Named after a Republican assemblyman, supported by the NRA, passed by a 2/3 vote in a Democratic assembly & senate, and signed in by Ronald Reagan, all due to a group of Black Panthers protesting inside the capitol building while armed. Who knew all you needed was a racial incentive in order to make the stripping of rights a bipartisan effort.
Not anymore. The firearms community is more inclusive than it has ever been. We - and I obviously count myself among them - see the racial disparity in access to arms as a key component of our legal strategy to get those laws overturned.
Pretty much all gun control in the US is racist in its origins and usually in its modern implementation. "May issue" is a shining example of this.
When you say "Not anymore", that must have changed dramatically in the past 2 1/2 years. The NRA's silence in the Philando Castile case in 2017 was deafening.
The NRA does not represent the entire gun community by any means. The Second Amendment Foundation has a better reputation among 2A absolutists, for example.
Not even close... thanks to YouTube personalities like Colion Noir, white gun owners and black gun owners are on very very good terms.
There's a lot of black shooters at the ranges here in North Texas, and I'm happy to see them. Black people aren't my enemy - the ever encroaching desire of the state to strip us of what few freedoms we have left is.
More gun control is actually shockingly well supported. 83% of gun owners support universal background checks. Even 72% of NRA members support universal background checks.
It’s mostly just the NRA itself that doesn’t, and they control a lot of lobbying dollars. So universal background checks stay dead, despite massive bipartisan support.
The trick is that laws like this tend to contain certain types of other things that have nothing to do with the matter at hand.
A reasonable universal background check bill is not going to pass if it also comes bundled with things like red-flag laws or registries attached to them, which then leads to "but they won't compromise" from both sides of the aisle, so nothing gets done.
Or you get one side ramming something through which ends up defining "transfer" such that it actually criminalizes things like letting your kid shoot your gun even under supervision, which is very difficult not to see as an intentional act to degrade the culture of gun ownership merely because it is done by the people who constantly complain about the culture of gun ownership.
It's also a privacy concern if the system isn't set up properly; while countries like Switzerland have successfully mitigated those issues in the way they run their background checks, the difference between the average Swiss and the average American when it comes to gun politics (mandatory military service helps as does being a small nation) makes it more likely both sides of the issue aren't just going to try to screw each other over at the first opportunity.
Of course, the background check law is not one that is seldom if ever pursued (until it becomes politically expedient to do so), so maybe they should just enforce the law they do have instead of declaring the situation unworkable from the start?
> 83% of gun owners support universal background checks.
It's kind of like how everyone supports "better infrastructure" or "fixing healthcare" but people greatly differ on the implementation details.
We already have background checks for commercial sales. What people support is extending that to private sales but with the caveat that it preserve the privacy of private sales. When you start talking about requirements like recording serial numbers and keeping records (both of which are required for commercial sales) support drops massively.
We could have universal background checks. It's not the NRA that's standing in the way. It's the legislators that propose background checks in ways that ensure they are a backhanded means of creating a registry that ensure those bills are stillborn.
