About those universal background checks ...

After the recent mass shootings, universal background checks for gun purchases are again front and center. The media always make it appear as if there are powerful forces preventing legislation for these from ever getting passed in Congress and signed into law. 

Actually, almost nobody is opposed to background checks for gun purchases. 

Even the oft-loathed NRA has supported these for decades.  As a gun owner, I’m not opposed, nor is anyone else I know who also owns guns. We’re all in favor of them. No responsible gun owner – the overwhelming majority – wants a crazy or violent person to get a gun.  

The problem is these checks won’t always prevent someone who shouldn’t have a gun – the psychotic, the mentally unstable, those prone to extreme violence, and even some juveniles with criminal records – from getting one.  At least not in today’s environment of political correctness. 

Not because the premise of universal background checks is bad.  No, it’s because the data that would rule these people out are often intentionally withheld to comply with a variety of laws and policies designed to protect the privacy of individuals, and especially juveniles.

HIPAA routinely prevents licensed medical professionals – and insurance companies – from disclosing medical conditions and sharing treatment records of a patient with anyone else, even another medical professional, unless the patient or legal guardian consents in writing. What makes anyone believe these would now be part of a background check database?  

Many schools and local police departments, as in Broward County where the Parkland shooter lived, have policies intended to avoid putting juveniles in the system unless he or she causes serious bodily harm to another. Then, in many states and cities, the criminal records of juveniles are sealed by the courts and not accessible; in some places, barring another conviction, those same records are later expunged. Essentially like they never happened.      

In short, the kind of data that might be useful in a background check database to see if someone shouldn’t be allowed to purchase a gun simply won’t be there. 

However well-meaning those laws and policies may be, these severely limit access to the type of information that might have kept guns out of the hands of disturbed individuals.

If we want this information in a national database, we’d have to sacrifice some personal liberties. We’d have to agree as a nation that there are limits to anyone’s privacy, raising the question of who decides what constitutes a warranted invasion of privacy and when.  And the dicier issue of what constitutes protected speech, and when is something posing imminent danger.

Some states are already wrestling with this.

Florida has something called the Baker Act which allows for the temporary involuntary commitment by family or friends of someone deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. There is also new consideration among other states of so-called “red flag” laws which would allow authorities to take guns from those who might use these to harm themselves or others. 

While these seem to make common sense, there are flaws in them, too; fundamental ones that will surely be exploited by civil libertarians and smart lawyers. They violate due process, for one. There’s the Fourth Amendment prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, too. Then there’s the Second Amendment, of course. 

More to the point, in this country it would set a dangerous precedent to deny basic rights to anyone based on what they think, what they might do, or what they say:  you can only do that after they’ve done something. If we start incarcerating, committing, or taking away other rights merely based on a hunch or a grudge by someone, we’re opening up a terrible can of worms.

And granting law enforcement the right to take away someone’s rights based solely on a person’s thoughts and speech is truly scary: that’s police state stuff.   

There's nothing wrong with legislating universal background checks to purchase a gun. Expanding checks to include gun buyers at gun shows and guns bought privately from another owner – which is what’s on the table – probably won’t make much of a difference, though. 

I doubt these will accomplish as much as their rabid supporters promise, mostly because the data still won’t be there unless key laws are changed.  And that’s not going to happen anytime soon. 

Once even the most ardent supporters realize they might be opening a Pandora’s Box – by giving government the right to monitor and track an individual’s most personal data – many will reconsider. After all, do they trust the government to collect and manage their most intimate and personal data, and protect it from unauthorized disclosure?

This is the NSA snooping on steroids. We all know how vulnerable that data was to hacking.  We also know that hackers routinely get into bank and credit card files.  Imagine how valuable the data in this database would be. 

So what’s the solution?

How do we stop crazies from getting guns and committing mass murder?

The honest answer is we can’t.  Anyone who says otherwise is lying. You can’t prove a negative hypothesis – that something will never happen.  

In a population of about 330 million, we’ve had 3-4 mass shootings a year at most, which by any measure is extraordinarily rare. That’s not to minimize the horror of each, but for perspective when politicians and gun-control advocates talk about abridging the rights of millions of law-abiding citizens to prevent these.    

The best hope we have is to find a way to stop people from wanting to commit such heinous acts.  We need to prevent them from becoming perverse celebrities; we need to cut off the social media oxygen they use to fuel their demented fantasies and rewards them with notoriety.

Until we accomplish that, we’re essentially screwed.