The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

From the Barack Obama statement on Heller:

We can work together to enact common-sense laws, like closing the gun show loophole and improving our background check system, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals.

The "gun show loophole" is a rhetorical fiction, a semantic second cousin of the so-called "assault weapons" ban. When Democrats talk about "closing the gun show loophole," what they are actually talking about is applying the federal regulations that govern commercial firearms dealers to individual owners privately selling their own weapons. This is nonsensical. It is already illegal for convicted felons to own guns, and in such cases it is the buyer, not the seller, who violates the law. What Democrats want to do is to require individual gun owners to do background checks before selling a firearm from their personal collection.

topics:
Barack Obama, Law