Democrats and Their Imaginary Gun ‘Loopholes’

 
By DAVID HARSANYI

These are almost always euphemisms used by Democrats defending laws they wish existed but do not.Y

Yesterday, the National Shooting Sports Foundation obtained an email from Ashleigh Wilson, legislative director and counsel to House majority whip James Clyburn, urging congressional colleagues to co-sponsor to “The Enhanced Background Check Act.”

The bill, which will likely move forward without any debates, hearings, or mark-ups, is ostensibly meant to close the so-called “Charleston Loophole.”

Here is how Wilson describes it:

Today, Whip Clyburn will be re-introducing the Enhanced Background Check Act of 2021 which will narrow the “Charleston Loophole,” that allows individuals to purchase firearms prior to an approval of their background check. This loophole enabled the gunman who took the lives of nine parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina to purchase a firearm to commit this horrendous act.

This is highly misleading. In 2015, the New York Times asserted that those “conducting the background check did not have access to that police report,” a framing that would soon dominate media coverage. In reality, local prosecutors had failed to respond to the FBI’s request for information about Dylann Roof’s case. It was a case of human error, or perhaps negligence, but that doesn’t make it a “loophole.” No ambiguity or inadequacy exists in the law simply because a mistake has undermined it. The FBI is empowered to retrieve a gun after it notices an error was made. If it fails to follow up, that’s a law-enforcement problem.

“This common-sense legislation extends the time allowed for the completion of a background check for firearm sales from three days to ten days, giving the FBI time to completely process each check,” Clyburn explains. (Of course, if it were “common-sense,” he wouldn’t need to tell us.) The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) processed more background checks this year than any year in history — and it wasn’t even close. The FBI doesn’t need ten days to run those checks, and it didn’t need ten days in 2015, either. Rather, it needed states and localities to enter criminal-possession charges into its system.

The three-day provision exists to ensure that the government — the same government that was home, for instance, to Lois Lerner’s IRS — does not begin arbitrarily delaying Americans the chance to use their Second Amendment rights. Indeed, it was explicitly written into the law for that purpose. Clyburn’s bill, as is the case with all gun-control measures these days, would primarily target lawful people — such as churchgoers who want to protect themselves and other parishioners — and make it more difficult or more time-consuming for them to own guns, while doing nothing of consequence to the people who already ignore the law.

In all likelihood, the bill won’t pass the Senate. Like many others, it is designed to be a political cudgel. But this does not make it harmless. A few years ago, Democrats championed a bill that would have stripped citizens placed on secret government “no-fly lists” of their Second Amendment rights without probable cause or due process, purely so they could ask: Why do Republicans want terrorists to have guns!? Earlier this year, a House bill sought to require every gun owner to undergo a psychological examination, so that Democrats can ask: Why do Republicans want the mentally ill to own guns!? Both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have promised to turn millions of Americans into criminals by making the AR-15 — a highly popular weapon that is rarely ever used in crimes — illegal, so that Democrats can ask: Why do Republicans want people to have “weapons of war”!? Do these measures improve, or worsen, our political culture and our respect for constitutional norms?

A lot of our debate over gun control is predicated upon myth.

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