An Op-Ed from Fox News lays out how the new spending bill would jeopardize the 2nd Amendment rights of over 4.2 M Senior Citizens.
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.
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.
It goes on.
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.
This is just another example of how the turncoat spending bill is absolutely horrible. Not only does it not give him border wall funding or defund sanctuary cities and planned parenthood but the bill also has little pieces of gun control hidden in it. The White House initially said Trump would sign the bill but earlier today Trump announced he would consider vetoing it.Â
