At Fox News: The Second Amendment rights of more than 4 million Americans are at risk thanks to Republicans in Congress

Mar 22, 2018 | Featured

Dr. John Lott’s newest piece at Fox News talks about the gun control parts of the Omnibus-spending bill.  Here are some comments by four congressmen on these problems.  The piece starts this way:

Congressional Republicans are jeopardizing the Second Amendment rights of 4.2 million senior citizens. At the same time, they have voted to funnel tens of millions of dollars to gun control organizations and support other actions that Democrats will love.

All of this is wrapped up in the giant $1.3 trillion spending bill that the House of Representatives approved Thursday on a 256-167 vote and sent to the Senate.

Just before President Obama left office, his administration finalized new regulations banning Social Security recipients from buying a gun if they have trouble managing their finances.

About 10 percent of all people 65 and older risked being classified as “financially incompetent” – about 4.2 million in all.

Using the Congressional Review Act, Republicans and two Democrats passed a bill overturning the regulation. But the bill did more than that. It also prevents any future president from reinstituting the ban without new legislative authorization from Congress.

Unfortunately, the spending bill passed Thursday allows the ban to be reinstituted because it reauthorizes the 2007 National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Improvement Amendments Act. This act allowed government agencies, not just the courts, to determine if someone is mentally incompetent to buy or possess a gun.

House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said during testimony late Wednesday that he was “disturbed” that the bill would undo part of Republicans’ good work. But by Thursday morning, the House leadership had decided to go ahead with the measure.

Despite the name Fix-NICS, the bill is likely to cause more problems than it is worth.

Criminals are often dumb, but they are rarely so stupid as to buy a gun through a legal background check process. The people who get stopped are law-abiding citizens who simply have similar names to the criminals on the NICS list.

These “false positives” are a real problem. From 2006 to 2015, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System denied gun purchases by 826,144 people. But all those denials led to only 488 prosecutions in the whole 10-year period – fewer than 50 a year. Less than half of these ended in convictions.

This is an easy problem to fix. The government need only hold itself to the same standards it demands of companies performing background checks on their employees. But the problem isn’t being fixed, and so adding more names to NICS will only result in more false positives.

Democrats want to “fix” NICS, but they won’t even accede to Republican requests mandating the full, annual NICS reports that the Obama administration discontinued in 2010.

Another part of the spending bill provides $50 million for the STOP School Violence Act, which will provide schools with training in how to cope with attacks and how to identify violence-prone individuals. Despite President Trump’s push to encourage schools to arm teachers and staff, the bill expressly forbids schools from using any federal money to do just that. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

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