By now, we all know the Brady background-registration gun law has failed to reduce homicides, a fact reported widely in the media based on a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That's what the anti-gun lobby and many Colorado politicians want us to believe. In fact, the petition initiative by Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic, the name of which likens gun ownership to a disease, is an attempt to expand the failed Brady system to private sales at gun shows. Criminals don't obey gun laws. They don't obey the 22,000 plus gun laws on the books, and the next gun law won't stop them, either.
Criminals merely resort to theft and the black market to get their guns.
However, background checks are effective at stopping honest people from purchasing a gun for self-defense. Because of faulty and incomplete records, the national Brady check wrongfully denies many thousands of people their rights of self-defense. Thanks to the Colorado legislature and administrative pressure, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation wrongfully denies even more Coloradans their rights than does the national system. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation vetoes gun purchases simply because a person has been arrested, even if CBI has no information showing that there was ever a criminal conviction. In fact, the overwhelming majority of CBI denials are for arrests, not convictions.