Part VI: To NICS, Or Not To NICS?
January 15, 2003
2:46 PM CST
There seems to be some confusion about my position on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the “instant-check” system handled by the FBI, and originally spawned by that Tool of Satan, the “Brady Bill 2.”
Here’s why I don’t support it in its current format, and why I would support it in a better format.
Given that we don’t want convicted felons to be able to buy a gun (and I’m not going to argue about that one), it seems reasonable that there should be a background check when someone attempts to buy a gun from a registered gun dealer.
The way it should work is that the stupid FBI [Redundancy Alert] should have on their silly little database a list of all convicted felons, and only convicted felons* (supplied by the various states)—so when someone’s name is called in by a dealer, the check is what we database geeks refer to as a “null check”—the onus is on the FBI to prove that the name being referred to should not be allowed to buy a gun. And this is done by their answering a simple “yes” or “no” to one question: “Is this name on your list of felons?” If the answer is “yes”, the sale is denied, and all sorts of shit can hit the fan. If the answer is “no” (which it will be about 99% of the time), then the sale goes through, and no record of that call may be kept by the FBI.
In this way, the onus is on the state concerned, and on the FBI, to ensure that the list of Bad Guys is kept up to date. If the state screws up, or the FBI, then it’s not the fault of the dealer for processing the sale. (The onus should always be on government to prove their case, not on the citizen to prove his worthiness.)
And finally, the check has to happen within 3 minutes, which is how long any simply database check should take, or else the transaction should be allowed, by default—I refuse to allow Government to hide behind “the system’s down” bullshit—and they can fix/update the system during the night, when no transactions take place anyway. The current default is three days, which is total bullshit. And I refuse to accept the “volume of traffic” excuse, either: a typical Visa card issuer processes well over a million transactions a day—you’d think the FBI could handle a few lousy thousand.
That’s not how the system works now, of course, which is why I think that NICS (and its proponents) should be tossed into a garbage compactor.
* “convicted felons” does not mean “anyone the court feels like.” If a man has a restraining order against his ex-wife (the most common example), he has not been convicted of any crime, and there is no reason to deny him the purchase of a gun. If he shoots her, of course, he gets either a looooooong prison sentence (if she’s wounded) or else the Big Sleep (if he kills her). But our Constitution does not contain any mention of “prior restraint” or “the precautionary principle”. We do not take away people’s rights because of what they “might” do.
