Background checks are widely supported. Even existing background checks are supported by many gun owners. The idea of keeping guns out of criminal hands is noble, and the checks are touted as a way to do that. Well, they're not.
Oh, they might make it harder for a convicted felon to get a gun, but while they're being sold as the answer to everyone's prayers, they're nothing of the sort.
In fact, over at Ammoland, Bill Cawthon compared background checks to snake oil, and for good reason.
Snake oil was made by boiling rattlesnakes and skimming the oil that rose to the surface. Hyped as a miracle cure, rattlesnake oil doesn’t have any real medicinal value at all. Nonetheless, hustlers and conmen peddled untold numbers of bottles labeled as snake oil in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Gun control is similar. The entire gun control spiel was created for the gullible. Bold, completely unsupported claims are coupled with words like “commonsense” and “reasonable” to soothe any doubts and overcome reluctance.
This is particularly true of universal background check laws
“Background checks save lives,” gun-grabbers assert as if it had been engraved on stone tablets and brought down from Mount Sinai. However, there’s little objective evidence that background checks deliver on the promises.
In 2000, Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig published “Homicide and Suicide Rates Associated With Implementation of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They were studying the impact of the federal background check requirement that went into effect in February 1994 and the waiting period imposed from that month until the FBI’s NCIS program went live in 1998.
Cook and Ludwig concluded, “implementation of the Brady Act appears to have been associated with reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or older but not with reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates.”
In 2017, Dr. Garen Wintemute, Director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California’s Davis campus, was one of the authors of “Comprehensive background check policy and firearm background checks in three US states”, a study of the impacts of universal background check laws in Colorado, Delaware, and Washington. The study looked for increases in the number of background check inquiries and concluded people in Colorado and Washington ignored the laws. Delaware did show the expected increase in background check inquiries but It also had the largest increase (45%) in the rate of firearm homicides. Colorado had a 42% jump and homicides rose 31% in Washington.
Cawthon also notes that universal background checks, the current snake oil being peddled, are unenforceable. That's absolutely true as only the law-abiding will comply, and anyone who doesn't want to, won't. There's no way to determine if someone complied or not, which I suspect is by design. When they run into those problems, they can try to justify gun registration.
Regardless, the fact that background checks didn't reduce homicides is one of those things that really doesn't get talked about enough.
Let's say, for a moment, that the Second Amendment included some allowance for gun control, just for the sake of argument. In this hypothetical, let's assume that the provision requires the gun control to have an actual impact on criminal behavior while being as minimally invasive of gun rights as possible. That's how people sell background checks, after all: that they're minimally invasive and they stop crime.
Well, based on their own research, it doesn't.
If homicides increase, then it sounds like the law didn't really do anything, now doesn't it?
I'm not going to say that the background checks led to an increase in homicides. That's correlation, not necessarily causation. But the flip side of that is that causation should lead to correlation, and that means the background checks don't work as advertised.
Seriously, go and read the rest of Cawthon's piece, because it's good work and there's more there.
And let's understand that Jens Ludwig and Garen Wintemute aren't pro-gun advocates. From everything I've seen from both of these men, they want gun control to work. They want to sell the idea that gun control is a good thing. We also know that gun research is full of examples where studies were manipulated to reach a predetermined conclusion.
That means that these two men are far more likely to have tried to make the data reflect their anti-gun desires than most would, and they couldn't even make it work.
Background checks sound good on paper to those open to even a smidge of regulation. They sound like a way to keep guns out of criminal hands while not actually preventing us from buying them ourselves. It sounds like a solid compromise to many people.
It never was, in part because we're the only ones impacted by the law, and it's not even reducing homicides as we were told that it would.
You're not likely to see that in the New York Times, though.
