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Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. We vote on legislation. While people, when responding to a poll, may respond overwhelmingly in response to certain questions, it doesn't mean that, when they come to understand fully what the law at issue would actually do, they wouldn't feel differently.

The truth is that the legislation that we are being asked to pass by unanimous consent today, without additional debate, discussion, opportunity for amendment, opportunity for input by the public--that is the bill S. 494, the Background Check Expansion Act--has some real problems with it, problems that I think make it a bill that stands to transform, in some circumstances, ordinary law-abiding citizens into criminals.

We always have to consider this when evaluating any law, particularly any law with criminal implications, particularly any law with criminal implications that touches on a constitutionally protected right enumerated in a constitutional amendment.

This is not solely about transactions involving guns at gun stores. This is about the father who wishes to pass down a hunting rifle to his son or the friend who wants to lend a shotgun to his neighbor who is in need of protection at the time.

Universal background checks, as this bill conceives them, don't just regulate; they criminalize these quintessential moments of American life and, under this legislation, would render unlawful what in countless circumstances would be lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior.

Now, most would not think twice about lending a firearm to a family member for sporting or personal protection purposes, and yet this bill threatens to do that by narrowing the definition of family to such an extent that passing a gun to a daughter-in-law or to a great-grandson could lead to criminal charges. This bill fails to distinguish between a criminal act and a gesture of trust and safety.

Participating in a hunting trip often involves using firearms. Of course, it is important to be aware that under this proposal, under this bill, if you hand over your firearm to a partner during such a trip, even for a short period of time, you could potentially be held criminally liable if that individual doesn't hold the proper hunting license. It is an absurd overreach that would penalize the innocent traditions that bind our communities together.

The only conceivable way to enforce such a law is through the creation of an expansive, Orwellian national gun registry--yes, a national gun registry. Now, it is here that we arrive at the true purpose or, at least, the true inevitable outcome of this legislation were it to become law.

Universal background checks only work when you have a national gun registry. This bill would require a registry, even though and notwithstanding the legitimate policy concerns embraced by Congress when Congress prohibited the creation of such a registry in the Firearm Owners' Protection Act.

However, the ATF has already compiled a database with over 920 million records, a direct challenge to both the letter and the spirit of the Firearm Owners' Protection Act and Public Law 112-55. Let's not compound the problem created by the ATF's illegal and constitutionally problematic registry by enacting a law that cannot be enforced without the creation of a national gun registry.

Registries lead, inevitably, to gun confiscation. If you don't believe me, if you don't want to take my word for it on that, just look to the public statements made by some of my colleagues in the Senate and our counterparts in the House. They told us confiscation is the goal.

As our friends at Gun Owners of America have reminded us, without this invasive registry, enforcement of S. 494 is unfeasible. We are staring down the barrel of a system that would monitor the most personal and responsible uses of firearms among citizens.

Now, the Senator asked us to pass this major legislation without any debate, without any meaningful opportunity for amendment or further discussion. This isn't how Congress works. This certainly isn't how the U.S. Senate should work, certainly not on a matter so significant and so directly tied to an enumerated constitutional right as this one.

This bill should, of course, go through the Senate Judiciary Committee, a body on which I serve and a body where Members routinely can and do debate, offer amendments, and raise these and other policy and constitutional concerns.

I also want to speak for a moment to what was referenced as the gun show loophole. It is not, in fact, a loophole. There is no such loophole. The effect of the law is that, if you are a federally licensed firearms dealer, you have to perform these functions before you sell it, with or without you being in the presence of a gun show. If an FFL shows up at a gun show and sells guns, the FFL has to conduct the background check. It isn't a loophole.

Moreover, we are talking about a tiny, minuscule percentage of people who even do these things. We are looking at the overwhelming percentage. According to the Department of Justice bureau that collects crime statistics, a tiny percentage of people who even buy them at gun shows go on to commit crimes with them--like less than 1 percent. Very few of them even buy them in any retail establishment, opting instead to buy them on a clandestine market in an illegal way.

So, at the end of the day, we have to evaluate this law just like we would any law--but this law in particular, given that it touches on a constitutionally protected, enumerated right. We have to look at both the law's impact on criminal behavior, which is negligible, and on the law's tendency to punish the law-abiding.

It is not the law-abiding who typically will go to illegal sources to buy a gun. It is not the law-abiding who refuse to dot the i's and cross the t's. It is typically the law-abiding who are willing to go through that process. We shouldn't be adding more redtape that is going to affect mostly the law-abiding, touching on very few of those actually bent on violent criminal activity.

This bill would do precisely that. It would punish the law-abiding citizens for the actions of criminals. It is time to accept this fact, and it is time for us, really, to choose between the various tensions that we feel pulling on us. I am confident that, at the end of the day, we should choose common sense over fear. We should choose liberty over control. We should choose the rights of the law-abiding many over the criminally minded few.

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