U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “An Alexandria nonprofit is working to get every state to improve its background checks on gun purchasers, and Democratic lawmakers are taking notice,” a sympathetic ALXNow promotional piece masked as a news report asserts. “Safer Country was founded in 2019 by Alexandria attorney Paul Alan Friedman with the mission of taking firearms away from dangerous people. Friedman said that progress was made in the general assembly’s last session, but there is a ways to go.”
Naturally “Democrat lawmakers are taking notice.” It’s not like they have any real solutions to catastrophic problems resulting from their policies, so blaming guns is a surefire way to divert the public’s attention and increase the power of the state.
A quick look at the Safer Country “leadership” tells us much. Executive Director Friedman “was elected to serve as a Joe Biden Delegate,” and President Boyd Walker “was a Delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is a former member of the Alexandria Democratic Committee Executive Board.” Is this where we call in the ETrade Baby?
And naturally, they’re asking for money. The group only got its IRS ruling in 2019, so no financial data is available yet to look at
It’s very name though, is a denial of reality, meaning the promise of a safer country through infringement of the right to keep and bear arms is not possible, as well as a direct contradiction of the Founders’ wisdom. What Friedman and his kind never seem to grok (or do, but admitting it would spoil the trick) is that the problem is with “dangerous people.”
We know that anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian. It’s not just a saying, it’s true. Not that “the law” keeps anyone determined to get a gun from doing so, as weekend homicide stats from Chicago or Baltimore continually remind us. And remember that mass killings that racked up the highest death tolls, 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Happyland Dance Club fire, were all committed without guns. Of relevance, author Robert J. Kukla made an astute observation in his 1973 classic, Gun Control, equating the release of the chronically violent from prison with opening the cage of a man-eating tiger and expecting a different result.
Citizen disarmament fanatics like those at Safer Country would compel loss of rights without due process, and the only ones who would comply would be the “law-abiding.” And as prohibition attempts have shown us, it only makes things more lucrative for Capones and cartels to seize and control black markets with deadly ruthlessness – that and further incentivize government corruption.
Background check prior restraints (that’s what they are) are a misdirection from true goals anyway. The gun-grabbers are well aware of a report from DOJ’s National Institute of Justice that concluded:
“Effectiveness depends on the ability to reduce straw purchasing, requiring gun registration…”
The “experts” agree. Unable to show a reduction in so-called “gun violence” in the most restrictive states, those who couldn’t fudge the data enough to get the results they want now say we need to expand the disarmed citizen pool with “age” restrictions, and have the government permit and license a “privilege” to even own a gun. Gee, I wonder where that door leads.
And what can government do – without true due process – once it has registration lists? (Yes, the president’s backtracking on this has not escaped me. He at least has the motivation to be “persuaded.”)
If the grabbers were really serious about using background checks to prevent “legal” gun transfers and had no ulterior motives, they’d be advocating for something like BIDS, the Blind Identification Data System:
“In BIDS, the word ‘blind’ refers to the fact that the government cannot detect who is attempting to buy or has bought a firearm and thus cannot add this person’s name to a registry of gun owners. Nor can gun dealers randomly view a list of persons who have been denied the right to buy, own, and use firearms.”
While there’s no denying that BIDS would greatly reduce the risk of confiscations, I won’t endorse it. It’s still a prior restraint.
That said, here’s where BIDS could prove a very useful tool to expose the antis and what they’re really after: If the “commonsense gun safety law groups” truly only want background checks, why would they not promote a system like BIDS, which creates none of the potential registration dangers that create such strong gun owner opposition? So the question for anti-gun groups pushing “background check” edicts is “Why not BIDS?” After all, they say the reason they want background checks is to stop dangerous people from buying guns.
As usual, they’re lying.
The truth is in the forum poster graphic, above. Democrats and their apparatchiks intend to use such edicts to, in their own words, “remove guns from people who are believed to pose an extreme risk…” In other words, they haven’t even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted, or removed to where they can harm no one.
One great thing about this country: You can believe in just about anything. But that doesn’t give you the right to impose those beliefs on others and to lay claim to rights that aren’t yours to give or to deny. The wrongness of this is probably nowhere better illustrated than by the words of an insane tyrant in Lewis Carroll’s absurdist classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first — verdict afterwards.’”
They would impose such madness on their countrymen under the force of arms and con us into believing doing so makes us all safer.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.