Op-ed: Democrats put politics into firearm legislation

In the national debate over gun control, emotion and rhetoric often overshadow the facts. Consider what President Barack Obama said in the wake of the tragic murders at Sandy Hook: "If there's even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try."

Of course he's right; we should do everything we can to stop violent gun crime. But then why did Democrats in the Senate just vote down common-sense legislation that would have made major progress in actually stopping gun crime? The only answer is politics.

There are two basic approaches to gun legislation: We can target violent criminals and those with serious mental illnesses or we can restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens. Obama and U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, favor the latter. But the former is what actually works.

Here are three facts that Obama does not want to address:

• The Obama administration has not made it a priority to prosecute felons and fugitives who try to illegally purchase guns. Indeed, in 2010, 48,321 fugitives and felons tried to illegally purchase firearms. The Obama administration prosecuted just 44. Forty-four out of 48,321.
• Under Obama, gun crime prosecutions hit a decade low in 2011 - down 30 percent from their record high in 2004.
• Obama's budgets have slashed funding for school safety. If the objective were to stop violent gun crime, the approach would be to target felons, gun-crime prosecution and school safety.

And that's exactly what the Grassley-Cruz bill would have done. It allocated $50 million to create a task force to prosecute felons and fugitives trying to illegally purchase guns; it provided $45 million to increase gun-crime prosecution in the 15 most dangerous U.S. cities; and it restored $300 million in school-safety funding that the Obama budget had cut.

The legislation had the most bipartisan support of all the gun proposals; Democrats cast nine of the 52 yes votes. But the remaining Democrats, led by Reid, filibustered and killed the bill.

Why? They wanted instead to pass legislation that would extend the background check system to private sales between law-abiding citizens.

Their bill would not have allocated one penny to prosecuting felons, fugitives or gun crimes. But it was poll-tested. "Universal background checks" are popular, at least until people learn what that entails.

Under current law, every federally licensed firearms dealer must perform a background check on every single gun sale, whether that sale occurs in a store, at a gun show or online. Individual citizens, however, are not required to do the same for private sales.

The bill Obama seeks would turn Americans into felons for simply selling or transferring a firearm without first performing a background check, with fines and penalties up to five years. A recent national poll of law-enforcement officers showed that they overwhelmingly disagree this would bring down gun crime.

If regulating private sales wouldn't be effective at stopping violent crime, why are the Democrats pushing so hard for it?

For one thing, it would impose a universal Obama "gun tax" on private sales - requiring individual citizens to pay for the new background checks.

Even more ominously, the long-term objective of extending background checks to private citizens is the creation of a national gun registry, a federal government list of every firearm owned by every American. To be sure, the latest Senate legislation purports to prohibit a gun registry, but the Obama Justice Department has been explicit about its ultimate objective.

In January 2013, Greg Ridgeway, deputy director of DOJ's National Institute for Justice, wrote, "effectiveness (of universal background checks) depends on the ability to reduce straw purchasing, requiring gun registration and an easy gun transfer process."

And gun registration has historically been the predicate for gun confiscation.

Senate Democrats reply that gun confiscation is not their objective. But the record belies that claim.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has said that, "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them (assault weapons) … Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it."

Given those stated objectives, Americans are understandably reluctant to take any steps down a path toward a federal gun registry. Instead, we should protect the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for law-abiding citizens. And we should do what works: targeting felons, fugitives and gun crime and improving school safety.

If we look at the facts, that's how we stop violent crime.