Much Ado About Next To Nothing

The President released his list of Second Amendment constricting executive actions that he can take to strengthen gun control in this country.

The list has 23 actions on it, all of which he can put into motion by signing Executive Order.

Here is an article with the official list. There’s nothing earth shattering, but you should go read the article so you can a picture of the President signing the orders with stage props children of various ages plus the Vice President (but I repeat myself standing around him giving him a false air of gravitas.

Here is a blog post with a much snarkier than I could ever write commentary on the real meaning of impact of the President’s actions.

The most dangerous action to gun owners that I see is the proposal to incentivize police to run a “full background check” on the owners of weapons they seized. I’d hate to be so cynical as to suggest that it might incentivize police to seize firearms from people and then just never get around to running that background check. Speaking of which, I see not one thing about making the National Crime Information Center more accurate. Since it depends on humans from various agencies around the country to enter data it’s notoriously in accurate due to data entry errors. That in turn causes incorrect delays and denials when a person tries to buy a gun from a federally licensed dealer. Yet, this is the system that some people want to expand to require individual to individual sales to be processed through. The National Instants Criminal Background Check System (MICS) has been overburdened since the November election. I can think of no better way to slow down firearms sales than to require background check and then underfund the system that performs them. Then add redundant checks on people who have guns “seized” by the police.

The system will grind to a halt, which would be a feature not a bug to the President.

In other news, it’s pretty clear that Congress is not going to pass any substantial changes to current federal firearms laws unless there is some drastic sentiment change among the majority of Americans.

Which is not to say that some states won’t be like New York and pass legislation that furthers their anti gun agenda and has absolutely nothing to do with preventing crimes such as the murders at Sandy Hook. It will be interesting to see if that New York law passes Constitutional muster in the federal courts.

Just politicians being politicians I guess. They just can’t resist the urge to do something especially if it’s something that looks good but actually does nothing at all.