There are a number of ways that rules could be written to require background checks to be performed on firearm sales without allowing any new sale-related information to flow to the government, but that wouldn't solve a more important danger with background checks: they make it much easier for the government to arbitrarily deny individuals' rights to keep and bear arms without any sort of due process. I think the latter point is probably a more effective argument, given that gun grabbers don't say they want registration lists to facilitate confiscation, but they have openly expressed their desire to disarm people who are not even suspected (much less convicted!) of any crime nor been ruled mentally incompetent by due process of law.
>>There are a number of ways that rules could be written to require background checks to be performed on firearm sales without allowing any new sale-related information to flow to the government
But how would the government be able to know that a background check was done if it doesn’t know where the guns are in the first place? The gummint loves its metrics!
>> but that wouldn’t solve a more important danger with background checks: they make it much easier for the government to arbitrarily deny individuals’ rights to keep and bear arms without any sort of due process.
They could do that now since all dealer sales require a background check. To say that expanded checks would catch the people who can’t pass a background check now and have to go to private sales actually supports the anti-gun crowd’s assertion that unchecked private sales supply guns to people who shouldn’t own them.