It's pretty simple how it will help actually. If you fail a background check, you won't be able to legally buy a gun. It's harder to illegally buy anything than legally buy it. Currently, however, it is not harder to illegally buy a gun because you can bypass the background check requirement. So by having the requirement on every purchase, you make it actually harder to buy a gun if you are otherwise not allowed to buy one. The inconvenience to legal gun owners is tiny borderline non-existent. It's a small time sink of at most a couple days. That's it. You have to go through more to buy a car, get insurance, buy a home, a lot of things.
Well, I have to call B.S. on that first point. It's way easier to acquire a gun illegally--partly because there aren't all those pesky government regulations. As I mentioned before, I neither own not have any interest in owning a gun. However, I have had a casual acquaintance (guy who worked at the magazine store I used to pre-order comics from) offer to sell me an unregistered handgun. I'm sure someone who is less of a hermit and/or is more clued in to the criminal underworld (I barely even play GTA) would find it much easier.
And that's not even getting into all the people who get their guns by stealing them. In fact, in a number of those mass shootings everybody's so riled about the perpetrators didn't actually own the guns they used--they took them from a relative without their knowledge. So tell me again how background checks are going to help.
Also, protip: Buying a car/home/etc. is a
pain in the ass, and doesn't make a good argument for having more types of transactions locked away behind licensing requirements and bureaucratic gate-keeping. Just because the government is already screwing us doesn't mean we should offer up another orifice for plundering.
As for how it helps gun owners? Well, it protects you from liability if you accidentally try to sell to someone trying to buy a gun illegally. It provides an incentive to report when guns are stolen. This helps innocents from being implicated in crimes falsely. Does it do anything if everyone's perfect? No, but people aren't perfect. It won't help everyone all the time, but it will help some people some of the time. And the paper trail? It shows that you aren't the owner of the gun anymore. Assuming you sold it legally, it means you're absolved from the crime (assuming you aren't selling it to the person knowing they're going to commit the crime, and whatnot). Without that paper trail, it's harder to show that you aren't involved in the crime.
The thing about registration isn't that it directly reduces gun crimes. However, it does indirectly reduce it. There's a small number that would be prevented if the person knew that the gun could be traced to them easily. Then there's the second effect of the guns adding you to the list of fails for background checks. There's even more, but it's 5:30 and I'm tired.
I'm seeing a lot of declarative statements here and not a lot of support. If your gun is stolen, that's incentive enough to report the theft--you don't need to add "I might get implicated in a major crime" to the list. As for the paper trail, that doesn't help you if A) the weapon is taken and used in a crime without your knowledge, or B) someone decides to hold you responsible for giving it to a person who committed a crime--because blaming you and calling it a criminal conspiracy or negligence looks better than admitting their background check system failed.
So that's one situation in which it might help, and two in which it would work against you. In the case of mass shootings--which is what's being used to sell this--both of those situations are likely to come up. If your kid/nephew/crazy uncle/etc. decides to break into your gun safe and shoot up a school that morning, you're not likely to find out about the theft until after the shooting hits the news--at which point a lot of emotional people are going to be looking for someone to blame, and the perpetrator is likely to be dead, leaving you as the next likely target.
This has already happened with at least one of the school shootings, where the kids stole the guns they used from a relative and there was a big push to hold that relative responsible--despite their only crime being "not having a good enough lock, apparently" and being a victim of burglary.
Or the short way of putting it: people illegally buying guns anyway will still illegally buy them.
This just closes off a technically-legal way to get them for those SHOULDN'T. And makes it less likely you're going to be incriminated for something that happens with your ex-property.
The thing is, I seriously doubt many criminals are getting their guns at gun shows. The implied claim here is: "This is going to prevent mass shootings because gun shows are where mass shooters get their guns." and I don't see a lot of evidence to support that.
What this looks like is a case of: "The problem is A but we're going to crack down on B because it's easier and then soak up the publicity for 'solving' the problem." Which is the typical M.O. of politicians.
Also: fuck the 'right' to untraceably and indiscriminately sell deadly weapons. It's not introducing any restrictions that aren't floating around already, so...
Who said anything about all that?
If the government wants background checks on every gun sale, they can pay for it themselves with the money they've already taken from the people. There's no excuse to demand even more in the form of "licensing fees." If the legislature can't figure out how to do their jobs with the budget they have, maybe they should take a chunk out of their ridiculous, $100,000+ yearly paychecks for being incompetent leeches, instead of saddling us with more fees and restrictions.
That we're already acclimated to this kind of behavior is a
problem, not an argument for expanding it.
Sorry if I threw you off by bringing an actual argument instead of the "from my cold dead hands" rhetoric you were apparently expecting.
