I am more looking at it in the reverse. Not so much about prevention, as allowing an avenue to punish the person putting the gun in the felons hands. Straw purchasers are basically operating with impunity. But I will certainly agree, if a bad guy wants a gun they'll get it, so who the hell really knows what the answer is? Circling back around, I just don't think being able to order guns out of the Sears catalog like the good ole days is feasible or realistic today. So much has changed, parents don't parent, no one has personal responsibility for anything anymore and "mental issues" seem to be way more prevalent.
Passing a Federal law demanding "Universal Background Checks" for 100,000,000 million gun owning men and women is a "pie in the sky" idealistic view that if we just somehow pass more and more restrictive anti-gun laws, miraculously criminals will not be criminals anymore.
After all, several States now demand background checks for a citizen to buy, sell, trade, give as a gift, a firearm ...... and have those b.g. checks made a dent in their violent crime? No. So, what do the do-right-daddies and mommies cry, "MORE GUN LAWS! MORE, MORE, MORE! Just look at Calif., New York, Mass., Maryland, etc., etc. Gardens of Eden, right?
Have any of you pro-universal background checks adherents ever considered what it is truly all about with the left? It is not about preventing violent crime, It is about eventual universal registration and eventual confiscation. No, no, not today nor tomorrow, nor even next year ... but
someday when the Presidency and the Congress/Senate are again controlled by the far left America hating, Constitution hating radical "progressives," then the law will be passed. As far left liberal Calif. Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein said on CBS several years ago, "
Turn them all in, Mr. and Mrs. America, or we'll come get them." And with universal registration, Big Brother & Big Nanny will know exactly where to "come get them."
Here is a link to a very good (although a bit slow at times) movie regarding criminals, strict gun control, and what happens when the honest people are disarmed. Yeah, I know it is "fiction," "just a movie," but I have friends in and from England who've told me it is very true, including a retired London Metropolitan Police Officer now living in this country.
http://ffilms.org/harry-brown-2009/
It's the full movie so make some time to watch it.
Years ago when I was going through one of the largest, non-Federal LEO academies in the world, one of our Senior Instructors told us, "You cadets better never forget what I tell you. Criminals are exactly like you, except for one thing. They
do not think the way
you think." I never forgot it and that very street wise instructor was 100% correct. If a criminal wants a gun, NO MATTER WHAT law is on the books, he or she will get one. They don't
think the way we think.
Just my view of how very unworkable, useless, restrictive, and ineffective background checks for private transfers of firearms are. They just punish honest men and women.
L.W.