My position on background checks as they are today is similar to the majority of people on this site. But as I've posted before, we do have a growing mental health problem in the U.S. which accounts for a spike and continued growth of homelessness in our country and also explains some of the more visible gun-related crime.
So let me ask a related question and I'll ask that you suspend disbelief while reading the following:
If a background check could be done anonymously; that is, an automated query done in a bunch of databases regarding felony's, mental health records, actually not much else I can think of, and then when the query is complete and a yes/no is decided, the record of that query, and more importantly who has been queried disappears and cannot be stored or accessed ever. No human would or could be in the loop ensuring privacy, much like the trillions of data transactions and queries that are done across the net every day. So if that were done, would it be more acceptable?
It would seem to eradicate the notion of BATF or others creating a list of gun owners (there would be no list because there would never be any names stored) that many people fear would be used in the future to remove their legally owned firearms. No agency would be alerted of a query unless there was a 'fail' (e.g. the request to purchase is in a database as a felon). The only record that remains would be what exists today, varying state by state. Basically a local/paper record filed at the FFL or gun shop where appropriate. It would be a follow on discussion to see if this should be used for private sales as well. For now I would assume 'no' and that the majority of gun sales (does anyone know? I'm assuming 80% but its just a WAG) are run through a commercial entity which would be required to use this system.
Despite the fact that this could be done (the equivalent is done today with many viruses and other legal commercial software technologies) I accept that it would be too tempting for its implementors to leave a back door to preclude anonymity. That could be solved as well, but I doubt BATF would relinquish some control to enable that. So I'm only asking for people to consider it as a 'thought exercise' rather than something that should actually be considered.
Anyway, just a thought from a techie, gun owner and 2A supporter, and someone who is also trying to find a way to separate out the very few known bad people from purchasing (a) gun(s).
Comments and disagreements are welcomed. Flaming not so much.
B