>>I’m as distrustful of government as anyone, but I am not clear on what makes these background checks dangerous.
The background check is not dangerous. What is dangerous is the implementation. When a gun arrives at a dealer, it is logged in with a firearms record book, which is a legal document that must be maintained. They can see when it arrived and when it left the dealer’s hands.
Now, how do they keep track of YOUR gun to make sure that left your possession only after a proper background check?
Universal background checks requires universal registration. Registration leads to confiscation.
Also, how will you do a background check? Will you be able to call the same number as the FFL dealer and pay a small fee? Or will they require you and the buyer to go to a dealer so they can “process” your sale. The dealers around here charge about $150 to process a sale where they don’t make any money.
This is another “let’s pass it to see what’s in it” bill.
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.