If you haven’t seen Star Wars: The Last Jedi, don’t worry, I am not going to give away any spoilers!
But it is comical how close-to-real-life a science fiction movie can be. And, how it can hold significant warnings for American gun owners.
In The Last Jedi, two of the resistance fighters receive a parking ticket when they travel to a planet in search of a code breaker. They are arrested for unlawful parking, but they escape and flee the planet, thus becoming “fugitives from justice.”
Sound familiar?
It should if you have been following the debate over the Cornyn-Schumer-Feinstein bill (S. 2135) and reading about the dangers with this so-called “Fix NICS” (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) legislation.
For starters, this “fugitive from justice” category is the second highest cause of denials under the FBI background check system.
In the movie, once the resistance fighters become “fugitives,” the Supreme Leader sends SWAT Teams to take away their guns and …
Well, there is more to it, but I told you that I am not going to give away any spoilers.
The point is, the heroes flee, they become “fugitives from justice,” and all of this for mere parking tickets. And this is where the movie presents some very tangible parallels to real life.
Under current law, if you do not pay a speeding ticket which you incur while on vacation, the vacation state can put out a bench warrant on you. These bench warrants can then serve as the basis for turning your name into NICS as a “fugitive from justice.” Currently, some states, such as Massachusetts and Ohio, do this a lot. Others, apparently, do not. But the point of the Cornyn-Schumer-Feinstein bill is to require that all states become 100% compliant by doing what the repressive states are now doing.
In other words, states will be forced to search high and low for every conceivable person who might be “deserving of a gun ban” under the massively overbroad definitions of current law.
So S. 2135 will create huge complications for law-abiding gun owners and exacerbate already existing problems. Gun Owners of America has already spent time documenting how passage of this bill would affect military veterans and seniors, medical marijuana users, and more.
We have also answered the claims by misinformed pro-gunners who think that S. 2135 will improve things for the Second Amendment community, although it will not.
In short, some pro-gunners are holding out section 2(2) of this gun control bill as some big achievement. They claim it will require records corrections within 60 days for people erroneously denied under the Brady Law. But the Brady Law itself, at Statutes at Large subsections (f) and (g), ALREADY requires the FBI to give a reason for a denial in five business days, and provides that “the Attorney General shall … IMMEDIATELY correct all federal records relating to the prospective transferee.”
So section 2(2) of S. 2135 actually takes current law and makes it more unfavorable to gun owners. And without sanctions for non-compliance at the FBI, neither current law nor the proposed law is worth the paper on which it is written.
It is understandable why a gun-hating Senator like Darth Schumer is supporting S. 2135. It is a shame that Sen. John Cornyn does not see the problems with a bill that will put the NICS system on steroids.
Michael Hammond is Legislative Counsel for Gun Owners of America and a guest columnist for “Down Range with AWR Hawkins.”
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