Checks threaten gun rights: why 'better enforcement' of current restrictions is a bad idea.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Columns - Column

"To MAKE SURE those who would commit acts of violence cannot get access to guns," President Barack Obama said in January, Congress should mandate background checks not just for sales by federally licensed firearms dealers, as current law requires, but for all gun transfers except those between relatives.

This idea seems to be the most popular of Obama's gun control proposals, backed by 92 percent of respondents in a mid-January CBS News poll. Yet "universal background checks" are unlikely to stop mass shootings, and enforcing them would require the sort of surveillance that has long been anathema to defenders of the Second Amendment, exposing millions of peaceful people to the threat of gun confiscation and criminal prosecution.

Although an expanded background check requirement is ostensibly a response to the December 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, it would not have stopped the gunman in that attack, who used his mother's firearms. Even if he had tried to buy guns, it seems he would have passed a background check because he did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record.

That is typically the case in mass shootings, observes Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox.And if they could not pass a background check, Fox says, "mass killers could always find an alternative way of securing the needed weaponry, even if they had to steal from family members or friends."

Meanwhile, to make sure that every gun buyer undergoes a background check, the government would need to know where all the guns are. Although Obama did not mention that title detail, The Washington Post reported that the administration was "seriously considering" creating a system that would "track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database."

Second Amendment supporters historically have opposed gun registration, fearing it could lead to confiscation, which has happened in places such as Canada, Great Britain, Australia, California, and New York City. While wholesale disarmament would be clearly unconstitutional in this country, confiscation of guns that legislators arbitrarily deem unnecessary or excessively dangerous is easier to imagine...