Aside from picking office holders, Nevada voters next year will have the opportunity to help keep guns out of the wrong hands.
Granted, we can’t always identify “the wrong hands” because many crimes are committed in the passion of the moment by first-time gun-wielders who might not fit the profile of a gunman-in-waiting.
But as a society, we at least can try to weed out those people who, on the face of it, shouldn’t be allowed to carry a weapon. It’s an obvious group: felons, domestic abusers and the mentally ill who have been identified by the state as having been committed involuntarily to a mental health institution or deemed a danger to themselves or others.
As it stands now, someone in Nevada can buy a weapon from a private party and not register it or be checked against a federal database of criminals maintained by the FBI. As a result, guns end up in the hands of very trustworthy and well-intentioned people — but also with street thugs, spouse beaters and the seriously mentally ill.
With some exceptions, the proposed law would require every person who buys a gun from an unlicensed, private seller — they account for about 40 percent of all gun sales and typically are found at gun shows and online — to undergo a computerized FBI criminal background check. In many cases, it can be done very quickly.
Customers who buy guns from licensed firearms dealers already are required to undergo background checks.
The proposed law is known as the Background Check Initiative. It qualified for a place on the Nevada ballot in November 2016 by virtue of a petition drive that got 166,779 signatures, the most ever collected for an initiative in this state.
This should be an easy decision for voters. Who would argue against background checks? Where’s the harm?
The National Rifle Association is fighting the initiative. It worries background checks are a veiled effort by the government to build a national registry of gun owners. Such a registry apparently would allow the government, when it sees the need and the moment is right, to swoop in and confiscate everyone’s weapons. Claiming the offensive, the authorities — monitoring us with surveillance cameras, supercomputers and hovering black helicopters — would imprison us in huge warehouses, shut down the Internet and blow up our printing presses.
Despite that threat, 18 other states have adopted the Background Check Initiative, which is being promoted by Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety and its partner, Moms Demand Action. The groups call background checks a no-brainer.
Seems that way to us, too. According to the Justice Department, more than 2 million people have failed to pass background checks and have been denied firearms since federal checks began in 1994.
Polling shows overwhelming support for efforts to clamp down on who can buy guns. A New York Times/CBS News Poll in 2013 found 92 percent of respondents supported background checks on all potential gun buyers. The findings were echoed in a Pew Research Center poll that same year: 85 percent of respondents supported background checks. And various polls show NRA members strongly support background checks, despite the organization’s opposition statement on its website.
The only argument to be made against background checks is the misguided notion that the government is trying to compile a list of gun owners. But five federal laws ban the creation of such a national registry.
We hope voters get behind the Background Check Initiative. If we are proven wrong, and at some point the feds come after gun owners in a nationwide dragnet, we assume word will spread quickly and people can bury their guns in their backyards or stick them in a storage unit. Until then, let’s start saving more lives.
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