Opinion
New Jersey – -(AmmoLand.com)- As a New Jersey small business owner, I’m painfully familiar with government red tape. As a New Jersey gun owner, I’m painfully familiar with the government’s distrust and overregulation of a Constitutionally protected right. Now the 119th Congress is aspiring to pour more salt in that wound in the name of H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019.
You can ignore the title because it’s not a bipartisan bill; hardly any are these days. But what you can’t overlook are the additional hardships this bill would impose on law-abiding gun owners.
We’re told that H.R. 8 will prevent bad guys from getting their hands on guns. That would be great if criminals purchased guns legally. Unfortunately, they’re criminals and seldom follow the law. A recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report from the Department of Justice tells us just that. Released in January of 2019, the report found that the overwhelming majority of people convicted of gun-related crimes obtained those guns by stealing them, buying them on the black market, or through a straw purchase (where someone with a clean record buys a gun for a criminal). H.R. 8 does nothing to prevent any of those crimes.
What it does prevent is the private transfer of firearms. Not just private sales but private transfers as well.
That means an employee who is being harassed by a crazy ex-boyfriend can’t borrow a firearm for self-protection. It says my stepdaughter wouldn’t be allowed to borrow a firearm if she moves into a sketchy neighborhood. Not without finding a federally licensed firearms dealer to conduct a background check first. And after the threat has passed? When the crazy ex-boyfriend has gone to jail or moved away? Then I have to pass a background check before she returns my gun. How does this make any sense?
The sad part is people like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi already know that universal background checks don’t work. She knows this because Johns Hopkins and UC Davis released a study in December of 2018 that said California’s universal background check system had no impact on gun deaths. If universal background checks had no impact on gun deaths in California – a state with the strictest gun laws in the nation according to the Giffords Law Center – then why would anyone think they could have an impact on a national scale?
Probably because the only impact people like Pelosi and Michael Bloomberg (former New York City mayor and founder of multiple gun control groups including Moms Demand Action) are concerned with is the impact laws have on good, honest, law-abiding gun owners. H.R. 8 is one of those laws.
We elect politicians to improve our lives. To expand our freedoms and protect our rights. Passing the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019 will do none of those things. What it will do is outlaw a perfectly legal activity, make it more difficult for honest people to protect themselves and their loved ones, and have no impact on crime.
We didn’t send those politicians to Washington to make life easier for the bad guys. Maybe it’s time to remind them of that.
About Anthony P Colandro
Anthony P Colandro, a lifelong New Jerseyan, and Second Amendment activist, is the owner of Woodland Park Range and is running for the 2019 NRA Board of Directors.
…or just do what the Second Amendment says, “shall not be infringed”. No more gun laws and all the existing ones are trash.
Many people continue to say that CA gets the idiotic and illegal laws they have because of who they elected. Well…many of those people don’t realize that conservatives, pro 2A people are outnumbered in places like CA, especially in counties like L.A. That place went to the dogs a long time ago. Some of us continue to do something about this but with the kind if demographic the permeates most of CA, it’s a lost cause. Thought I’m still hopeful….
Keep fighting and maybe they’ll come to their senses that their gun control doesn’t apply to the criminals.
Laws are only intended for the law abiding, politicians and their bureaucrats know that. What these officials are doing is creating feel good laws that are equally inept as they are.
There will always be a group in society that will follow blindly, but that group is growing as evidenced by state governments taken over by liberals and leftists. One party rule will destroy this nation and conservatives are letting it happen.
Slippery Slope! The only means of enforcing “universal background checks” is mandated registration of all firearms. Otherwise, government agencies are unable to identify the legal owner of any firearm. There is, of course, a predictable transition from registration to confiscation, which is the ultimate and intended purpose of these “common sense” measures of reducing “gun violence”.
Here is the crux of the problem:
“We elect politicians to improve our lives. To expand our freedoms and protect our rights. ”
No. We elect politicians to defend liberty. Only. All political actions in a Constitutional Republic are legitimate only if they serve to defend liberty.
Thinking like this has made Jersey a living hell for liberty loving people.
Lost my vote on that one.
Profound. Exceptionally profound, indeed!
“The report found that the overwhelming majority of people convicted of gun-related crimes obtained those guns by stealing them, buying them on the black market, or through a straw purchase (where someone with a clean record buys a gun for a criminal). H.R. 8 does nothing to prevent any of those crimes”. Per the above from the author, 2nd amendment patriots need to educate the public on the idiocy of proposed bills such as this. What we need make it much harder for perps to gain access to unsecured guns by private owners. For straw purchasers, prosecute those much more… Read more »
Wow, enforcing the current gun laws would be a good start, but we know that the anti-gunners only want to take guns from law abiding. Easier to control when they’re disarmed.
f hr8 & its originators/supporters.