Background Check

Welcome to California. Or more specifically, welcome to our future.

In California, we pass laws, and then later, we get more laws to do what the first laws would do, except they didn’t bother. This is what passes for progress. Our politicians pretend to solve problems by making laws, and then our legal system pretends to enforce the laws, and then when it becomes apparent that nothing has been done, or even tried to be done, and nothing was fixed with the laws, we get new laws to do what the others didn’t, and then repeat as necessary.

Yeah, I know. That’s what I thought. See, I can read your mind. And yeah, it is a scam. But sadly, it’s our scam.

Here’s the deal…this time.

California has had some laws for twenty years. These laws mandate stringent background checks to insure that when a criminal or crazy person tries to purchase a gun, the state won’t allow it. If you purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer, your background is checked for a criminal record or severe mental illness. Every time you choose to buy a gun, they check you again. This takes only a few minutes. You pay a fee for this service. If your background reflects crime in your past, you don’t pass and you cannot buy that gun. If you are the good law abiding citizen, you can.

Then you wait ten more days, which of course is meaningless but annoying, and if nobody materializes saying you shouldn’t have that gun, it’s yours.

We have laws that state if you try to buy a gun from your best friend who’s known you for decades, you still must jump through these same hoops. A licensed agent who oversees the transfer does your background check, and holds the gun for ten days. Buy a gun at a gun show…same deal. And again, you pay that fee for the service.

Your dad can give you a gun without a background check. I believe your grandfather can too. But if I’m not mistaken, you cannot give a gun to your brother without a background check. You know how brothers can be. Any other way you can think of, you must pass a background check to get a gun in California.

We have laws that say you cannot buy a gun for anyone else. You cannot sell or give a gun to a criminal or crazy person. And you must lock up your guns so criminals and crazy people cannot stumble across them. The California background check for firearm purchase has no loopholes, either real or imagined. It’s the best our politicians said they can do to protect us all from guns.

Oh, and there are many federal firearms laws that apply in California, laws that also prevent criminals from obtaining or possessing guns.

So, it should be just about impossible for a criminal or crazy person to get a gun in our state. The assumption here would be, no criminals with guns, no crime. Problem solved.

California keeps track of some things. And they make some guesses about other things they cannot really count. And now they are saying that a few guns have slipped through their impenetrable web of background checks and limits upon gun sales. And some people who aren’t allowed to have guns might have them. California confesses that it’s not quite a perfect system.

Not quite a perfect system.

California keeps track of a list of those people deemed guilty of violent crimes, various felonies, and those with restraining orders and also those mentally messed up enough that they’ve been told not to have guns. If these folks are on the list, they cannot pass a background check, so they cannot acquire firearms. The list, by the way, is something like 30,000 people large. This is a big state, and we have more than our share of criminals (despite all these laws) and crazy people, but yeah, that’s a large list.

According to the state of California, twenty thousand people on this list who are prohibited by law from possessing firearms, who cannot buy or be given a firearm, have firearms anyway. The state suggests that there are 40,000 guns in the hands of these people on their list of prohibited people. This doesn’t even count all the other criminals out there not yet on the list. Just the ones on the list. Problem solved?

So, ya see…don’t tell anyone, but this bunch of laws isn’t working all that well, if the goal here was keeping guns away from criminals. Therefore, of course, our politicians say we need more of the same laws to protect us all from the evil of guns. There are forty some suggestions for new laws working their way through the legislature now, all about more gun restrictions. That’s so we can make the same things illegal that we already made illegal. Makes sense to me. Anyway, that’s what we do in California. Let me know how much safer you feel.

There is a twist to this time around that I found interesting. The politician who sponsored our latest new law to pass is so happy about this one. Seems that all those times in the past decades when citizens submitted to a background check to purchase a firearm legally, and they passed, a record was kept. And now…”we have the technology” so some clever nerd can run the names of one million folks who have submitted to background checks, (and presumably purchased a legal firearm at some point in the past) and can then run those names against the list of prohibited folks, and if some match, well them puppies must own a gun illegally. Don’t know if that means all 20,000 people who the state thinks illegally possess a gun, which seems a bit of a stretch, (this would suggest that two thirds of all convicted criminals and crazy people once bought a legal firearm) but somebody wants us to believe this. My guess would be that most of these folks on the list didn’t buy their gun long ago, legally, but what do I know? If I’m right, those laws are even more worthless. Who’d want to admit this?

California has quietly been confiscating firearms using this information since 07, but because of lack of funding, only the slightest dent has been put in the “mountain of illegal guns on the street.” So if we could only afford, as the richest state in America, to hire a few more cops to chase down these folks, we could confiscate all those guns. Well, guess what the politician did…He just found the money to pay for this.

Ya see, we’ve been a bit broke around here since our politicians irresponsibly but enthusiastically spent way more than they had for some considerable time, and those chickens done come home to roost. So even though we knew we had 20,000 law breaking law breakers out there, we didn’t bother to find the resources to do anything about it. That’s pretty much the same story you get if you ask why the Feds haven’t managed to enforce their laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, either. For years and years. And years. We had money to spend on lots of other nonsense, but that is another essay. California did nothing about these criminals. And neither did our presidents’ men. (We don’t enforce the laws we already have, so of course we need more laws, and more restrictions on the citizens who don’t break the laws. Because our protectors, our state and federal government, don’t do their part. This works out so well for our politicians, that it’s almost as if this was done on purpose.

So, now we have the money to hire the cops to finally check the folks who once could legally purchase a gun, who now are on the list so they cannot, and we will presumably turn those cops loose to correct this oversight. Good for us. What could be wrong with this?

Can I make a list?

1)      The money they found to pay for this comes from the DROS fund. The DROS fund is that money we citizens have paid for the privilege of a background check in order to legally buy a firearm. It pays for the background check. Of course they charge far more than needed, which some wag might suggest is intended to discourage folks from buying guns, but I wander….Anyway, there is a surplus sitting in this fund, and the politician is gonna borrow a bit from this surplus, about $24 million, to pay for this new law. So the good law abiding citizen who followed the rules to purchase a firearm, and paid the freight for this, gets to pay for the time and trouble to arrest criminals for doing criminal things. Like it was our fault for all that criminal stuff all along.

2)      Some might wonder why this new law isn’t being paid for from the general fund, as if the entire population of our state was vested in keeping criminals from doing criminal things. But the general fund is running on fumes and shaky promises right now, and a tax increase would be needed, which ain’t gonna happen because even in California we are real sick and tired about our taxes already, and a two thirds majority won’t be happening. So why not steal from money already there? Ah ha!!! Problem solved.

3)      The whole notion that the law abiding folks should pay for the criminal behavior of some others, simply because some politicians cannot see ANY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LAW ABIDING GUN OWNERS AND CRIMINALS bothers me a bit. Sure…guns are the spawn of the devil and the mere passing of the image of a gun through the mind of a citizen will lead to the murder of children….oh hell. Never mind. Who can argue with logic like that?

4)      We are currently releasing THOUSANDS of California criminals from our California prisons because we got caught treating them like criminals instead of housing them in a spa with piped in essence of Myrth or whatever. Gotta be nice to criminals these days. My cops tell me that these released criminals are causing all kinda havoc again once they hit the street, which fits the usual theme. So I’m sitting here wondering where they plan on putting all these twenty thousand criminals with guns they aren’t supposed to have if we do actually catch that many. They cannot put them in our prisons. When the music stops, there won’t be near enough chairs. So what will they do with these folks after the cops risk their lives to capture them? Well…they will turn them loose, of course. Catch and release fishing; keeps the fishery healthy. After they confiscate their guns. Yep, that’s the word they use. Confiscate.

5)      Politicians lie. Regularly and often. They promise to protect us from crime, and then they tell us it is the guns and not the criminals we must fear. So after they confiscate their guns, they turn the criminals loose, no doubt reformed and ready to do their duty in society.

6)      Does it comfort me to know that the only laws that actually reduce crime rates are those laws that put criminals in jail for a while, and those laws that merely disarm the good people, without addressing the criminals, actually increase crime? And that the politician in question here would much rather inconvenience the good guys then the criminal, and I’m supposed to thank him for this? Can you spell messed up? Let’s see…C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A

7)      Does it comfort me to know that a politician thinks it is OK to CONFISCATE guns from criminals located by a REGISTRY of LEGAL gun purchases, when such a politician has never demonstrated that he can see any difference between the legal citizen’s constitutional right to own firearms, and the callous disregard for life and property demonstrated by criminals misusing guns? Ah, no…it does not. For this sets a dangerous precedent.

8)      The politician states that those 40,000 guns are “handguns and assault weapons” even though he has no clue if these folks on the list even own a gun, much less what version. He assumes we will concur that such guns as handguns and assault weapons are evil because of all that propaganda they’ve loosed on us over the years, despite the evidence and reality that no such evil attaches to them. And we are supposed to cheer him on as our savior, and presumably re-elect him forever. He is eagerly demonizing the weapon while discounting the criminal. He is starting with these evil firearms, and then the next firearm will become the next evil primed for a ban, and a new list will start. And just maybe, he’ll be confiscating that one shortly, for why not use the same database to locate the owners of the latest firearm made illegal by fiat? And that would of course include the (formerly) law abiding citizens.

9)      Do I wonder where all this might lead? Welcome to your future.