MILESFORTIS

‘TL DR”, No.

But other research has found different outcomes. The state of California has had a comprehensive background check law on the books for 10 years. Researchers at UC Davis School of Medicine have studied gun violence in CA during that period and found there was no change in the number of gun homicides or gun suicides. The researchers use the term “comprehensive background check” instead of universal background check. And another study by the same authors found that the repeal of comprehensive background check laws in Tennessee and Indiana had no effect on gun homicides or suicide rates in either state.

Do Universal Background Checks Prevent Gun Violence?

Under current federal law, licensed dealers are required to run background checks on all gun purchases prior to making sales. But this law does not apply to private gun transactions between individuals either in person or online, potentially providing a “loophole” for prohibited persons to legally obtain firearms. While polls show widespread support for universal background checks, there is mixed evidence that requiring UBCs for all gun sales would prevent or reduce gun violence….

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You want to defund the police? You have to let the people have guns.

House Resolution 1013: Resolving that jurisdictions seeking to dismantle or reduce funding for the jurisdiction’s police force should not unduly burden residents who seek to defend themselves.

Russ Fulcher R-Idaho:

Resolving that jurisdictions seeking to dismantle or reduce funding for the jurisdiction’s police force should not unduly burden residents who seek to defend themselves.

Whereas the killing of George Floyd was a horrific and despicable act;

Whereas racism in any form is wrong and should not be tolerated;

Whereas adequate and accountable police departments are vital to helping people to defend themselves and their property; and

Whereas the right to defend oneself is a God-given natural right enshrined in the Constitution and upheld in English common law and recent Supreme Court cases: Now, therefore, be it that –

(1) any jurisdiction in the United States, which seeks to dismantle or reduce funding for a police force, should undertake a review of its local rules to ensure such rules do not place an undue burden on its residents who seek to defend themselves, including the legal purchase of a firearm and any training services such individuals choose;

(2) such a review should be based on the standards set forth by the Supreme Court in the cases District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, which confirmed the Second Amendment to the Constitution to be an individual right and that no law can prohibit an individual from possessing and using a firearm in the home for self-defense; and

(3) any jurisdiction which seeks to dismantle or reduce funding for police agencies must ensure they remove rules that hinder individual gun ownership or access to firearms.

Black and White Americans are embracing the Second Amendment

The gun control crowd isn’t having a good year.

Americans have been buying firearms at a phenomenal pace. From January through May, the FBI conducted 15.2 million background checks on people purchasing guns through licensed dealers — an increase of 3.7 million over the number of background checks during the same period last year. First-time buyers have accounted for an estimated 40 percent of gun purchases in 2020, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation — and of those new gun owners, 40 percent have been women.

For months, news accounts have reported on the nationwide surge in gun sales. The soaring demand for guns has led in turn to soaring prices for gun stocks. Shares of firearms manufacturers like Smith & Wesson and Ruger have sharply outpaced the broader stock market.

All this was happening before Americans learned about Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police offier who killed George Floyd on May 25, or saw the video of Gregory and Travis McMichael, the two Georgia men — one an ex-cop — who gunned down Ahmaud Arbery after seeing him jog past their home. Black Americans in particular have been getting a pointed lesson in the value of their Second Amendment right to bear arms, and translating that lesson into action.

Hence the “explosion in the number of Black gun owners nationwide,” as David Dent reports in The Daily Beast. The National African American Gun Association, which began in 2015 with a single chapter in Atlanta, now comprises more than 100 chapters with 40,000 members — 10,000 of whom joined within the past five months.

They include not only recreational shooters, but new owners like Iesha Williams, a young mother who, Dent writes, was persuaded by recent events to acquire a gun “as a form of protection against racial violence.” Black gun ownership is as essential today as it was in 1892, when Ida B. Wells wrote that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

The gun-control lobby, which includes a vast swath of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party’s leadership, has for years sought to make it harder for ordinary Americans to acquire guns and insisted that firearms in private hands pose an intolerable risk. “Hell, yes!” declared an impassioned Beto O’Rourke last September during a Democratic presidential primary debate. “We’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.” The partisan audience roared its approval, but O’Rourke’s candidacy expired six weeks later.

Millions of Americans instinctively grasp that private ownership of guns makes them safer. But advocates of more gun control never see it that way. When Michael Bloomberg was asked in January about a Texas church where a massacre was aborted when a 71-year-old parishioner shot and killed the gunman, his response was that guns are for police. “It’s the job of law enforcement to have guns and to decide when to shoot,” said Bloomberg. “You just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place.”

Only cops should have guns and decide when to shoot? Try telling that to the families of Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Botham Jean, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Michael Dean, and Walter Scott, all of whom were killed when cops — whether from recklessness, incompetence, or racism — decided to shoot.

Of course the great majority of cops are neither racists nor thugs. But even the most dedicated police officers cannot always be there to provide protection when it is needed. The Second Amendment exists in part for just that purpose, as persecuted minorities have had good reason to know.

The denial of the right to own weapons reinforced the racial repression of America’s first centuries. In its infamous Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court ruled that if African Americans were considered US citizens, the Second Amendment “would give to persons of the negro race … the right … to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Gun control’s racist roots run deep. Before the Civil War, a multiplicity of laws barred slaves from owning weapons and permitted free Blacks to do so only with a court’s approval. In the Jim Crow era, states found other ways to disarm Black Americans. They heavily taxed handgun sales, for example, or permitted pistols to be sold only to sheriffs and their deputies — a category that often included KKK terrorists.

“The Second Amendment is always revitalized when we feel threatened,” writes David Harsanyi in the current National Review. Between the Coronavirus pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the recent wave of riots and looting, this is an alarming moment in American life. Black and White Americans, millions of them, have chosen to meet the moment by arming themselves. The hoplophobes may disapprove, but this is what the Second Amendment is for.