Nevermind. It's complicated. Don't worry your pretty little head about it.
She said Grassley is considering five main points: addressing mental health challenges; reining in gun trafficking; preventing school violence and ensuring student safety; protecting veterans from false mental health accusations (e.g. of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder); and improving enforcement of existing laws regarding state information-sharing for the background check database.
This depends on how these points are addressed.
”Addressing mental health challenges” could include a wide range of initiatives with potential for abuse. The definition of what is and isn’t a mental disorder seems subject to change, from being a normal energetic youth to being doped up by the end of school years. Will those who have been so medicated be automatically disqualified? Even if it is determined later that the diagnosis was incorrect?
”Reining in gun trafficking” might include finally getting some hard information on who thought the “fast and furious” operation was a good idea, but likely will mean that private sales without the requirement for NICS checks and dealer records will be over. Not being able to give my now adult grandson a rifle, for instance is an infringement.
”Preventing school violence and ensuring student safety” While a noble aim, the question is “How?” Only enabling the presence of trained individuals with firearms on campus will deter such violence, nothing will prevent the determined from engaging in or attempting it. The expansion of “Gun Free School Zones” will only infringe on the Rights of those who live in the area or unwittingly drive within the proscribed radius from a school.
I have no issue with protecting veterans from false PTSD disqualifications (see the first part of my reply)—that needs to be done, especially now.
Improving information sharing between state felon and disqualified individual databases with NICS databases might improve the rejection of disqualified purchasers at FFL dealers, but in the end, the determined individual will obtain firearms through other means, including private sales. For that to be even marginally effective, private sales (without a background check, 4473, dealer intervention) will have to be made illegal as well.
Then, in all likelihood, someone will be ‘stung’ and made an example of in order to give the law real teeth in the public mindset. Those happen. For instance, the Kenyon Ballew Raid shortly after the ’68 GCA became law, which occurred not far from where I lived at the time, and frankly, sparked my awareness of BATF excesses.
Opening the door, once again, to that sort of abuse or another Randy Weaver situation (which also began with a ‘sting’) is counterproductive to anything firearm owners want. The idea that I could not, knowing someone and their character and background—or otherwise—sell them my property without having the Government intervene and record a transaction that is none of the Government’s business is an infringement, as is the necessity to pay any fee for any such transaction.
So those are my misgivings. Gun owners have compromised in the past on issues, and it has never been enough. the slice between the line and where the anti-gun people stand has grown thin in most places, been crossed in others. Although I do not regard Grassley as anti-gun, any compromise will have to fall into a very small area to be even palatable.
With the stated aims of the ringleaders on the Left, no ground can be given.