Bad part of law remains bad law

Published 3:46 pm Friday, June 19, 2015

Your editorial, “Background checks save lives” cites a study claiming to support the title thesis. Perhaps.

Your claim that this vindicates I-594 evades the issue.

Not one of the many letters opposing I-594 that I read or wrote objected to making sure that gun buyers could pass a background check. I proposed such a law in a commentary published on this page two years ago, albeit in a more practical form and without creating a gun registry.

The legal challenge to I-594 did not challenge background checks for gun sales; it challenged a requirement for background checks for loans or “transfers” so broadly written that thousands of innocent or benevolent acts are defined as felonies.

Examples: If your friend confides suicidal thoughts, or is suddenly deployed overseas and you offer to store her guns, without looking up an FFL and passing a NICS check for each transaction, a process which can take days: you and your friend are both felons. Show a novice how to safely unload: ditto.

This section is so egregious that nobody enforces it — yet. Ironically, its egregiousness allows I-594 to survive: the court will not hear a challenge until the law is enforced.

An unenforced bad law is still a bad and dangerous law, and these provisions were written to advance the Left’s war against private gun owners — a very real war, further evidenced by their instantly seizing the recent mass shooting in another “gun free zone” in South Carolina as cover for renewed attacks.

John R. Alberti

Everett