Opposing SB104

There’s a hearing for SB104 on Tuesday, May 29th.  Here’s what the bill does:

This bill requires that if a resident of Milwaukee County is a party to a transfer of a handgun and no firearms dealer is involved in the transfer, a firearms restrictions record search must be conducted on the transferee before the handgun may be transferred. Under the bill, the transferee must request a firearms restrictions record search through a firearms dealer.

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The bill provides that any person who intentionally violates the firearms restrictions record search requirement for handgun transfers that involve a resident of Milwaukee County and do not involve a firearms dealer is subject to a fine not to exceed $25,000 or a term of imprisonment (consisting of a term of confinement followed by a term of extended supervision) that may not exceed ten years or both a fine and imprisonment.

Under this bill, if you want to sell your pistol to your brother, you’d have to go to a firearms dealer and pay them to do a background check on your brother first.  There are a number of very serious problems with this bill.

First, despite the rationale for the bill advanced by its sponsors, it does absolutely nothing for crime prevention.  Crooks who are already buying guns illegally on the street are not going to suddenly comply with this law.  All this law would do is impose additional restrictions and cost on those who are law-abiding citizens. 

Second, this bill is targeted just at Milwaukee County, but it is more far-reaching than that.  Currently we have a statewide preemption law that forbids municipalities from enacting gun control laws more strict than those at the state level.  If this bill is passed, it will open the door to letting municipalities all around the state enacting their own gun control laws.  This will lead to a patchwork of gun control laws in the state and will make it extremely difficult for law-abiding gun owners to comply with the law. 

Third, consider how that patchwork of gun control laws might look.  There are a lot of kooky folks working in local government.  Is it outside of the realm of possibility that Madison would pass an outright gun ban?  How about Racine deciding that people shouldn’t be allowed to purchase more than 20 rounds of ammunition at a time?  Even if you support such restrictions on our right to keep and bear arms, consider the cost of litigation when folks challenge the constitutionality of such restrictions. 

This is a law that would do nothing to stem violence in Milwaukee, but would take long strides toward infringing on the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.  Hopefully it will die a swift and painful death in the legislature.