Safety is an important thing. No one is going to say otherwise.
On guns, though, we tend to have a bit of a disconnect. Gun safety includes things like not putting your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to fire. Unfortunately, anti-gun zealots have stolen the term and used it as a euphemism for gun control.
It’s bad enough that now the term “gun safety” causes a visceral reaction in me because far too often, it just means gun control with a different look. It’s like putting a prostitute in red carpet-couture. It doesn’t change the nature of the thing itself, it just tries to hide what it is.
In Iowa, a congressional candidate seems to think you can have that flavor of “gun safety” and still respect gun rights.
Democratic Congressional candidate Christina Bohannan tried her hand at shooting at a private gun range near Blue Grass, Iowa on Saturday with the Democratic candidate for Scott County sheriff Thomas Gibbs, a former firearms instructor.
Bohannan is running against Republican incumbent Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in southeast Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, for the second time.
While at the property owned by Iowa House Democratic candidate Phil Wiese, Bohannan fired a 9 millimeter handgun, an AR-15-style rifle, and a 12-gauge shotgun at a target set up on the lawn.
Bohannan said she wanted to come out to the range because she thinks it’s important for legislators to understand more about the firearms they regulate and to show her support for gun rights for law-abiding citizens as well as for gun safety.
“I grew up with guns, I’m a gun owner myself, I support the Second Amendment, and I think it’s important that we support those rights for law-abiding responsible gun owners and understand really firsthand what we’re doing when we think about gun regulation,” Bohannan said.
Bohannan said it’s important to recognize rights for gun owners while also pushing for expanding background checks and keeping people safe from gun violence.
Now, Bohannan did resist calling for things like assault weapon bans, but even the whole “expanding background checks” thing is a problem, primarily because she’s equating it to keeping people safe from gun violence.
We know that the vast majority of criminals get their guns via either stealing their guns or buying one that was stolen by someone else. They’re not getting them from law-abiding citizens. So how are universal background checks going to keep people safe?
The short answer is that they’re not.
All that universal background checks do is create the opportunity for a de facto gun registration.
In time, if every gun transfer requires paperwork, there will be documents that clearly outline which guns are where. With the ATF trying to digitize records in their storage, it’s also clear that they will eventually want gun sale records digitized at the store level. If those end up in a single database, we have gun registration. If the records are there, then there will be a way to search them by more than just looking up a serial number.
That’s the only thing universal background checks will actually do.
But Bohannan doesn’t acknowledge that, unsurprisingly, nor do most other gun control Democrats.
“I grew up with guns, I’m a gun owner myself, I support the Second Amendment” is a fine start, but she should have stopped there. She did not.
Democrats never do, these days.
Here’s the thing, though. You cannot support the Second Amendment and support universal background checks, assault weapon bans, permit-to-purchase requirements, mandatory training requirements, or literally any of that crap. One could argue that supporting gun control regulations with historical analogs dating back to the nation’s founding is different, because of Bruen, but none of the things being pushed for have any such analog and we all know it.
So Bohannan can try to frame herself as pro-Second Amendment, but her position on background checks illustrates that she’s not that supportive of it.
