Brett Cashman writes:
"With the House passing HR8 on mostly-partisan lines, I'm seeing a lot of people boggle at Republican opposition to universal background checks. "But 90% of the public, including most gun owners, support this!" they say.
Kinda. Take a walk with me.
Most gun sales (our best, informed-by-data estimates put the number north of 75%) are conducted through commercial gun dealers. Under federal law, anybody in the business of selling firearms is required to hold a federal firearms license, or FFL -- engaging in the commercial sales of firearms without a license is a felony. And also under federal law, FFL holders are required to conduct Brady background check on prospective buyers, in order to complete sales.
For those of you who have never gone through this process, it works like this:
(1) You go into gun dealer's shop and select your purchase.
(2) The dealer provides you with a BATFE Form 4473, which takes 5-10 minutes to fill out. The form contains personal details (name, address, phone number, SSN, DOB), the particulars of your firearm purchase (make, model, serial number, caliber), and an attestation that you are (a) buying the firearm for yourself rather than some third party and (b) not legally prohibited from possessing a firearm. Lying on this form is a (rarely-prosecuted) felony.
(3) The dealer electronically submits the information on the form to the National Instant Check System (NICS), which is operated by the FBI. The system compares your personal details against a database of persons who are legally prohibited from owning guns for various reasons. Despite the name the check isn't actually "instant" -- it typically takes a few minutes, but sometimes takes much longer.
(4) If the system doesn't match your details to a prohibited person, it returns a "proceed" message to the dealer, who is entitled to complete the sale. If the system *does* match your details to a prohibited person, it returns a "deny" message to the dealer, who is barred from completing the sale.
(5) Assuming the dealer gets a "proceed" message and there are no other state-law requirements encumbering the transaction, you pay your money and take your shiny new boomstick home.
"So what's the big deal," you ask, "with extending this to the other 25% of sales?"
A few things.
The first problem is *how* you do it. That other 25% of sales are what we call "private-party" sales: people who aren't commercial gun dealers who are nonetheless selling guns out of a personal collection, or as part of an estate liquidation. It's me selling one of my guns to a friend or online acquaintance. It's a widow trying to dispose of her late husband's hunting rifle. That kind of thing.
Most "universal background check" legislation outright bans direct private-party sales, and forces buyers and sellers to transact through FFLs. So instead of me just selling a gun out of my collection to you, like any other piece of private property, we'd both have to take time out of our lives to find a gun dealer, go to his place of business, fill out the Form 4473, wait for the NICS result, and then compensate the dealer for his time and trouble (usually around $40-$50; what, you didn't think this'd be free, did you?).
That's a lot of unnecessary hassle and friction. As an alternative, you could make NICS available to private-party sellers (right now only FFLs can access the system), and set up interlocking incentives and penalties to get them to use it. But the people pushing universal background checks resolutely refuse to consider that approach, likely because most of them think making private-party sales more costly and less convenient is a feature rather than a bug. And that naturally leads a lot of people to say, "Fuck off with that shit."
The second thing is that most universal background check legislation is written in terms of "transfers" rather than "sales," which means that it encompasses gifts and even loans. Urbanites who aren't familiar with firearms or gun culture sometimes struggle to believe this, but it's not that uncommon for people to give each other guns for birthdays or Christmas or anniversaries or whatever; and it's actually *really* common for people to lend guns to one another, both for recreation and self-defense. And the laws generally aren't written by people who are interested in *preserving* that culture; they're more commonly written by people who think it's dangerous and déclassé.
So even when they grudgingly make exceptions for certain types of gifts and loans, they're extraordinarily narrow -- the gifts have to be between close family members (spouse-spouse, parent-child, grandparent-grandchild) and the loans have to be in-person and limited to no more than 24 hours, that kind of thing. So if you're trying to get your best friend into recreational shooting and want to give him a handgun for his birthday, or if your niece is moving into her own apartment and you want to lend her a handgun for personal protection, or if you want to lend your hunting buddy your spare deer rifle because his is under repairs at the gunsmith, it's a trip to an FFL, with forms and fees. And for loans, it's a *second* trip to the FFL, with forms and fees, to process the transfer when the gun gets returned to you. Again: that naturally leads a lot of people to say, "Fuck off with that shit."
The polling that shows most gun owners supportive of universal background checks is probably accurate. In the abstract, most of us *do* probably either support the idea or, at least, don't consider it a hill worth dying on. But the operative words there are "in the abstract." Once you get down into the actual legislative weeds, there are good reasons for people to oppose this stuff."
"With the House passing HR8 on mostly-partisan lines, I'm seeing a lot of people boggle at Republican opposition to universal background checks. "But 90% of the public, including most gun owners, support this!" they say.
Kinda. Take a walk with me.
Most gun sales (our best, informed-by-data estimates put the number north of 75%) are conducted through commercial gun dealers. Under federal law, anybody in the business of selling firearms is required to hold a federal firearms license, or FFL -- engaging in the commercial sales of firearms without a license is a felony. And also under federal law, FFL holders are required to conduct Brady background check on prospective buyers, in order to complete sales.
For those of you who have never gone through this process, it works like this:
(1) You go into gun dealer's shop and select your purchase.
(2) The dealer provides you with a BATFE Form 4473, which takes 5-10 minutes to fill out. The form contains personal details (name, address, phone number, SSN, DOB), the particulars of your firearm purchase (make, model, serial number, caliber), and an attestation that you are (a) buying the firearm for yourself rather than some third party and (b) not legally prohibited from possessing a firearm. Lying on this form is a (rarely-prosecuted) felony.
(3) The dealer electronically submits the information on the form to the National Instant Check System (NICS), which is operated by the FBI. The system compares your personal details against a database of persons who are legally prohibited from owning guns for various reasons. Despite the name the check isn't actually "instant" -- it typically takes a few minutes, but sometimes takes much longer.
(4) If the system doesn't match your details to a prohibited person, it returns a "proceed" message to the dealer, who is entitled to complete the sale. If the system *does* match your details to a prohibited person, it returns a "deny" message to the dealer, who is barred from completing the sale.
(5) Assuming the dealer gets a "proceed" message and there are no other state-law requirements encumbering the transaction, you pay your money and take your shiny new boomstick home.
"So what's the big deal," you ask, "with extending this to the other 25% of sales?"
A few things.
The first problem is *how* you do it. That other 25% of sales are what we call "private-party" sales: people who aren't commercial gun dealers who are nonetheless selling guns out of a personal collection, or as part of an estate liquidation. It's me selling one of my guns to a friend or online acquaintance. It's a widow trying to dispose of her late husband's hunting rifle. That kind of thing.
Most "universal background check" legislation outright bans direct private-party sales, and forces buyers and sellers to transact through FFLs. So instead of me just selling a gun out of my collection to you, like any other piece of private property, we'd both have to take time out of our lives to find a gun dealer, go to his place of business, fill out the Form 4473, wait for the NICS result, and then compensate the dealer for his time and trouble (usually around $40-$50; what, you didn't think this'd be free, did you?).
That's a lot of unnecessary hassle and friction. As an alternative, you could make NICS available to private-party sellers (right now only FFLs can access the system), and set up interlocking incentives and penalties to get them to use it. But the people pushing universal background checks resolutely refuse to consider that approach, likely because most of them think making private-party sales more costly and less convenient is a feature rather than a bug. And that naturally leads a lot of people to say, "Fuck off with that shit."
The second thing is that most universal background check legislation is written in terms of "transfers" rather than "sales," which means that it encompasses gifts and even loans. Urbanites who aren't familiar with firearms or gun culture sometimes struggle to believe this, but it's not that uncommon for people to give each other guns for birthdays or Christmas or anniversaries or whatever; and it's actually *really* common for people to lend guns to one another, both for recreation and self-defense. And the laws generally aren't written by people who are interested in *preserving* that culture; they're more commonly written by people who think it's dangerous and déclassé.
So even when they grudgingly make exceptions for certain types of gifts and loans, they're extraordinarily narrow -- the gifts have to be between close family members (spouse-spouse, parent-child, grandparent-grandchild) and the loans have to be in-person and limited to no more than 24 hours, that kind of thing. So if you're trying to get your best friend into recreational shooting and want to give him a handgun for his birthday, or if your niece is moving into her own apartment and you want to lend her a handgun for personal protection, or if you want to lend your hunting buddy your spare deer rifle because his is under repairs at the gunsmith, it's a trip to an FFL, with forms and fees. And for loans, it's a *second* trip to the FFL, with forms and fees, to process the transfer when the gun gets returned to you. Again: that naturally leads a lot of people to say, "Fuck off with that shit."
The polling that shows most gun owners supportive of universal background checks is probably accurate. In the abstract, most of us *do* probably either support the idea or, at least, don't consider it a hill worth dying on. But the operative words there are "in the abstract." Once you get down into the actual legislative weeds, there are good reasons for people to oppose this stuff."