The Danger Of A National Gun Registry Looms

When it comes to gun control, there’s one thing everyone can agree on: criminals and psychopaths shouldn’t be allowed to get guns. The real question is how to stop them. 

For Democrats, the answer is “universal background checks.” Their argument is that private sales, the so-called “gun-show loophole,” must be closed to keep would-be killers from getting their hands on firearms. 
There’s just one problem with this prescription: it would not have stopped any of the mass shootings we have seen in this century. 

Background checks have no chance of working unless criminals are arrested and prosecuted. If you seriously threaten someone’s life, you shouldn’t be allowed to buy a gun. One of us, Andrew Pollack, saw the disconnect first-hand between the rhetoric of gun control and the reality of mass murder. 

The police came to the Parkland school shooter’s house forty-five times, but he was never arrested. He committed multiple crimes in school, but he was never arrested. The mental health authorities evaluated him three times on his eighteenth birthday, with knowledge of his history and the fact that he wanted to buy a gun. But he was never committed.