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Child Safety Locks and NICS Checks
April 2007
Child safety locks, and NICS checks. I know what you're thinking - "Think of the Children!" and "Prevent Criminals from Owning Guns!". Not quite.
I paid a large, undisclosed sum of money for my top-of-the-line gun safe,
to protect my firearms from my children (and theft). In spite of this,
the government forces me to pay the manufacturer an extra couple of
bucks to buy a safety lock with every firearm I purchase.
Not only is this an excess and unreasonable fee imposed by our
government, but it also gives dumber parents the false sense of security
that a lock is as good as a safe, and can keep your kid from doing something
stupid.
A 5-year old doesn't have the strength to rack most firearms. In fact,
my wife can't rack some of my pistols. Locks certainly aren't going to stop
teenagers who want to shoot up their school. So who exactly do
trigger locks protect? It only protects the parent, by giving them
deniable plausability - allowing them to continue to be irresponsible with
their firearms and let off the hook when their idiot-parent "my kids are
good kids" philosophy caves in. In other words, child safety locks
turns "I was a stupid parent" into "he just fell in with the bad crowd".
And what of accidents? Most accidents involving unintended discharges you hear about occur in
crack-houses with doped out parents and chambered firearms sitting on the
floor. You're asking too much if you expect a druggie will use the lock
anyway.
Locks don't do nearly as much, in fact, as educating your kids about firearms. My kids have toy cap guns, but they know never to point it at someone. They
also know just how scary and dangerous a real gun can be, because I've let them shoot one (under supervision). That knowledge is far more valuable than a kid lock, just as having burned your hand on the stove can be more valuable.
On to NICS checks. NICS is a background check system which basically
forces people to prove they have a "right to keep and bear arms" by doing
a background check. What's wrong with this? Well for one, there shouldn't
be people walking around on our streets who don't have a right to
keep and bear arms. They should still be locked up..
The other problem is that NICS checks are an illusion that gives us the
false sense that criminals (and other people who aren't permitted to own
firearms) don't. In reality, only about 1-2% or so of all NICS checks turn
out to be denials (these are based on McCarthy's own numbers), and most of
them are smart enough to go and buy a firearm illegally.
I'm all for preventing illegal immigrants, psychotic people, and terrorists
from owning firearms in this country, but NICS is a money sink-hole that
doesn't solve the bigger problem. Bigger problem being that we let these
people into our country in the first place, through the borders
- or out of jail when we don't trust they're rehabilitated enough to own a
firearm (we should be giving all violent offenders a psych eval before letting them out). Where in the constitution did it say that criminal who have
served their time and payed their debt to society no longer deserve the
right to be able to defend themselves? That is, unless they're still unstable.
So now we're making laws based on
the prediction that such people will commit another crime. How sick is
that?
McCarthy wants to sink another $125 million into a more aggressive NICS system over the next several years.
There are plenty of valid ways to deal with the problem of people who
shouldn't have a firearm. These include much more severe penalties for
illegal posession rather than NICS checks. In other words, let people
buy guns through the Sears catalog again, like it used to be, but if you
are caught owning one when you're prohibited, make it a mandatory 10
year prison stretch. How about fixing our borders too while we're at it,
so that the illegal Mexicans committing some of the most heinous crimes
in our country are back where they belong. This would cut our prison
load by 1/3. And speaking of prison, have a prison system with tighter
parole controls so that we're not letting people out who really have no
business being out.
I agree we don't want bad people to have guns, but the means are clearly
wrong. NICS checks violate our right against illegal search (and
sometimes seizure). On top of this, we don't actually see these real
results; as I said they are just an illusion, because we know the bad
guy can and will get guns whenever he wants, illegally.
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