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In reply to the discussion: No charges for seller who sold gun to W.Va. killer [View all]benEzra
(12,148 posts)with "background check" legislation is that too often, it goes waaaaaaay beyond background checks. For example, Manchin-Toomey made it a crime to lend your significant other a gun unless you were married, including simply leaving the gun at home if you were traveling out of town more than a week, as I recall. Washington's i594 is a steaming mess that makes it a felony to let a friend who has already passed a background check to so much as touch your gun outside of a commercial shooting range, and all transfers have to go through commercial dealers to be registered via BATFE Form 4473, among other things. That was a bait-and-switch.
I'm not opposed to background checks for private sales, in principle. I am deeply opposed to registration, and to intentional inconvenience such as requiring tranfers to go through gun stores, or making the background check as expensive and inconvenient as possible. A lot of those things are intended to simply discourage unregistered gun sales, background check or not. And given the fact that there is still a powerful, extremely well funded lobby trying to outlaw the most popular civilian guns in this country, de facto registration is an absolute dealbreaker.