Why do you agree with David Hogg who says, "If you’re afraid of a background check you shouldn’t be able to buy a gun”?
This pretty well sums up my opinion of David Hogg. He has been coached, coddled and cosseted by Michael Bloomberg and has capitalized on his celebrity as the survivor of a tragedy that was allowed to happen through ineptitude and failures of the Broward County school board, the administration of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the sheer incompetence and cowardice of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office and a failure to properly route information by the FBI.Sheriff Scott Israel was removed from office by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in part because of the failure to properly respond to the incident.But David Hogg and his coterie of schoolmates gave a free pass to the sheriff’s office, Deputy Scot Petersen and everybody else in order to focus blame a Smith & Wesson rifle and a small business that had done nothing wrong at all. The business, Sunrise Tactical, was forced to close its doors after the shooting.It is highly ironic that a person supposedly damaged for life because of the actions of a person who passed a background check is such a strong proponent of them. The shooter was able to pass the background check in spite of the fact he had a long history of interactions with law enforcement due to his violent behavior. He had no criminal background, no record because he was never prosecuted for his offenses. That’s because of the policies of the Broward County school district and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.This is not NRA propaganda. These were among the findings of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Commission created by the state of Florida in response to the incident. The commission released its preliminary report in January of this year.On to my opinion of polls and the people that participate in them.Last week, NPR (National Public Radio) and the PBS Newshour conducted a Marist poll of 880 adults. The poll was conducted from February 5th through 11th.The poll showed that 82% of adults believed that background checks would make a difference. Just 15% said they would make no difference. 68% of self-identified gun owners were in favor of background checks but 30% said they would make no difference. The poll also found that 60% of respondents favored a ban on “assault weapons” and 64% favored creation of a national gun registry. 65% also believed a ban on high-capacity magazines would make a difference.The last question in the survey was, “From what you have read or heard, do you think, compared to 25 years ago, the per capita gun murder rate in the U.S. is higher, lower, or about the same?”In an odd coincidence, 82% of those surveyed believed that the gun murder rate had remained the same (23%) and the majority (59%) believing it was higher. Only 12% believed the rate had gone down.The latest data we have is from 2017. the 25-year period that includes both beginning and ending years starts in 1993. According to data complied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the gun murder rate fell by more than 36% from 1993 to 2017.So 82% of respondents had no idea what they were talking about. That’s not surprising, they have been fed a stream of distortions and lies by politicians and media and by celebrities who don’t know what they’re talking about, either.Political party didn’t seem to matter except in the percentage of ill-informed people. Only 8% of Democrats and 9% of Republicans were aware of the truth. I am almost embarrassed to say that gun owners did no better than the average of the respondents.David Hogg’s comment is interesting. I am not afraid of a background check, I have gone through far more of them than he has, especially considering that he can’t even legally purchase a gun since Florida raised the minimum age to 21.But the background check law currently being rammed through the House isn’t about buying a gun. It’s about transferring a firearm, which is a whole different ball of wax.The federal government considers anything that shifts the physical possession of a firearm from one person to another, even temporarily, to be a transfer. If I hand my wife a gun for her to look at, that’s a transfer. When she hands it back, that’s another transfer.The bill currently being marked up does exempt me and my wife handing guns back and forth. I can even give her a gun to keep. I can do the same for my children.I can also let a friend use one of my guns at a shooting range or while hunting. But, if I let him keep the gun after the trip to clean it as a favor to me, that’s a felony, even though he is going to return it the next day.As a sop to the NRA and gun rights advocates, the bill specifically prohibits national gun registration. In the first place, that’s stupid. Establishment of a federal registry of guns or gun owners has been illegal since 1986. So this bill does what? Makes something that’s already illegal “illegaler?” In the second place, it makes the law impossible to enforce.If the government doesn’t know who owns what guns, how is it going to monitor the transfers of those guns? How is it going to make a case for prosecution? Why wouldn’t a police chief or county sheriff figure that they have better uses for their resources than chasing down cases they can’t prove. Are we going to have sting operations to catch Mr. Jones selling his old hunting rifle to his next-door neighbor? What if Mr. Jones and his neighbor said that it was actually sold before the law went into effect?Noted gun control advocate Garen Wintemute did a study of three states that enacted universal background check laws, Colorado, Delaware and Washington state. Only Delaware had a significant increase in the volume of background check inquiries. The volumes in Colorado and Washington remained essentially flat. The homicide rates in all three states rose in the years after the laws went into effect. Wintemute concluded that the laws were ineffective because people ignored them and, in some cases, county sheriffs weren’t enforcing them.Moreover, results from other states with universal background checks are mixed. Illinois and Maryland, both of which require checks on every sale outside of immediate family, consistently report some of the highest homicide rates in the nation. Washington, D.C. is at the top or near the top every year.The thing is that I am not afraid of a background check: I am concerned about what will happen when they continue to prove to be worthless.