Alan Korwin is something I’m very much not: an expert on gun laws and someone who actually reads the wretched bills (an act I consider akin to diving into Charles Schumer’s septic tank, but somebody has to do it).
He just sent around his take on Manchin-Toomey & I think it’s a strong analysis. That, and a link to the latest text (which I’m actually attempting to read despite not having a hazmat suit or a gas mask), after the “more” link.
Everything that follows is from Alan, not me. The short version is: Yes, as you already knew, this is national gun registration and yes, Gottlieb’s “trinkets” and “sweeteners” don’t make up for the fact that you DO NOT surrender a right in order to gain illusory, revocable, government-granted privileges.
Studied and Revealed
Media chatter about background checks a smokescreen
1- “Background gun-check records are saved.”
The so-called “background check” bill is really about gun registration — ultimate and imminent registration of every gun and gun owner in America.
The mandatory paper records are saved — nobody denies that. Federal agents use those all the time.
The electronic records have virtually no controls on them. They go into a system designed as a recording device. This bill vastly expands the electronic records federal agents will collect.
THE MANCHIN-TOOMEY-SCHUMER KEY:
Read the bottom of page 27 of the bill (read it, it’s killer, very short) and you tell me if you think that language stops the federal government from recording, storing, collating, compiling, distributing, securing, retrieving, integrating, merging, using or … backing up its records forever. It doesn’t. Show me an audit trail. You can’t. It’s not there.
It doesn’t even limit the FBI or BATFE in this regard. It only restricts gun dealers and gun owners. It is a complete farce.
Show me where they can’t go around and just use all the Form 4473 gun-registration papers you fill out that every dealer must permanently keep — as they are doing right now and have been doing for years. You can’t. This bill allows the federal government to do almost anything it wants with records of you and your firearms, and massively expands the records it can collect — even though it can’t collect absolutely every record at this time, yet.
Failure to give them all the records they currently demand under this bill, even by accident (and there are plenty of easy ways to innocently make an error), would put you in prison. The 15-year prison term they threw in for creating a federal registry is a meaningless smokescreen.
The bill requires you to get a background check to buy firearms from people you meet at a gun show, but doesn’t require anyone to do a background check just because you want one. Dealers would have plenty of reasons not to do such a check — like having paying customers, liability, fee caps, and pressure from a sometimes rogue federal agency like BATFE. That would mean the end of freedom at gun shows. This is something Sen. John McCain has been working on for more than a decade. McCain was quoted by the Associated Press today as “very favorably disposed” to this Manchin-Toomey-Schumer gun-infringement bill (meaning he likes it). This bill is totally unacceptable.
And what’s that bit at the end of that section that says medical- and health-insurance-company owned guns are exempt? Say what? Where’s the media on that? I’ll do a more detailed report on this soon. Or someone should — who’s planning what that got that in there?
The bill offers gun owners some trinkets — “sweeteners” they’re called. Like being able to buy a firearm in any state you are in, not just your state of residence. That would remove a grotesque infringement in place since the 1968 Gun Control Act. It was apparently squeezed in there by a gun-rights group (CCRKBA.org — NOTE from Claire: A group to which I am not going to link) now taking a lot of heat for cooperating with the anti-rights bigots. That’s a good trinket, true, and I might accept that — but only as a stand-alone bill, certainly never as a condition for gun registration.
Do you think the gun grabbers would go for that? They only accepted Retail Freedom to get their tyranny enacted. There are other “sweeteners,” like restoration of rights, and other things America should have — but only as stand-alone bills, never as bait to allow gun registration. Manchin-Toomey-Schumer must be rejected outright. The idea of making tyranny acceptable by offering trinkets is absurd and must be killed.
It’s far more important to look at the underpinning of this scheme, the story behind the story the public loudspeaker omits entirely.
Why are we even having this discussion? Because a madman killed children in a kindergarten in a corner of the nation. That’s really the only reason.
This led Dianne Feinstein, Charles Schumer, and the president of the United States to begin a campaign to ban certain firearms we own by brand name and looks, our ammunition magazines by size, to restrict public gun shows, and introduce gun registration and background checks on all innocent Americans as a response. They are dancing in the blood of victims, to advance a monstrous agenda, a game they have played for decades.
They can call it background checks all they want. It’s about gun registration (and other illegal infringements).
And gun registration itself is a false flag, and the media doesn’t know that. Most of the public doesn’t either.
Think — A gun list would not have saved or solved any of the mass killings that have ignited these law-writing frenzies, right? Right. In no way whatsoever. So what do we need? At last, the right question.
The real problem with gun registration.
Only one thing is overlooked in the common-sense proposals to register guns, so here it is. How exactly would writing down my name, or your name, help arrest criminals or make you safer? Although at first blush, gun listing has a sort of tantalizing appeal, on reflection you have to wonder whether gun lists would be an instrument of crime control at all.
The unfortunate answer is that, no matter how good it feels when the words first pass your ears, registering honest gun owners doesn’t stop criminals, and in fact focuses in exactly the opposite direction. It is an allocation of resources that has no chance of achieving its goal, if that goal is the reduction of crime.
1. Registering 100 million Americans is extremely expensive — and omits the criminals and crazies.
Do you know what it takes to run a database that big? You need 27,000 changes daily, just to keep up with people who move every ten years. Floor after floor of cubicle after cubicle for employees with permanent jobs, payroll, parking and dry cleaning bills. It’s a government jobs program all by itself, all in the common sense — but deceptive name — of stopping crime.
How many criminals and crazies do you figure will register when all is said and done? That’s right, none, and the planners know that, but the media never mentions it. All that money and time is invested on tracking the innocent. That’s why so many police departments are against it — they’ll be forced to run huge data centers with their limited resources, and hire clerks instead of cops. And make all that data on us available to central command at the FBI. It makes even them nervous. And that’s not crime fighting. Canada just scrapped their registry as a worthless paper trail on the public (after wasting $2 billion on it).
2. Americans who fail to register property they already own would become felons without committing a crime.
Under registration, property and activity that has been perfectly legal since inception makes you a felon. Think about that. Possession of private property would subject you to felony arrest, if the property isn’t on the government’s master list… every single piece you own, and for many Americans, it’s a collection. This is not the American way — it is something else with a very ugly name. The agency in charge (BATFE) is infamous for busts on minor paperwork errors (and worse). No other evil is needed, there is no victim and no inherent criminal act takes place. Paperwork equals prison. That’s just wrong. Why are we even thinking of this? Why doesn’t the media point out any of this? Who are these people?
3. Registration, if enacted, will create an underground market for unregistered guns bigger than the drug trade.
How many times must an elite forbid what the public wants, before learning the unintended consequences of outlawing liberties? People get their freedom either way, it’s just a question of how much crime the government itself forces to accompany it. With respect to guns, the last thing you want to encourage is the creative import programs and price supports that drug dealers enjoy, for gun runners.
4. People have said to me, “But Alan, if all guns were registered and there was a crime, then you could tell.”
Tell what? If your neighbor is shot, that’s not probable cause for a house-to-house search of every armed home in a ten-mile radius. (Can you imagine if police had power to do that?) The evidence needed to conclusively link a person to a crime has no connection at all to a registration scheme — you need motive, opportunity, witnesses, physical evidence, the murder weapon. Police aren’t waiting for official lists so they can start catching murderers, right? Gun-registration schemes lack a crime-prevention component. Think — A gun list wouldn’t have saved or solved any of the mass killings that have ignited these law-writing frenzies, right? Right. So what do we need? At last, the right question.
5. You don’t really think authorities would use gun registration lists to confiscate weapons from people, do you?
Despite real-life examples of exactly that recently in New York, California and Louisiana, and global history for the past century, this couldn’t really happen, do you think? Who would even support such a thing in a country like America, with its Bill of Rights? The guarantees against confiscating property, unwarranted seizures and the right to keep and bear arms would surely forestall any such abuse of power. Are there really U.S. politician who would support firearm seizures? (Even if you drink Kool-Aid you know it’s a long list of usual suspects.)
So what about the so-called First Amendment test? If it’s OK for arms it should pass muster for words too. Why would an honest writer object to being registered on the government list of approved writers? Why indeed. Many journalists have a hard time with that question. (Be sure to report to authorities when you move.)
Pile logic on logic, some people just feel the government should register everything, just to keep control. When government has that much control, you no longer possess your liberties. You’re living where government lists define who can do what, and where people control trumps crime control — the gun registration model precisely. This form of “gun control” isn’t about guns, it’s about control.
I might consider registration if the system would include criminals. In fact, I might consider testing the system on them first. But that’s illegal.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a widely known case (Haynes v. U.S., 1968), had determined that a felon who has a gun cannot be compelled to complete the forms, because it violates the Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. That’s right, mandatory registration — not in your case of course but in the case of a criminal, who can’t have a gun in the first place — is self-indictment of a crime, and is therefore prohibited. (see NOTE at end)
Gun listing is a feel-good deception that passes unquestioned by the “news” media and representatives who support such legislation, engorges the federal or state bureaucracy, and undercuts the linchpins of American freedoms. It has no more place in a free society than a government authorized list of words, and should be rejected outright. Elected officials who promote such a scheme are opposing the very Constitution they take an oath to preserve, protect and defend, and deserve to be removed from office.
This portion of the Manchin-Toomey-Schumer amendment, i.e., all the additional use of the NICS system, at the very least, is defective and must be stripped. As you’ll see when I get to it, most of the rest of the bill is no better.
The fact that some gun-rights trinkets have been tossed in as sweeteners only means those items might be worth enacting, without all the attached infringements. Gun purchases outside our home states, for example, is a long overdue rights restoration worthy of passage.
Sincerely,
Alan Korwin, Author
Gun Laws of America
NOTE: Haynes only concerned a limited class of weapons called “destructive devices,” which are listed and tracked in a special federal registry under the National Firearms Act. Congress rewrote that law after Haynes to require only the legal transferor, and not the transferee, of such devices to file papers, and along with other clever changes believed it solved the 5th Amendment Haynes “problem.” In U.S. v. Freed, 1971, the Court agreed the problem had been fixed (for possession of hand grenades by criminals in that particular case).
A general registration scheme would run into greater difficulty. A prohibited possessor cannot have a firearm at all, so mere possession is a serious crime. An additional charge for failing to register the gun that can’t be possessed would offend the 5th Amendment the same as in the Haynes case. However, possession of an unregistered gun by an ordinary citizen would turn that citizen into a felon, with no other illegal act but the paperwork failure. The innocent would have to register to remain legal, the illegal possessor could not register without violating the right to not incriminate yourself.
Short form: The Gottlieb-Greased Toomey-Manchin Anal Rape would purportedly do three things allegedly good for gun owners:
1. Criminalizes the creation of a “national firearms registry” by the Department of Justice.
— Easily bypassed by 1) following the example of “Total Information Awareness” and calling it something else, since the name is criminalized, 2) DOJ passing the records to another department to create a registry (think handing it off to the CDC to “study patterns of gun violence”), 3) passing the records to an outside “contractor” to create a database for “research purposes, 4) calling everything an investigation into a possible crime and collecting and correlating the records as allowed in this bill, 5) simply saving the automatically generated log files to create the registry later when Congress lifts the restriction, 6) ignoring the law as the ATF has been doing with impunity for years.
2. Reciprocal Transportation.
Except it doesn’t. It guts existing FOPA standards (which some states have ignored anyway). And it has a nice built-in escape clause: transportation by licensed gun owners if the owner’s state of residence and the state he’s passing through recognize each other’s licenses; the bill does not require reciprocal recognition of licenses.
3. Out-of-state firearms purchases.
See #2; it only works if the states have — unmandated — license reciprocity.
For these wonderful things, we only have to give up privacy, beg permission to exercise a human right, pay for the exercise of that r/i/g/h/t/ privilege, be tracked, imprisoned and fined if we give a gun to the wrong friend without permission, pay for a commission specifically created to find new ways to infringe human rights… and get no guarantee that even those wonderful things won’t be stolen in the next round of “compromise”.
If “reciprocal carry” is in there anywhere, it’s not in a version available to us lesser beings for review.
The “sweetners” added to the Manchin/Toomey bill is like adding aspartame to arsenic laced grape kool aid.
I find it interesting in this bogus gun control debate that no one, not one person that I’ve seen talking about it on TV, has mentioned that to the Founding Fathers the most important reason for the citizenry to be armed was to ensure that if the government ever became a tyranny the people would have the wherewithal to oppose it. Of course, that can’t happen in America…yeah right! The public school propaganda mills have done their jobs of dumbing down the American people. We are getting closer to the one universal law of all tyrannies: If it is not expressly allowed then it is forbidden. All hail the Imperial government. (Dissenters will be shot.)
This whole bill stinks! The supposed “sweeteners” added on by Gottlieb is like adding a sprinkling of sugar on a tablespoon of sh*t and telling us it tastes good now.
No way, have already begun lobbying my Senators telling them a vote for this is going to make me do absolutely everything in my power to put them out of office at the next election.
For those of you that don’t vote any longer you can still effect some change here by just telling your Congress critters that you will do everything in your power to end their career if they vote for this steaming pile of dung!
” This bill allows the federal government to do almost anything it wants with records of you and your firearms”
I don’t see that in the bill. What I see in this respect is a continuation of the current state of affairs – a theoretical prohibition on making a database, in face of the reality that there almost certainly is already a database. In other words, I don’t see how this bill really changes anything in this respect.
“…and massively expands the records it can collect.”
Yes, now everybody who buys a gun, assuming they comply with this law, will be almost certainly recorded. No more buying “unpapered guns”, except from relatives (and that means there is no plausible deniability as to who the gun was sold to – You can’t say “I don’t know the buyer’s name.”). No more armed people out there who have left no tracks.
“It doesn’t even limit the FBI or BATFE in this regard. It only restricts gun dealers and gun owners.”
Well, I don’t see how that section limits dealers and gun owners. It (at least theoretically) limits the AG and everyone under him.
“Show me where they can’t go around and just use all the Form 4473 gun-registration papers you fill out that every dealer must permanently keep — as they are doing right now and have been doing for years.”
Yes. So the bill changes nothing in this respect.
“Failure to give them all the records they currently demand under this bill, even by accident (and there are plenty of easy ways to innocently make an error), would put you in prison.”
I didn’t see that. Give a page and line number…
“The bill requires you to get a background check to buy firearms from people you meet at a gun show, but doesn’t require anyone to do a background check just because you want one.”
Perhaps, but I suspect show organizers would put together a facility to do checks for people who need them – if they want people to come to their show! I doubt this is a real problem.
“And what’s that bit at the end of that section that says medical- and health-insurance-company owned guns are exempt?”
I suspect you are misinterpreting this. It says the AG cannot make a database by combing through medical and insurance company information. These two often are aware of firearms ownership of their clients.
I don’t agree this bill is about gun registration. The only thing they now have connecting a gun to a person is the turned-in 4473’s. That is unchanged with this bill. Of course that is only valid in the first sale of a given gun. When it is sold again, even with universal background checks, there is no gun information that goes to the government.
What this bill is about, in my opinion, is *gun owner* registration. They don’t know what guns people own, but they sure intend to find out 1) who owns guns and 2) how many guns, which will point out to them the “gun nuts”. Still good enough for a subsequent gun confiscation.
“Americans who fail to register property they already own would become felons without committing a crime.”
Unless you can point us at a page and line, I believe this is completely in error. Again it is not gun registration, but gun owner registration.
“Registration, if enacted, will create an underground market for unregistered guns bigger than the drug trade.”
To me this is a good thing. We need more black markets.
“You don’t really think authorities would use gun registration lists to confiscate weapons from people, do you?”
Yes, I do believe that.
This bill is troublesome in two main respects. 1) It is *gun owner* registration – however it is pretty unenforceable. Anyone attempting a “sting” operation risks being shot. Many times. 2) It cements in place the notion that government can make a list of people it (or they) consider crazy, and not authorized to own a gun. Who will be considered crazy? People who think guns are for stopping government tyranny. Call it “administrative disarmament”.
That’s my reading of the bill. If I am in error, someone point me at the passage in the bill…
We’ve been here before. https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/554982_288805611254559_482874029_n.jpg
Of COURSE it’s about “gun registration”. The goal has been obvious for some time.
But here is some food for thought:
A “universal” background check (ie, the elimination of the concept once called “private property”) is the most “In-Your-Face” example of what Biblical prophecy popularly terms ‘the Mark of the Beast’.
Ask this question:
If Big Brother can require a ‘mark’ (permission) in order to “buy or sell” the ONE single category of property EXPLICITLY protected by the Bill of Rights that “shall not be infringed” —
then are there any limits left?
“Of COURSE it’s about “gun registration”.”
Not this bill – unless you are saying it’s a step in that direction, which could be said of any gun control bill. Toomey is actually about gun owner registration.
For this bill to directly contribute to gun registration, it would have to require gun information (make, model, serial number) to be transmitted to the govt. There is no such language in the bill.
Oh, it’s also possible the bill writers were depending on BATFE creating rules that amount to gun registration, the excuse being to make this bill more enforceable. That would be an interesting tactic, and I suspect the noncompliance would be huge.
All moot now of course.
OK, I finally understand why people keep saying this is about gun registration, from an alert from GOA:
“This bill would require you to go to a dealer and fill out a 4473 if you put up a sign or run a newspaper ad touting your gun that’s for sale. And, once you fill in that 4473, Toomey-Manchin-Schumer would open the door to putting you on a national gun registry.”
I wish that point had gotten more circulation. Did anyone even bother to warn Gottlieb?
It’s not clear to me this is actually true. We had 4473’s long before we had background checks (they came in with GCA68, and NICS dates from 1998). There is no mention of 4473’s in Toomey’s bill, and there is frequent mention of NICS. I had assumed that private parties would have to submit to NICS, not the 4473. Maybe I am wrong and it was left unmentioned in the bill on purpose. 4473’s do indeed facilitate gun registration, while NICS (as it currently stands) is about gun owner registration.