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.
