Gun control from the old homestead

I’m sort of from the Seattle-Metro area, and I have family that still lives up there. So when I saw this article from the Seattle Post Intelligencer I was rather disappointed. Mind you, I’m not particularly surprised by the mayor’s actions, but still disappointed.

For those of you that don’t feel like wading through the article, the gist of it is that the mayor of Seattle is calling for more gun legislation. One of his hot-buttons apparently is the “gun-show loophole”, which is something that doesn’t actually exist.

Gun-grabbers claim that the gun-show loophole allows convicted felons and other naughty mans to go to as “assault weapons bazaar” and purchase firearms without an NICS background check or paperwork filled out by a dealer. The problem with this theory is that any gun dealer that actually has a Federal Firearms License is required by federal law to perform a background check on anyone purchasing firearms. Over the years, I’ve bought about a dozen guns at gun shows, and I’ve had an NICS check run on me every single time.

The only people that aren’t required to run a background check on a buyer are private sellers, i.e. if I sell my Ruger rifle to my best friend from high school I don’t have to run a background check on him. This might seem like a loophole, however most gun shows prohibit private sellers from selling firearms. I know that the local show that I usually attend doesn’t allow unlicensed entities to sell firearms; their reason is based both of federal law and for liability reasons.

The “gun show loophole” doesn’t need to be closed. Calls to close the loophole are most assuredly a less than clever beard for the gun grabber’s desire to eliminate gun shows in their entirety. Why these folks are so afraid of licensed business conducting a legal trade is something that I will probably never understand.