Why NRA is Nuts to Expand Background Checks

GUN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS OPPOSED TO NICS

Perhaps Chris Cox and NRA leadership need their heads checked, as they are walking in lockstep with notorious anti-gun Democrats in congress on this issue. Their PR machine is revving up to sell NICS and its continued expansion to NRA members packaged as a reasonable way to stop the insane from buying handguns.

But Cox is divisively out of accord with most gun owners and most other national and state gun rights organizations in our nation — and in our view willfully neglecting the wishes of NRA members who want to preserve, rather than destroy, the Second Amendment. In our opinion, NRA leadership’s support of NICS is almost certainly out of touch with the views of NRA members who, upon hearing the truth about this issue, will see NICS as the proverbial “Emperor with no clothes” that it is — compelling them to oppose it vehemently.

“Calling NICS a background check is simply a deception: the Brady system is an elaborate scheme to register gun owners,” said Dudley Brown, Executive Director of the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) “And it’s the foothold the gun-grabbers need to enact even further restrictions on our Second Amendment rights.”Asking permission for a right — which is what the Brady Registration Check does — turns it into a government-administered privilege. How any ‘gun rights group’ could support it, or its expansion, is beyond me,” Brown said.[5]

In addition to national gun groups like NAGR and GOA opposing the NICS mental health expansion, Wisconsin Gun Owners, Inc. (WGO) is unified with other state no compromise gun rights groups in our opposition. “The NRA will open a can of worms about what mental health is and who gets to decide who is mentally ill,” said Ken Rineer, President of Gun Owners of Arizona. “In today’s ‘politically correct’ society, do you really want a single judge deciding your mental competence to own a firearm? What is mental illness? Is it someone who is depressed and on meds? Our courts are not friendly to those who wish to own firearms and I would not want my right to own one left to a single person wearing a black robe!”

New Hampshire gun owners killed a similar piece of legislation to the one Wisconsin State Senator Alberta Darling intends to foist upon us Badger State gun owners. “The bill in question was a blanket gun ban for anyone who had gone to a shrink for any reason,” wrote Alan Rice, Treasurer of the New Hampshire Firearms Coalition. “The definition and diagnosis of mental illness is so subjective.”

CONCLUSION

Expanding the National Instant Check System is wrong for gun owners and dangerous for everyone else. We’re the ones who are insane if we think the subjective field of diagnostic psychiatrics can be trusted to accurately define or diagnose mental illness in the first place. Once that dangerous premise is established, linking these spurious diagnoses with a federalized database scheme that trumps due process will only lead to more injustice for gun owners while criminals continue to subvert the system. Indeed, if we expand NICS to subsume all our private medical records into a state and national gun owner database, we gun owners aren’t just nuts — we’ve completely lost our minds.

Corey Graff is the Executive Director of Wisconsin Gun Owners (WGO).

OBJECTIONS TO NICS OPPOSITION REFUTED

OBJECTION: Even though criminals and mentally-defective individuals will avoid NICS to get their guns, since we have the system in place shouldn’t we try to improve it? Shouldn’t we try to stop the mentally ill from buying guns?

RESPONSE: You just answered your own question, tacitly admitting that a diagnosis of mental illness will not necessarily prevent that individual from getting around the NICS system, thus conceding the worthlessness of NICS in the first place. How could a mentally-ill person buying a gun outside of a background check system use that gun to commit a crime if they are surrounded at all times by competent citizens with guns who know how to defend themselves? An armed society is a polite society. Gun control doesn’t prevent crime, it facilitates it. The question you should be asking is, why have we disarmed our competent citizens to begin with?

OBJECTION: Without the National Instant Check System, criminals could legally buy guns. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence claims that since its inception in 1994, NICS has stopped “more than 600,000 criminals and other prohibited people from purchasing firearms from FFLs.”[6]

RESPONSE: “The most comprehensive study of the Brady Act finds the law has not cut handgun killings.In fact, the law’s main result is increased violence against women… ‘We weren’t able to see any effect on the homicide rate,’ study author Philip Cook told UPI Tuesday. ‘In retrospect we would not expect Brady to be effective against violent crime. Increasingly homicides are committed by career criminals who do not get their guns in legal ways,’ said the Duke University researcher.”[7]

OBJECTION: NRA supports NICS and its expansion. If you’re opposed to this ‘reasonable’ measure, does that mean you want someone diagnosed with severe schizophrenic disorder to be able to buy a handgun?

RESPONSE: We don’t want schizophrenics to buy handguns, and that’s not the issue. We want a localized court of law to make that determination on a case by case basis through objective analysis and diagnosis — to ensure the person’s due process is upheld. NRA leadership appears to have lost their marbles — standing shoulder to shoulder with anti-gun Democrats to expand an unconstitutional gun control law they themselves know by their own arguments can and will be subverted by those “adjudicated mentally defective” who are intent on committing a crime.

If you’re tired of the broken system of compromise and access — a system which has netted gun owners only more gun control — we urge you to Join Wisconsin Gun Owners today!

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