“Universal background checks” could unjustly deny millions of people the right to armed self-defense.
“The single most important thing we can do to prevent gun violence and mass shootings,” President Obama said last week, “is to make sure those who would commit acts of violence cannot get access to guns.” Toward that end, he wants to require background checks not just for sales by federally licensed firearms dealers (as under current law) but for all gun transfers except those between relatives.
This idea seems to be the most popular of Obama’s gun control proposals, supported by nine out of 10 respondents in a recent CBS News poll. Yet it is unlikely to stop mass shootings, and enforcing it would require the sort of surveillance that has long been anathema to defenders of the Second Amendment, exposing millions of peaceful people to the threat of gun confiscation and criminal prosecution.
Although an expanded background check requirement is ostensibly a response to last month’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, it would not have stopped the gunman in that attack, who used firearms legally purchased by his mother. Even if he had tried to buy guns, it seems he would have passed a background check because he did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record.
That is typically the case in mass shootings, observesNortheastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. And if they could not pass a background check, Fox says, ”mass killers could always find an alternative way of securing the needed weaponry, even if they had to steal from family members or friends.”
CONTINUED at Reason. Written by Jacob Sullum.
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