Well Here We Go Down A Most Slippery Slope

The House of Representatives, with unusual backing from both the NRA and
anti-gun activists in the Democrat party, just passed HR 2640 on an unrecorded
voice vote. The "NICS Improvement Act" will greatly expand the list of people
banned from buying or having firearms, and now goes to the Senate where it will
likely be fast-tracked for approval.

Using "gun control" and murdered young students as a rallying cry, the federal
government has moved another step closer to a national computerized system
capable of screening the entire population.

If tied in to a national ID card being developed through linked state driver's
licenses (the so-called "Real ID Act" passed in 2005), all significant activity
in the nation could be
monitored under the guise of crime control.

In typical fashion, the bill coerces states into cooperation with promises of
grants and threats of withheld funding, depending on their degree of compliance.
It is unlikely that states will be able to afford to resist, compromising any
remaining sovereignty they have. The net effect will be to hasten centralized
computerization of all relevant local court records in the nation. Many
officials see this as a good thing.

"The Brady law was the first major step, and it was wildly successful," says
Alan Korwin, a nationally recognized gun-law expert and author of seven books on
the subject (www.gunlaws.com "Using 'gun control' for political cover,
Congress funded and began the process of building a computer capable of
identifying and checking every American citizen instantaneously. The main
problem for years has been getting all the data."

The initial cost to launch the NICS system and its sprawling support complex was
$250 million, followed by ongoing
allocations to keep it running. The new bill provides $250 million per year for
the next three years, for prepping and importing more records into the
FBI-managed system, based in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Indian tribes are
singled out for up to 5% of the total funding, to gain their input. An extra
$125 million per year is also authorized during the period to give to states
that cooperate, as added incentive.

Our nation and much of the developed world, thanks to digital technologies, is
moving quickly toward a universal background database. Eventually, experts say
you'll need your thumbprint (or similar) to ride an elevator, board transit, buy
groceries (or anything), open accounts, get fuel or use your computer online.
The most free places on earth will be the most primitive, like Africa, where
human activity will remain largely untrackable.

(I wrote a song about this called "Your Neck Chip" -- "It's a cell phone and a
tracker, it can tell if you're a slacker, it's a law enforcement tool, and on
you hey
it looks cool." Why would an honest person object? It won't matter. Failure to
ID will be a crime. It already is, it just still relies on olden laminated
cards).

News reports, in typical "pack" mode, have all included a line that says, in
effect, "It is the first significant gun-control legislation in a decade." No
independent reporting or news gathering is involved in the rote reprinting of
that standardized one-liner. The source is unknown but suspected to originate
with either the Associated Press or the Los Angeles Times, whose record on
gun-news accuracy is abysmal.

In fact, federal gun-control laws have passed in 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004,
2005 and 2006. They include numerous anti-terrorism gun bans and controls,
illegal alien gun bans, three "arm the pilots" laws, homeland security gun laws,
national concealed carry for active and retired police, protections for the
domestic firearms industry against frivolous legal attack, gun-lock laws, and a
Katrina-style gun-confiscation ban.

If federal gun laws don't broadly deny rights to all citizens, however, they are
not characterized by reporters as "gun-control" laws, a term now synonymous with
"gun-ban" laws.

The new law is expected to add at least 21 million records to the NICS database,
and presumably, deny firearms rights to those people. While keeping guns out of
the hands of true mental cases and hardened criminals is widely considered a
reasonable goal, the sheer size of the new denied class has critics wondering
how accurate or fair the listings might be. When those people learn they are
"guilty" after the data is loaded, and can no longer obtain or possess firearms,
a special appeals process is provided, at the insistence of the NRA. Proponents
assure skeptics this is not "guilty unless proven innocent," but it sure does
look that way.

No news is available on what future classes of people might be added to the
national rights-denial database, or how far the current bill might reach. A
denial category for anyone who has ever been issued
a prescription of any mental-health drug, from sleep aids to pain relievers to
relaxants or stimulants, has been proposed in the past. That might include
children or others even voluntarily placed on controversial
behavior-modification medications such as Ritalin or Prozac. It is not in the
current definition of mental incapacity.

Even a temporary diagnosis of traumatic stress disorder might raise a flag,
according to some pundits. Under the Clinton administration, more than 80,000
servicemen and women's names from the Veterans Administration were sent to and
included in the NICS database on that and related grounds.

Although current law already allows an appeal of the denial status, it has been
ignored frequently by authorities. A special book helps people with gun-rights
problems, entitled "Brady Denial," available from Bloomfield Press (linked at
the end).

The new law includes a new "guarantee" that those wrongly found guilty without
due process (by having one computer load their names into
another computer) can fight to prove their innocence and regain their lost
rights. This is intended to cover veterans, among others, where a medical
diagnosis without a specific finding that the person is dangerous or mentally
incompetent, has led to their rights being denied. The NRA gets credit for that.
The NRA also fought to have other protections in the NICS expansion bill:

Mental health findings that have expired or been removed, or commitments from
which a person has been completely released with no further supervision
required, will no longer prohibit the legal purchase of a firearm -- after the
state and NICS correct the records.

All participating federal or state agencies are supposed to establish "relief
from disability" programs to allow people to get a mental health prohibition
removed, either administratively or in court. The NRA points out that this type
of relief has not been available at the federal level for 15 years. The law has
many such protective requirements, but provides no punishment
of government agents who fail to comply or to keep records accurately.

It's not clear if other remedies this law provides, for relief from
disabilities, will be as meaningless as ones already on the books, blocked by
Congress since 1992 by simply refusing to fund them. The bill makes it clear
that no amount of elapsed time from a disqualifying event works to help restore
lost rights. States cannot refuse to include relevant records no matter how old
they are.

Although the Smith Amendment (1999) stopped the FBI from taxing gun sales
through the NICS system, the NRA has added another provision to prevent the FBI
from charging "a user fee" for using NICS. Appropriations bills repeatedly
attempt to circumvent that taxation ban, and have needed constant attention.
Additional audit requirements have also been added by the NRA to try to help
control NICS and the people who run it.

In perhaps the most glaring omission from news reports, the Dept. of Homeland
Security will be required to add and update its
relevant records to the NICS database at least quarterly. DHS has sought, and
has had some success in seeking, relatively autonomous control in identifying
enemy combatants (a category that would presumably prohibit firearm possession).
Prior to this bill, DHS records were not, in and of themselves, included as
grounds to deny firearms rights.

With support from both pro- and anti-gun factions, and a hue-and-cry still
ringing from a recent psychopathic madman's atrocities, the chances for passage
of the 5,000-word bill are considered good. The bill and this analysis will be
posted here later today: