General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A message to those who wish to ban or restrict guns: Give up. [View all]Lizzie Poppet
(10,164 posts)Moreover, the majority of gun owners wholeheartedly support them. Private sales are a current loophole, but that's not a matter of lack of support for extending the background check system to private sales, but one of the significant work and expense of creating a support infrastructure to enable them to occur (and, to some degree, of the difficulty of anything resembling effective enforcement).
Mind you, background checks seldom catch actual criminals attempting to buy guns. To even attempt such a purchase when you know full well that there will be a background check would be remarkably stupid, even by criminal standards. But it does weed out the really dim ones, and that's a good thing.
For my part, I'd like to see a much more extensive tie-in of mental healthcare records to the background check system, and a carefully considered expansion of the mental health-based criteria for denial (currently limited to persons "adjudicated mentally defective" . I mean, we're denying people access to air travel on what are often spurious grounds because we can't get over our post-9/11 hysteria after more than a decade...surely we can be a bit more cautious about the mentally ill buying firearms.