The McCarthy/NRA Gun Control Act

After all the warning signs, I don't suppose this is a surprise to many, but the NRA's support for H.R. 297, the NICS "Improvement" Act, is certainly not a welcome development to those committed to the fight for gun rights, and who are not impressed with the Neville Chamberlain approach.

Senior Democrats have reached agreement with the National Rifle Association on what could be the first federal gun-control legislation since 1994, a measure to significantly strengthen the national system that checks the backgrounds of gun buyers.

The NRA is apparently congratulating itself over "significant concessions" in the bill.

To sign on to the deal, the powerful gun lobby won significant concessions from Democratic negotiators in weeks of painstaking talks. Individuals with minor infractions in their pasts could petition their states to have their names removed from the federal database, and about 83,000 military veterans, put into the system by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2000 for alleged mental health reasons, would have a chance to clean their records. The federal government would be permanently barred from charging gun buyers or sellers a fee for their background checks. In addition, faulty records such as duplicative names or expunged convictions would have to be scrubbed from the database.

So, the "significant concessions" include a provision whereby someone with a minor brush with the law decades in his past can ask to be removed from the state mandated defenselessness list (with, apparently, no obligation on the state's part to honor the request). Gee, that's some concession. Likewise, more than 80,000 veterans who are in the database, supposedly for reasons of mental health, would "have a chance" to own a firearm to defend themselves, after having carried one to defend us all. How generous of us. Oh, and if the list includes names that shouldn't be there, they have to be removed. That's a "consession"? Or does the "concession" lie in the fact that we don't have to pay for this new government scrutiny into our lives (but of course we do, as taxpayers--a quarter of a billion a year, apparently)?

The article did teach me something I hadn't known about my new favorite state:

Only one state, Vermont, does not participate in the instant-check system, and even with the threatened aid cuts, negotiators expressed confidence that no other state would drop out, given the funding that would be available and the stigma that would be attached to withdrawal.

Wow, no government permission slip required to carry a firearm, and no participation in the NICS program--Vermont must be a raging maelstrom of "gun violence" (according to this, two states have lower violent crime rates).

As I've said before, the only thing this bill would "improve" about NICS is the government's ability to more closely approach Orwell's nightmare. NICS doesn't need to be "improved"--it needs to be abolished. As it happens, a vastly better alternative has been thought of.