The Crossed Pond

An easily missed story courtesy of Ed at CQ about quiet efforts between the NRA and Senate Democrats, underway since shortly after Virginia Tech, to smarten up gun control laws (background checks, databases, federal-state coordination, etc).

Senior Democrats have reached agreement with the National Rifle Association on what could be the first federal gun-control legislation since 1994, a measure to significantly strengthen the national system that checks the backgrounds of gun buyers.
The sensitive talks began in April, days after a mentally ill gunman killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech University. The shooter, Seung Hui Cho, had been judicially ordered to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, which should have disqualified him from buying handguns. But the state of Virginia never forwarded that information to the federal National Instant Check System (NICS), and the massacre exposed a loophole in the 13-year-old background-check program.

Under the agreement, participating states would be given monetary enticements for the first time to keep the federal background database up to date, as well as penalties for failing to comply.

To sign on to the deal, the powerful gun lobby won significant concessions from Democratic negotiators in weeks of painstaking talks. Individuals with minor infractions in their pasts could petition their states to have their names removed from the federal database, and about 83,000 military veterans, put into the system by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2000 for alleged mental health reasons, would have a chance to clean their records. The federal government would be permanently barred from charging gun buyers or sellers a fee for their background checks. In addition, faulty records such as duplicative names or expunged convictions would have to be scrubbed from the database.

This sounds good, to me. And it also represents two groups, both of which can become absolutist children in public forums, actually getting together and acting like adults.

I’ve long held that the Democratic party, as a whole, is less hostile to gun rights than they’re often painted as (not true of all of them, of course, but as a whole; I don’t think we’re any more likely to lose gun rights to Democrats than we are Republicans, despite historic affiliations. Hard to see a big difference in gun-friendliness between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, or Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, though that’s in large part due to the sheer effectiveness of the gun lobby, which cows Democrats to about an equal degree as it ingratiates Republicans). I’ve also held that if anybody should be advocating for sane and limited gun control, it should be the gun-rights crowd (obody has as much of a vested interest in making sure gun laws work smartly and effectively, and need the least amount of ratcheting up in the future, than the gun rights folks). So it’s good to see them coming together on this, though it’s not as surprising as it sounds. What’s surprising is it doesn’t happen more often.

Hopefully the success of this effort (and it will succeed if the gun lobby lets it) will inspire more respect for gun rights and gun owners among Democrats, and less reflexive knee-jerking from the gun lobby everytime reform is proposed. Win/win.