"Background Check" Charlatanry - Granite Grok

“Background Check” Charlatanry

“It seems to me sad when … you give a platform to the charlatans. It is doing great damage to the struggle. It sows confusion and uncertainty where there should be no confusion and uncertainty.” —Stephen Lewis

Rep. E. Elaine Andrews-Ahern with "Timmuh" Horrigan looking on.
Rep. E. Elaine Andrews-Ahern with “Timmuh” Horrigan looking on.

There is a bill right now in play. HB 1589and amended version. The bill seeks to require all firearms in this state to be sold or transferred through a licensed firearms dealer and provides for a criminal penalty for a violation.

Deception abounds. These folks use the word “background check” implying that all kinds of guns change hands in commerce without some kind of check in place.  Second, this bill and its sponsors, subtly imply through this bill that all gun owners possess some requisite criminal intent; Subterfuge for the trading in illegal guns. I am not going to use the words, “Background Check.” It is a phrase co-opted by anti-gun left and I reject it.   

In essence, this bill would require all firearms to be channeled through a licensed (Federal Firearms Licensed)FFL dealer in order to change ownership and possession. Yes, This bill would require that lending firearms to a friend would require processing through a NICS form 4473 porcess.  To lend a firearm to a friend for a deer hunting trip would require processing through NICS!  If I wanted to bequeath a substantial firearms collection to a close family friend, each and every firearm would require a NICS process.

The bill is insidious in that it opens the door to ancillary regulation and restriction in areas not exclusive to NICS processing, nor contemplated in our traditional use of firearms. Under the “exceptions” that is, those places where there would be lawful exceptions, this little new regulation is slipped in.  Page 4 Line 24 of the bill states,

(iii) that occurs at an established shooting range authorized by the governing body of the jurisdiction in which such range is located, provided the firearm is kept at such range during the entirety of the transfer.

If a landowner wants to invite some friends over for some shooting and can safely do so on privately owned land, this language suggests that the new law will have a mechanism to catch people illegally transferring firearms (handing it over to a friend to try) for no other reason than a Zoning board has not given its implicit blessing to discharge firearms on that parcel of land by deeming it a “shooting range”.

Aside from the bills content, there are the legislative findings that are a complete sham.  The bill starts off with,

“It has been estimated that 40 percent of all firearms are sold in the United States by unlicensed people.”

That “fact” comes from a nearly 20-year-old study conducted during the Clinton Administration  with a sample under 300before the implementation of NICS.

The rest of the information listed in the Legislative findings are from the whole cloth of the Brady campaign and Mayors against illegal guns. I am not going to detail here as it is so easy to cross reference.

What bothers me equally is the ignorance and stupidity of some advocating for this bill to be rendered dead. Today, our second amendment rights rely more than ever on truthful, accurate information, not from excited emotional utterances bloviated into a microphone by a well-meaning pro-second amendment enthusiast. Stop guessing! We do not have to guess. We do not have to pad our facts with favorable urban myths. The facts are on our side!

I heard a person recently defend non-NICS transfers taking place at Gun Shows saying they are only minimal. Indeed, some firearms are transferred without the NICS process, Antique Firearms. As defined in 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(16) the term “antique firearm” means  any firearm manufactured in or before 1898, And modern Muzzleloading firearms with the exception of those that accept interchangeable modern ammunition barrels.

Sale of contemporary and modern firearms simply do not happen. It is not legal.  N.H. RSA 159:10 states,

Any person who, without being licensed as herein provided, sells, advertises or exposes for sale, or has in his possession with intent to sell, pistols or revolvers shall be guilty of a class B felony if a natural person, or guilty of a felony if any other person.

What does that mean? I cannot sell a gun to my next door neighbor? No, it does not mean that. In 2004 we had a case, State v. Timothy Geddes where Justice Robert Lynn made the distinction.

“RSA 159 places no restrictions on the ability of private citizens to sell pistols and revolvers as long as this is not done with such frequency or regularity as to constitute a business.”

Point being, one simply cannot go to a gun show, set up a table and sell guns. One must be a licensed dealer.  RSA 159:8 III provides,

“No pistol, revolver, or other firearm shall be delivered to a purchaser not personally known to the seller or who does not present clear evidence of his identity; nor to a person who has been convicted of a felony.”

According to this law, any person who walks around with a gun to sell and sells it to simply anybody who happens by, is indeed, already breaking the law. Do some break the law? certainly, that is a fair assumption. But so do criminals who rob liquor stores with guns or nut jobs who shoot up movie theaters, schools and malls.

This “gun show loop hole? is an urban myth and term of art from the Kool-Aid slurping hoplophobes who want to ban guns.  Another pejorative made out of whole cloth.  There is no Gun Show loophole, there is no Internet loop hole.

New Hampshire has no specific law regarding a NICS process for gun shows because it simply in not needed. Dealers at Gun shows follow federal regulations and sell guns via 4473 NICS processing.  New Hampshire also has no specific body of law dealing specifically with machine guns and other firearms that fall into a class three NFA (National Firearms Act) category, despite the fact that many other states that do. The simple reason for that is that the Federal law adequately deals with those guns as well.

On Friday January 24, Politico.com rated New Hampshire the Number One state in America based on a study of  the Census Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI.  Other factors included high school graduation rates, per capita income, crime rates and life expectancy.  Indeed, the Granite State has very low crime rates reported in the face of so many people in this state buying, owning and carrying guns.

“Gun Crime.” There is no such thing as gun crime. this phrase “gun crime” is political buzz word crafted by the anti-second amendment charlatans on the left.  These are simply, “crimes.” When we see accounts of people killed with ball bats, we don’t call it “Baseball crime,” or, “Bat crime.”   Clearly, this current gun debate is not about fighting crime or preventing tragedy because this bill with all its draconian measures would not stop the killing sprees we’ve witnessed non-stop in the mainstream media.

You cannot go to a gun show and buy a gun without a 4473 NICS process. You cannot buy guns on the internet (legally) without 4473 from a local dealer of your choosing. Finally, there is no local data provided that would show any need whatsoever for this draconian law. Right now, despite overwhelming opposition to the passage of this bill, the sponsors and the committee are committed to seeing it to the house floor. This is a hill they intend to die on.

New Hampshire has always enjoyed a strong pro-second amendment culture and now we are doing battle with a bunch of outsiders sending in their people to monkey around in our state.

Make no mistake about it. while our legislators shamelessly exploited the parents of dead Children from Newton Connecticut to come here to New Hampshire and make us more like them, none of their speeches, arguments or assertions laid any factual groundwork for why such a law is necessary in the Granite State.

Now is the time to take ten minutes to go on nh.gov, find out who your legislator is and send them a message: Dear Representative: this law is dead, please ITL(inexpedient to Legislate) it.

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