A familiar refrain amongst anti-rights nuts is that firearm registrations, requiring people to go through FFLs in order to perform any kind of firearm transfers, and requiring the associated background check for all of those transfers could never cause problems for people with no criminal record, people who are strictly law-abiding, and people who have done nothing wrong – namely, the vast majority of the firearm owners out there.
It would appear as though the only reasonable response to such suggestions is, “O RLY?“:
My daughter gave her daddy a gun for his birthday. As a law-abiding citizen he went to transfer ownership. Ten days later a letter arrived from the Department of Justice — transfer denied, stated my husband is a felon and he can’t have fire arms. Shock: He knew he was not a felon, had bought and registered guns for years, and now that department states that he is a felon since 1972 and can’t have any guns.
Over the course of one, possibly two months (it is not entirely clear from the letter), the California Department of Justice (what a misnomer) and the husband’s local police department repeatedly and consistently dodged this man’s request for his non-existant criminal record (which must be why they could not find it, right?), ignored his complaints, claimed to have “lost the paperwork”, and told him that if he could not specify the non-existant crime in question, they could not talk about it (yeah, because that makes sense). This proceeded until such time as the husband brought to bear the threat of a lawyer, and then, suddenly, it was sweetness and light, and “you are not really a felon… but we will not send you paperwork documenting that fact”.
The husband was never a felon, but, for that month or two, he was completely incapable of exchanging in lawful commerce that he otherwise would have been legally permitted to do, and if the CADOJ really wanted to make life interesting, they could have showed up on his doorstep with an arrest warrant for him, considering that he, a supposed felon, possessed firearms aside from the one being gifted to him. Of course, were that to happen, something tells me the situation would have been ironed out very quickly, and the DOJ would be facing a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit… which might be exactly why it did not happen.
And all of this is thanks to Kalifornistan’s wonderfully draconian firearm laws.
When someone else’s idiotic clerical error can transform you from “average citizen” to “felon”, with all of the punishments and limitations thereof, we are well past the point of having a “broken” government.
(Courtesy of Say Uncle.)
Same thing happened to my step dad after he moved from California to Idaho. When he went to buy a handgun, his name came back on the background check as a no. Took him a month or two to finally straighten out with, I think it is the FBI? Turned out some other guy with the same name had done some bad things and for whatever dumbass paper work error type reason, they thought it was him.
I guess all’s well that ends well, but still pretty enraging. That’s what happens when we live in a world where regular human contact and trust is no longer the driving force in human interaction, and technical solutions have to be substituted for actual knowledge of a person.
In that case, it could be pretty much any federal agency that was being stupid… in this particular case, I am fairly certain that it is the CADOJ, though they are not specificied as such in the letter.
In any case, given the sheer number of methods the federal government has of uniquely identifying us, there is absolutely no excuse for crossed identities and abridged rights due to it. Worse, the people who are responsible for the initial paperwork mixup, or for your father’s misidentification when he went to purchase the firearm, will never face any kind of punishment or repercussion – not even the lightest of administrative slaps on the wrist. And so the problem continues unabated, partially because those perpetrating it know they can get away with it, and thus do not care enough to do a damned thing about it.
More specifically, this is what happens when our government forgets that it works for us, and starts treating us all as criminals, regardless of whether or not we are. Until we fix that, “errors” like this are going to keep happening.
This is also an example of why requiring background checks is wrong in the first place – I have to prove my innocence every single time I purchase a firearm from an FFL. Normally, it’s a matter of waiting a few minutes for the check to come through clear, but in this guy’s case, and Nadnerbus’ step-dad, because they could not prove their innocence, they were denied a Constitutionally guaranteed right.
Whatever happened to “innocent until proven guilty?”
Why, that only applies to those who have already blatantly broken the law, Jake – you and I and average people are not deserving of such lofty protections.
… And I wish I was being sarcastic, but you and I both know that is not entirely fascetious.