Don’t blame Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt for gun background check folly

In her Sunday letter to the Review-Journal, Linda Cavazos chastises columnist Victor Joecks’ “desperate attempt to try to justify Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s inaction on enforcement of the background check law passed by voters in November.” But Mr Laxalt is following the very law that Ms. Cavazos voted for in November.

This was a badly written, on-the-cheap ballot initiative that was shoved down our throats by a New York billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, and which passed by less than 1 percentage point (it carried only Clark County). If Ms. Cavazos had read the law before voting for it, she would have known that we use a system that employs local and state records, along with the federal system, to verify firearms background checks. Mr. Bloomberg and his bunch wrote a law that bypassed the state Legislature in favor of supposedly free background checks. Who’s going to pay the FBI for these free background checks?

Even if Mr Laxalt got an agreement with the FBI, the agency would still be woefully short on needed information to check for gun purchases. For example, the vaunted FBI background check many times has no clue (depending on the state) if the person in question has a court order pending or has been charged at the local level with a crime.

The federal system has huge shortcomings due to states, counties and cites failing (due to their laws) to pass along pertinent, current information about crime and criminals. There are also unreported issues involving mental health, commitments for addictions or competency.

This is the main reason that most law enforcement professionals look at the National Instant Criminal Background Check System with a jaundiced view.