by John Boch
Maine is the latest state of see a referendum put on the ballot with Bloomberg’s money. The gun-grabbing group Moms Demand Action seek to end private transfers of firearms with this new proposal, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see the final referendum read very similar to Washington State’s referendum passed in 2014.
In Washington State, it’s illegal now to even handle another person’s firearms, with a few very limited exceptions. You can’t borrow a friend’s gun while hunting without running them through a background check. In Washington State, you can’t even hold someone else’s gun while they cross a fence-line while hunting. It’s illegal to let a friend shoot your firearms, even on your own property. You can’t handle or use loaner guns during classroom / range training courses.
Then there’s the de facto registration that “universal background checks” implement.
Universal Background Checks are gun registration
Yes, “universal background checks” is gun registration and I’ll tell you why… When you buy a gun and a check is made under current law, a record is kept. For instance, if John Boch buys a gun from Liberty Guns in Homer, IL, the Illinois State Police have a record of the time and date of the background query, along with the type of gun (long gun, handgun, or other). At this point, there’s no formal registration list, but the ISP maintains a database of every query.
If the Illinois State Police want to convert their database info into a hard registration list, here’s how it works:
To create a list of guns John Boch owns, the ISP merely goes back through their records, identifies the dates and stores that made a call-in on a purchase for Mr. Boch, then they contact those gun stores and ask them to fax or email the Form 4473 from each sale to them. With the Form 4473s, they can create a list of guns I should have. If I don’t have them, then I better have the disposition information of whom they were sold to and on what date.
I saw it happen when a former employee had sold a couple of guns to friends without FOID cards back around early 2000s. One of the guns ended up at a crime scene. The cops swooped in to my then-workplace with three vehicles, literally like it was an episode of America’s Most Wanted. As I recall, there was an ATF agent, three detectives with the Chicago Anti-Gun Enforcement unit, one or two people from the Cook County Sheriff, two state police detectives and a local Urbana cop. Nearly ten cops.
Nearly ten cops… for a misdemeanor investigation. Does that seem a little like overkill? Especially when there are countless unsolved shootings and homicides in Cook County?
They had a list of about eight guns this guy had purchased and they wanted him to take them to his house and show them the guns. Right then. But first, they frisked him in the parking lot and then handcuffed him and searched his car top to bottom (to the point of taking out the spare tire) while his fellow employees watched through the window.
He was back about three hours later, with a notice to appear on the misdemeanor charge of failing to keep a record of the transfer.
What’s more, while they were interrogating him, they wanted to know what was in my fanny pack. He told them (a Glock). They then said I’d face arrest if they caught me with a gun in that fanny pack. You can guess how that went. I mailed said detective a terse letter urging him to carry out that threat as I always wanted to see the federal courthouse in Urbana from the plaintiff’s point of view. Guess what? Mr. Bloviator never returned and he and his friends never came back to arrest me.
And back to our referendum story…
Bloomberg has gotten nowhere at the federal or state level passing gun control since immediately after the Newtown killing spree by a social misfit.
But Bloomberg did win a victory in a ballot referendum in Washington State in 2014.
It’s the ONLY place he’s gotten results.
Look for more of these ballot referendum schemes as 1) he’s got lots of money to hire people to circulate petitions and 2) it’s the only place he’s had any luck passing any meaningful gun control.
Until we kick him in the teeth on one or more of these appeals to the low-information types, we’re going to see gun control by ballot referendum with greater and greater frequency.
Here’s the upside of the Maine announcement: It will galvanize gun owners and conservatives to the polls, ensuring the Bernie Sanders useful idiots are badly outnumbered.
AUGUSTA (Press-Herald) — Maine election officials are verifying petitions for a ballot measure requiring criminal background checks for all private gun sales in the state.
The group Maine Moms Demand Action submitted petitions to the Secretary of State’s office Tuesday. Deputy Secretary of State Julie Flynn says the group claimed it has more than 72,000 signatures certified by cities and towns.
If certified for the Maine ballot, the campaign to expand Maine’s background check requirements is expected to draw considerable interest – and money – from gun control advocates and gun owners’ rights groups in Maine and around the country.
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