Background Checks

“I never saw his face… [I] saw man with two holsters over his shoulders begin to turn towards me and down the aisle of desk. … The force of the first bullet caused me to throw the phone from my hand… Each time he came back into our room I was shot again. The second and third time in both my hips and the fourth time through my right shoulder.”(Goddard) This is the beginning of Colin Goddard’s story. Goddard was one of the victims of the April 16th 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University shooting in which 33 people were killed and another 23 were injured. He has since become a gun control activist and has devoted himself to fixing the gun control/regulation system in this country. In a meeting with congressmen Goddard says, “…I

The problem is that only federally licensed gun deals are required to get a background check on costumers. Private distributers and private parties have no obligation to do any form of background checks. The background check system is “designed to keep firearms out of the hands of felons, fugitives, drug abusers, people determined by a court to be dangerous or incompetent due to mental illness or those who have been committed to a mental institution, among others.”(Wright) There have been measures taken to spread the rule of background checks to private sales, but not to transactions between friends and family. The NRA heavily opposes the thought of making background checks more abundant, however. They fear that more background checks will lead to a national registry of guns, a gun registry would keep track of certain types of guns. The contradiction to the NRA’s worry, however, is that there is already a bill that forbids the formation of a nation registry. As Colin Goddard mentions in his article “I passed right by all the licensed dealers responsibly conducting background checks and went right through the loophole over and over again. … I bought an AK-47 without showing any ID or going through and background

New York was the first state to pass new gun control laws after the Newtown school shooting. They cracked down on assault weapons, requiring owners of these weapons to register them with the state police, reduced the capacity of magazines from ten rounds to seven and instated rules for background checks for people not only purchasing weapons, but also ammunition. They also expanded background checks to private sales people, with the exception of sales between immediate family members, tougher penalties were also established for the use of illegal firearms. This is a very productive step forward for pro-gun control advocates. It provides a balance between gun freedoms while at the same time creating some more secure safety measures as far as sales and transactions of weapons go. Even with the huge example that New York is providing not many states have followed suit. Some states have started to introduce new bills, but not many have actually been passed. With all this said and done, New York still has a very high number of gun murders. There needs to be a more aggressive and whole hearted attempt by the whole country to make a