… and despite Pennsylvania’s ban on transfers or loans of firearms without going through an FFL or Sheriff not doing hardly a think to put a dent in Philadelphia’s violence crime rate, some lawmakers want to expand the ban on transfers or loans to long guns.
This has been going around in rightly circles. It’s interesting to see some of the outlets making hay of this given that Santora is still willing to vote the right way on abortion.
Santora would never be forgiven for voting the wrong way on abortion.
We have decades of proof that he will be forgiven, and covered for, for voting against our gun rights.
It’s that simple.
I would really like to take this the opposite direction: the very fact that long guns aren’t used in crime means that we shouldn’t bother doing background checks on them.
Perhaps the starkest example is with lever-action rifles. If I could find one with a serial number that dates to before 1896, it can be sent to me by mail across State lines without a background check…but if it’s a post-1896 lever-action rifle, it’s subject to all the laws that any modern gun is subject to. Oddly enough, though, criminals haven’t been seeking out these lever action rifles.
Arguing for the removal of background checks for long guns would be *very* difficult to do in the current political climate, though.
“…the very fact that long guns aren’t used in crime means that we shouldn’t bother doing background checks on them.”
We should take the principle farther yet, and ask where it can be shown that background checks have any effect on crime at all?
The gun controllers will cite the statistics about how many “criminals were stopped from obtaining guns” based on the number of potential gun buyers who were rejected. But it is extremely doubtful that any active criminals attempt to buy guns through normal retail channels; usually it is someone who has forgotten or never knew they were flagged, because they don’t think of themselves as criminals — and the premise that everyone who is flagged, who succeeds in buying a gun, is going to to commit a crime with it, is false on its face.
The strength of background checks lies as much with gun owners, who on one hand will argue that “criminals will always get guns anyway,” while they at the same time place extreme value on, that “criminals” not be able to obtain guns in that metaphysical state of, “legally.” Meanwhile, it is doubtful that background checks accomplish anything worthwhile at all.