrounds checks at gun shows, unless the sale is a private transaction (one regular person to another), so the question is redundant. A tiny fraction of private sales occur at gun shows, where 99% of purchases are made through dealers who do a NICS check. Most of the private sales that aren't between family members and friends occur through the internet, which requires the gun be sent to a dealer where a background check can take place. When you ask whether people should have to get a background check to sell to a family member, the number of people responding in the affirmative drops considerably. I would like the NRA to budge on this one since I don't see any slippery slope consequences to requiring all private sales go through a dealer. It's like a $15 fee and a half hour out of your day. They don't support it because of fire from extreme groups like GOA and NAGR who opposed checks to begin with.

2) The NRA has been fairly straightforward in demanding the government do a better job of adding adjudication records to the NICS system, so the gun lobby can't be blamed for this one. The only objective standard for preventing the violently mentally ill from obtaining a gun is to use records of those "adjudicated mentally defective" (as the 1968 Firearms Act calls it), or people who were involuntarily committed. That's already law, the government has just done a bad job of making sure the checks catch these people. There are also questions of how we are defining "mentally ill" or would determine whether some get guns but others don't. Had depression as a teenager? Agoraphobic? OCD? Saw a family therapist? Having the feds scan through your private medical records to add them to the background check system would be a horrible breach of privacy protection. That's why commitment is the only workable standard so far, and it's already supposed to be part of the check system.

The NRA is backing John Cornyn's new background check bill, which is supposed to deal with some of the mental health holes in the checks system by increasing federal funding to get court mental health records into the system. It is also supposed to allow the court system (no private medical information involved) to determine someone mentally unfit for the purpose of checks without having to civilly commit them. It's entirely reasonable.

3) A federal database to track gun sales is an incredibly vague thing. Is this for some federal agency (assuming the already highly ineffective ATF) to be able to see where a gun was purchased by its serial number? Is it a national firearms registry? A database of who owns what? The expansion of background checks was roundly defeated last time on the basis of the fact that it could lead to a national registry, so advocating the thing itself is a losing proposition if that's what it is. Most criminals don't obtain their guns legally anyway, and mass-shooters generally can pass a background check and obviously have no fear of getting caught. With 300 million in circulation already, I'm not sure how effective this would be regardless of what it is.

4) The AWB was a joke, the proposed revived AWB was a joke, and nothing like it will be passed in the next 20-30 years because it's just bad policy. The DOJ and CDC admitted it was a complete failure. It banned certain guns on the basis of arbitrary cosmetic features. They were just semi-automatic guns, like the great majority of guns owned in the U.S.

There would be more of a clamor for gun control if we hadn't seen a massive proliferation of guns and liberalization of gun laws in tandem with a massive decrease in violent crime since the late 80's. Mass-shootings are the only things that keep a lot of this stuff alive, and none of these legislative items would have prevented any of the high-profile mass shootings from the last 25 years. Columbine occurred during the national AWB and Connecticut has an AWB, for instance.