Vin Suprynowicz

What’s the big deal about requiring background checks for private firearm sales? If you want to sell your gun to your neighbor, you just telephone the National Instant Check hotline and ask to have your potential buyer checked out . . . right?

Wrong. Although it’s reported the Nevada state Legislature, in its semi-annual scramble to close as required by midnight June 1, has just enacted a measure allowing for (but not requiring) private parties to access the Silver State’s state-run “background check” apparatus, that’s a first so far as I know, and it’s still not clear quite how it will work. I’m told the state police will apparently be given five days to respond to a written request.

Up till now, no such “background check” bureaucracy, state or federal, would accept or respond to any such call from a private party, so far as I’ve been able to learn. In fact, such legislation is yet another Trojan Horse, designed to eventually channel every gun sale through full-time, federally inspected gun stores with Federal Firearms Licenses, at the very time the BATF now violates decades of past promises that “anyone can get one just by applying,” with their ongoing campaign to systematically strip the FFLs from law-abiding citizens who they now deride as part-time, “basement dealers.”

Why route every transfer through a federal licensee? So that a paperwork record will be created of who owns every gun in America.

We’re told fears that this could eventually lead to confiscation are “paranoid.” I call that practicing psychiatry without a license, as well as insulting. Read your world history. You don’t even have to go back very far, especially in such Third World paradises of victim disarmament as, say, California.

Or do you really think Mafia hit men “forget” and try to buy guns through licensed dealers, instead of buying stolen or otherwise untraceable weapons out of Guido’s car trunk — then slapping themselves upside the forehead and exclaiming “What was I thinking?!” when they fail to pass the background check?

Comes now Jonathan J. Cooper, writing in the April 19 Salem, Oregon Statesman-Journal that “With Oregon Democrats moving forward on a bill to require background checks for private gun sales, the potential political backlash is becoming apparent.”

Gun rights advocates in early April filed petitions to recall three Democratic Oregon lawmakers who sponsored the legislation, and they say more could follow, Mr. Cooper reports.

The Oregon state Senate voted in early April to require background checks on any person-to-person gun sale not involving relatives. A Junction City gun shop owner filed the first recall petition against Rep. Val Hoyle, who received campaign money from gun-rights groups but signed on as a sponsor of the background check bill.

The lawmakers facing recall got a show of support from national Democrats. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee sent a statement calling the recall petition against Hoyle “naked retaliation by anti-gun safety activists who object to common-sense firearm laws.”

As it happens, I agree with that statement completely . . . once we apply our “spielchecker” to remove the Democrats’ focus-group-tested buzz words and translate their statement into standard English, in which it reads: Yes, the recall petition is, in fact, “a legal and proper response by defenders of vital, Constitutionally guaranteed human rights who object to the attempts of totalitarians to create a police state on the model of Stalin’s and Hitler’s through victim disarmament.”

In a statement released by her spokesman, Hoyle said she won’t back off, adding that she’s confident her constituents would support her if it got that far. To hold a recall election, Hoyle’s critics would need to collect more than 3,000 signatures from registered voters in a district she won last year by 12 points.

“I want to be clear that I won’t be intimidated away from doing what I think is right,” Hoyle said.

Separately, a group of constituents filed recall petitions against Rep. Susan McLain of Forest Grove and Sen. Chuck Riley of Hillsboro, both freshmen Democrats from swing districts in Washington County.

Riley barely eked out a win last year, Mr. Cooper reports, defeating a Republican incumbent by less than one percent of votes cast. But he said he’s not concerned about a recall over gun control, noting he campaigned on the issue. He believes his support for background checks is part of the reason he won his election.

“There’s no reason to think that you’re going to be recalled for doing what you said you were going to do in your campaign,” Riley said. “If you make promises and keep them, there’s no reason to think that you’re going to be recalled.”

The Web site Colorado Peak Politics (“Colorado’s conservative bully pulpit”) responded that for Coloradans, the Oregon battle shapes up as “gun control deja vu.”

Back in 2013, of course, gun rights advocates successfully recalled two Colorado lawmakers (Democrats Sen. Angela Giron and Senate President John Morse) and caused a third (Sen. Evie Hudak) to resign due to their support of expanded “background checks” after the shooting in a “no-guns-allowed” movie theater showing the latest Batman film in the town of Aurora.

Thus, “While Oregon legislators don’t seem too concerned about the local petitions against them, we’d like to highlight the history of the battle in Colorado as a warning,” comment the Colorado conservatives.

“Forcing legislation through a friendly Senate and House will seriously irk constituents who believe in their constitutional rights. In Colorado, sheriffs, legislators, small business owners, and private citizens took aim at the laws before the ink was dry, despite Democrat arrogance. Former Senator Giron confidently told The Huffington Post in 2013 that ‘I think it’s without a doubt that we’re going to make it through this [recall] … We are going to be making some history here.’”

The Coloradoans see a similarity in Oregon Sen. Riley’s remark that “There’s no reason to think that you’re going to be recalled for doing what you said you were going to do in your campaign.”

“We’ll see about that, Sen. Riley,” the Coloradoans conclude.

NO FOSTER KIDS FOR LICENSED GUN OWNERS

Stephen Gutowski of the Washington Free Beacon reported in March that a Nevada couple is seeking a change to state law after being denied a license to raise foster children due to a regulation that bars foster parents from carrying loaded firearms.

Brian Wilson and his wife Valerie applied to become foster parents in 2013. After a three-month process, which included “ten weeks of parenting classes and multiple home study visits,” the couple was told they would be denied foster parent status because of their refusal to comply with a demand from the state’s Department of Family Services that they not carry any weapons when foster children are present.

“If they were to turn around and deny our right to foster a child because we had a Bible or Koran, they’d be screaming from the heavens, ‘How dare somebody infringe upon somebody’s First Amendment rights?’” responded Brian Wilson.
A letter to the couple from the Clark County Department of Family Services said “The applicants stated they would not be able to comply with this regulation if licensed due to having a concealed weapons permit to carry their personal defense weapon on their physical body.”

“I’m really heartbroken,” Valerie Wilson told the Nevada Assembly’s Judiciary Committee back in March. “I really want a family. It’s been our plan all along.”

The couple supports a bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, R-Las Vegas (who’s been known to appear in campaign ads wearing a holstered gun on her hip) that would change the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services’ regulations requiring firearms to be unloaded and inoperable any time foster children are present with their foster parents.

“We have children in need of great foster care, and we have had people that are law-abiding citizens that have gotten their background checks, that have their CCWs (concealed carry permits), literally denied to foster a child because they have a concealed-weapons permit,” Fiore said during the hearing.

Fiore told the Las Vegas Review-Journal the bill has bipartisan support. State Sen. Kelvin Atkinson, D-Las Vegas, who has a concealed-carry permit, is considering becoming a foster parent, she said.

Reaction to the bill within the committee was mostly positive. “I was really shocked to hear about this current law because I grew up with a father who was in law enforcement and we were exposed to guns my entire life,” commented Assemblywoman Victoria Seaman, R-Clark County. “I am now a CCW holder.”

The Nevada Firearms Coalition supports the bill. “Citizens should not be denied the opportunity to be participants in the foster care program because they own firearms,” NFC president Don Turner said in a letter to the committee. “Safe storage . . . is the critical component of firearms safety in the home and this bill adequately addresses these issues.”

Opponents of the bill insist being a foster parent “is not a right.”

True. But keeping and bearing arms is. And denying gun owners the opportunities that others enjoy to participate fully in our society tends to “infringe” that right . . . doesn’t it?

HER WORK WILL GO ON

Sarah Brady, who pressured politicians to ignore the Second Amendment (a provision without which the current federal union could never have been formed), died April 4 at the age of 73.

Her husband was shot during an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981. James Brady was paralyzed, and last year died of those injuries. Reagan’s life was saved by the quick actions of Secret Service agents who were armed, including one who deployed an Uzi machine pistol.

By making it harder for potential crime victims to arm themselves, as the president’s bodyguards were armed that day, Mrs. Brady’s work will go on, continuing to cost countless lives.

Vin Suprynowicz, former editorial writer for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is the author of “Send in the Waco Killers” and a new novel about the War on Drugs, “The Testament of James.” A version of this column appears in the June 10 edition of Shotgun News.