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Showing posts from April, 2013

Death of the Instant Background Check Amendment

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As readers of this blog know, I hang, shall we say, to the right of center. In the past several months, I have tried to give the political discourse a rest, but after today's defeat of the National Instant Background Check Amendment, better known as the Manchin-Toomey Amendment, and hearing President Obama's impassioned comments about its defeat in the Rose Garden, I had to speak up. I just read the contents of the Amendment to see what the buzz was all about. Basically, in my not-so-legal opinion, this Amendment wasn't too onerous. It made specific points to disallow a national gun registry and to allow kin-folk to buy and swap guns without background checks. It mandated that all sales in and around a gun show, on internet commerce sites and (loosely speaking) advertised in print media, must be subjected to an instant background check. It also went into detail about how criminal convictions and mental conditions would be entered and maintained in a national registry.