Why is NSSF Trying to Expand
List of "Prohibited Persons"
By Kurt Hofmann, August 5th 2015
JPFO writer contributor, © 2015.
In the wake of high-profile mass shootings in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Louisiana, some of the calls for more "gun control" are coming from a perhaps surprising direction. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the firearm industry's trade association, is calling for revisions to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that would deny more people the most effective means of defending life and liberty. What's more, they are proudly boasting of having done so in the past, and lamenting the fact that "gun control" groups won't give them any credit for their own "gun control" efforts.
Larry Keane
"Now More Voices Agree on the Need to Fix NICS," announces the title of NSSF's recent blog post, written by NSSF's Senior Vice President and General Counsel Larry Keane, and apparently we are to believe that what the voices agree on is that the Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms is not being infringed enough:
For the national background check system to work, all applicable records based on current law have to be entered into it at the state level. After all, any system is only as good as the accuracy and completeness of its database. This is where we all can agree that the system needs improvement.
Um, no--we cannot "all agree that the system needs" that kind of "improvement." We cannot "all agree" that in a country in which "the experts" claim that twenty percent of the population is mentally ill, that the government should be given the names of the 60 million people who are to be forcibly disarmed.
But NSSF hasn't been waiting for our agreement:
We are in the third year of our industry's national effort to ensure that the system has all the appropriate records put into it. We call the initiative FixNICS and we have been successful through our direct efforts to convince 16 state legislatures to pass legislation to ensure that there are no statutory, regulatory, administrative or procedural impediments to entering all appropriate records - criminal and mental health - into NICS.
Quite proud of their "gun control" efforts, aren't they? This is collaboration with the enemy. Whether it sinks to the level of Quisling's treason, or "merely" to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement, is perhaps academic. As Churchill said, after all, "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." What the crocodiles of "gun control" are being fed here, of course, is the ability of millions of Americans to legally own the best tools of self-defense.
The intent, presumably, is to voluntarily give up some ground, in hopes that the gun ban zealots will be satisfied with that, and not seek more. How can anyone think that's an effective strategy? When has the forcible citizen disarmament lobby ever been satisfied that they have taken enough? Every inch of ground we surrender is an inch that they will not have to fight for--and an inch closer to total disarmament of the citizenry.
No. Again borrowing from Mr. Churchill, " . . . we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender . . .." Anything less is voluntarily aiding and abetting citizen disarmament.
The only way to "fix" NICS is to do away with it, consign it to the scrap heap of the more sordid parts of our history. As David Codrea has long argued, "Anyone who can't be trusted with a gun can't be trusted without a custodian." Maybe NSSF ought to redirect its efforts in the direction of recruiting a lot of custodians.
A former paratrooper, Kurt Hofmann was paralyzed in a car accident in 2002. The helplessness inherent to confinement to a wheelchair prompted him to explore armed self-defense, only to discover that Illinois denies that right, inspiring him to become active in gun rights advocacy. He also writes the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner column. Kurt Hofmann Archive.
