Groveling on guns

Of all the laws enacted or proposed over the years to curb gun violence, the most sensible and arguably the most effective is the Brady Act, named for the White House press spokesman who was seriously wounded in the 1981 gun assault on then-President Reagan.

During its 10-year life, the law has blocked hundreds of thousands of gun sales to people barred by law from owning firearms -- felons, domestic abusers, mentally defective persons and those under court restraining orders.

The fact is, the Brady law (which provides for a background check on retail gun sales) will not successfully prevent any criminal from obtaining a firearm. It can only prevent criminals from obtaining firearms through a retail sales channel at best, and that's assuming the criminal is unwilling or unable to obtain a fake ID and use that to make the purchase. Criminals have an extensive black market in which they can acquire firearms.

The Brady law seems sure to survive. But a measure that has already passed the House and is now before the Senate could weaken it, by forcing the destruction of records of gun sales within 24 hours of purchase. The current holding period is 90 days, which allows the FBI time to cross-check for illicit sales. A survey last year by the General Accounting Office turned up 228 transactions during a six-month period that should have been blocked but were not.

Sponsors of the measure, and the Justice Department, say that reducing the holding period to 24 hours would protect the privacy of law-abiding people.

But not all gun buyers are law-abiding. And why should they have more privacy rights than people registering cars or dogs or holding a library card?

228 transactions, over 6 months, out of millions of transactions per year. Think about that. And while you do, remember that the 24 hour period applies to gun sales that are given the go-ahead -- that is, gun sales to law-abiding citizens. If the transaction is denied or delayed it can be retained. But once the check has come back clean, the sale can go forward legally -- and the records should be destroyed, rather than used as a de-facto gun registry.

And a "gun registry" is the correct term. Firearms are not like library books; they are not loaned out and then returned. They are purchased and then retained by the buyer. The appropriate analogy would be a Federal government registry that kept, for 90 days, a record of all the books each person had bought -- and occasionally went back to reclaim books that the purchaser wasn't "allowed" to have. Do you think that policy would survive First Amendment review? If not, why should the identical policy survive Second Amendment review?