How Gun Control Ends: Not With A Bang, But A Whimper

[rrneck]

6. That's because

if the system is working right, sooner or later at the end of the day whatever legislation gets passed into law has to work in the real world. Prosecutors have to be able to look at the statute and be willing to devote resources to convict people of crimes.

The AWB and mag capacity regulations were absurd on their face. Background checks for private transfers are a fine idea if they can get it to work. But you're talking about regulating the transfer of an object that weighs about three pounds between people who could have a near infinite variety of relationships. I don't see how you can mandate and enforce background checks without chain of custody documentation. And we're not talking about documenting something almost exclusively operated in public, but something inside the privacy of people's homes. If the civil rights problems weren't bad enough, the political ramifications could be disastrous.

But let's assume they can figure out a way to get it to work and pass it into law without giving the Republicans control of government for another few generations. In all the brouhaha over the issue, I haven't seen anyone comment on the impact of private background checks on the gun market. If they implement that system, it will effectively turn every gun owner in the country into a gun dealer. We can't successfully regulate straw purchases at gun dealers now, imagine if we create eighty million of them.