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Fiction Shoots Into Reality
Congress passed a whopping $328 billion spending bill this week, despite democratic party efforts to block it. While this bill contains countless pork projects, overtime cuts, school voucher programs, and gifts for the corporate media, the tiny little measure I'd like to concentrate on was a present for none other than the NRA.
Currently, when one goes to buy a gun at a licensed gun dealer (not a gun show or private sale), the dealer is lawfully required to run a background check. These records are stored for 90 days and then destroyed. Why are they disposed of at all?--in order to limit the ability to track guns used in crimes. Now, you might think 90 days is pretty short, but the NRA thinks it's way too long. Buried in this spending bill was a little measure that changes this limit to *24 hours*. You see, the chances that a crime gun could be traced within 24 hours of its purchase is practically nil, and thats just how the NRA wants it. It allows them to perpetuate their myth that criminals don't buy guns, they steal them--so there is no reason to further limit gun purchasing because it will have no effect on crime.
Whats eerie, though, is the degree to which these actions are played out and even predicted in a novel I recently read, called Balance of Power, by Richard North Patterson. The book centers around a fictitious president, congress, NRA, and others in an informed novel about gun rights and the powers of special interest in the halls of Washington. In the book, there is a balance in Washington, with a republican congress and a democratic president. The single-party power we have in real life, however, allows the NRA even more control than they have in the book, and this new measure is the evidence. I highly recommend this book as a gripping political suspense story backed up by extensive research into the issues of gun rights and lobbyist control of the US government.
Posted on January 24, 2004 03:46 PM
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