Manchin & Toomey Reporting Deal Reached On Expanded Background Checks

Opinion

AmmoLand Gun News
AmmoLand Gun News

Manasquan, NJ –-(Ammoland.com)- Word just released this morning is that Sen Joe Manchin (Va-D) and Pat Toomey (PA-R) have as of this morning brokered a deal to expand the Federal Firearms Background Check System for firearms purchases.

Details remain sketchy, so we will have to wait to an announced 11 am press conference to learn more that is verifiable, but so far whats coming out is the deal covers all “commercial sales” of firearms, “ including at gun shows and over the internet” but will reportedly contain exemptions for family members, “relatives” and other limited and ambiguous subsets.

This deal is already being spun as being credited to the shameful exploitation of the Newtown Familes trip to DC on Air Force One yesterday.

While the specific language in the deal has yet to revealed and examined, we can take a stab at dissecting whats come out in the various press releases thus far, limited as that may be.

1) “Commercial Sales”. Commercial Sales, at least in the most elementary use of the English Language, refers or should refer to businesses that are regularly engaged in, as their primary source of income the sale of firearms. Something that already is, and has been a Federal Law since passage of the Brady Act in 1994. However, I strongly suspect that what will be discovered is that “commercial sales” will have intentionally been so broadly defined as to encompass as many transactions as possible.

Which is something we’ve seen before as well. During the Clinton Era, when the regulations regarding who could qualify and under what conditions for a Federally Issued ATF Dealers License were tightened to all but eliminate the ability for people to run a small firearms related business from their own homes, so called “kitchen table dealers”. The ATF changed the regulations on licensing dealers to an applicant having to have a “retail location” and “be primarily engaged in the business of selling firearms on a day to day basis”. This drove many much smaller dealers out of the business all together, as the overhead required to meet the new licensing requirement was simply not economically feasible. And driving those small, home based business owners out of the trade was the goal all along, just another in a seemingly endless array of plots, ploys , machinations and scheme’s to incrementally chip away at the availability of firearms and their accessories in a so called “free market” based economy.

Essentially bringing to life the old fable about the frog dropped into a pot of water without protest, while the heat is incrementally turned up until the water is boiling and the frog is cooked, having been blissfully unaware of the soon to be end until it was to late.

2) “Over the internet” . This always was an agenda driven meme’ put forth by Anti Gun Groups and the media. While a small fraction of people may in fact have been using current communications technology in order to facilitate bringing private buyers and sellers together, something that is done every day on billions of products, it was spun in the “news” to create the impression that people were simply hopping on-line, ordering up whatever weapons their heart desired and they were being shipped to their doorstep. The reality is far removed from the fantasy. The overwhelming majority of internet based sales were from the web pages of existing ATF Dealer Licensee’s, with brick and mortar retail locations, whose terms of sale required the firearms to be shipped to a “local to the buyer” ATF Licensed Dealer for the customer to pick up in person, and after completing the required Federal Instant Background Check.

3) “Gun Shows”. Another fabrication of the Anti Gun crowd and their enablers in the Congress and Media.

Since the Clinton Era, “gun shows” have regularly been described by those wanting to see them go the way of the dinosaurs as nothing so much as a totally unregulated “arms bizarre” like one would find in Third World Africa or South America. Using over the top rhetoric and emotion driven word play to paint a picture of gun shows being overwhelmingly populated by hordes of leering sociopaths, drug gangs and terrorists gleefully scooping up whatever they fancy with no oversight what-so-ever.

Again, the reality is completely removed from the picture painted by Anti Gun supporters. Multiple reports issued over the last 20 plus years by the ATF and DOJ have showed that roughly 1 to 3 percent of criminals had acquired their weapons at a gun show. The vast majority of gun show vendors were and always have been already Federally Licensed Firearms Dealers, who are still required to conduct the same background check at the show as they are in their retail location, and vendors of T-Shirts,other clothing, gun locks, safes and other accoutrements, books and literature, hunting accessories, and a veritable laundry list of other related products whose only dangerous feature was that their very existence scared people on the left side of the political spectrum.

The language in the current proposal is simply trying to accomplish the same thing that has always been the goal of the left, to shut down gun shows altogether. Not because they are the “anything goes” arms market Anti Gunners like to claim. No, the real reason is far more insidious

The reason Anti Gun Ideologues want to shut down gun shows altogether is because they know that gun shows are a public gathering place for large numbers of like minded, freedom loving people to get together, socialize, exchange information, promote their local gun club with membership drives, perhaps join the NRA and in many cases meet and talk with potential political candidates.

Its nothing more then an open and blatant attack on the 1st Amendment Right to Assemble and engage in Free Speech activities as well as an attack on the Second Amendment.

And as we’ve seen time and time again, the Political Left will attempt anything, anything they can think of and attempt to get away with, to silence, intimidate, marginalize, dehumanize, insult and crush their political foes and anyone that does not agree with their ideology at every opportunity.

More articles, commentary and information by D. Roberts available at That Every Man Be Armed.com

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Bill Baker

Great article, very accurate. Except for some face to face sales or when someone lists a used gun on craigslist for local face to face pickup, every sale already gets a background check. And let’s not leave out that lately with the climate in the air a lot of face to face sellers want people with concealed licenses since they are already checked out. The true number of non background checked sales has to be pathetically low, but unlike the dems making up bullshit numbers like their current ‘90% of people want universal background checks’ I won’t make up a… Read more »