Don’t believe everything you read about gun initiative I-594
Oct 9, 2014, 9:25 AM | Updated: Oct 12, 2014, 10:16 pm
If I-594 becomes law, virtually everyone purchasing a gun in Washington state would be required to go through a background check. (AP Photo)
(AP Photo)
Taken from Wednesday’s edition of the Jason Rantz Show.
The I-594 campaign is heating up and you’re starting to see more folks coming out talking about the importance of background checks because that’s what I-594 is centered around.
As you know, if I-594 becomes law, virtually everyone purchasing a gun in Washington state would be required to go through a background check.
Now, Ansel Hers over at “The Stranger” on Monday basically reprinted a press release turned into a puff piece to support I-594 – without much critical thinking. And Danny Westneat, on Wednesday, published his column in The Seattle Times that also promoted I-594, again sans much critical thinking.
This is what he wrote, and he did it in a very melodramatic way:
“When the husband and wife first met the stranger in a Chevron parking lot last year, he looked sketchy enough they had second thoughts about selling him their new semi-automatic assault rifle.
“He seemed like maybe he was a druggie, or one of those preppers,” the wife says.
He looked like “one of those end-of-the-world type guys,” the husband told federal investigators.
It turned out their instincts were right — John Christian Parks had an eight-felony-long rap sheet, for meth dealing and escaping from jail, and was developing paranoid, white-supremacist views. Still, the couple, who did not know who Parks was, sold him the gun for cash and later also sold him a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle — the same type of gun used in the Sandy Hook massacre.
“We had a bad feeling about it,” the wife told me this week. “But my husband and I are not criminals. We just sold him the gun. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
Now, by properly setting the stage that felons can buy guns like this, Westneat’s got you worried and looking for a solution. He goes on:
“These are exactly the types of gun sales that Initiative 594, the background-checks measure on the November ballot, is trying to stop. Instead of handing over an assault rifle to a stranger, the sellers would have been required to go with him to a gun shop and subject him to a background check.”
Required, unless they don’t. If I-594 passes, this couple could have done exactly what they did here because there’s no enforcement mechanism in place to stop people from selling guns to a stranger. It’s already illegal for a felon to buy a gun and for you or I to sell one to a felon.
“Presumably Parks would have failed or would have refused to do it. Either way the couple could not then have legally sold him the guns — and according to them, they wouldn’t have,” Westneat wrote.
So why not push a law that requires people to ask someone if they’re a felon before selling a gun? It still lacks the enforcement mechanism, but it does push this idea that you can’t sell to felons and you need to be hypersensitive to that. It’s about educating the gun-selling public, but doesn’t put the burden of having to go to a licensed dealer to sell the gun.
I’m not against background checks, at all. I’ll happily go through one to purchase a gun, but the problem I have with this bill, aside from the iffy language that I read to mean you can’t even loan a gun to a family member to use while out at a range or hunting, the problem I have is I-594 is overstating the meaningfulness of this initiative.
They want you to think that if you pass this, felons will have a harder time getting a gun, which is baseless. That someone who becomes a domestic abuser won’t be able to use a gun on their victim. Again, it’s baseless.
When I see an initiative overstating its effect and poo-pooing the criticism, two things are at work: 1) they’re lying to you to get your vote and/or 2) they’re lying to you about the purpose of the initiative and they might have ulterior motives.
Now, the folks behind I-594 and legislation like this, they don’t like guns. They want fewer guns in the hands of Americans, whether or not they’re a felon. They’re scared of guns and they fear guns, which are two emotions I certainly understand. But they want it harder for people to exercise their constitutionally-protected right to bear arms and so I look at I-594 through that lens and I notice how much harder it would be for me and you to get a gun if I-594 worked the way they say it would work.
You’d have to go to a dealer just to transfer a gun to a family member you know isn’t a felon? And on top of that, you have to pay for the background check. So in other words, you have to pay to exercise a constitutionally protected right. Typically progressives scream about that and rightfully so. They don’t like voter ID laws because you have to have an ID to vote and that costs money.
I have a simple solution: subsidize it.
Taken from Wednesday’s edition of the Jason Rantz Show.
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