A Blue State needs to pass legislation regarding any gun sales without completed background checks

[Tom Rinaldo]

It should follow the exact same template as the Texas anti-abortion bill. It should ban all gun sales made without the buyer first passing a background check with the same vigilante enforcement mechanism used by Texas: private citizens collect $10,000 through civil suits by informing on anyone who sells guns without background checks, buy guns without background checks, or aids and assists anyone involved in the sale of a gun without a completed background check. If that State already requires full background checks for every gun sale, it can target something else like, say, requiring background checks for the purchase of ammunition.

I saw this type of law rhetorically invoked, by former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal during a TV appearance on MSNBC, as something that those on the Right would immediately condemn as anti-constitutional. But why stop at just rhetorically making that point? Make it an actual law, and then see what the Supreme Court and Republican State Legislatures have to say about that.

Unlike abolishing reproductive rights, requiring background checks for all gun purchases is extremely popular with the public. In Texas today abortion providers must legally prove that there was no fetal heartbeat prior to performing that procedure. In California tomorrow (or in any other blue state) matter) gun show vendors, and private individuals engaged in gun sales (and those who assisted those transactions in any way), should be subject to $10,000 bounties placed on their heads. If the Supreme Court refuses to strike down an unconstitutional assault on a constitutionally guaranteed right, due to certain "complexities" in the law, they can't interfere with legislation that furthers clearly constitutional constraints on the exercise of a different constitutionally guarantee, because of those very same legal "complexities.

[sl8]

1. Why wouldn't the state just arrest the perpetrator and send them to prison?

The Texas law was written the way it was to avoid judicial review. It specifies that there will be no government enforcement, only enforcement by "civilian" lawsuits. That's not currently much of an issue with state mandated background checks. Plenty of states currently have them.

Currently, if you break the state's background check law, the state can send you to prison. Would your plan's "civilian" enforcement replace state enforcement, like the Texas law, or would it go further and allow both?

[Tom Rinaldo]

2. In my mind the whole point would be to totally mimiic the Texas law, because then the legal farce...

...is exposed. The right would not stand for the shoe being on the other foot. They would demand that such a law be struck down immediately. Even introducing legislation like this in a high profile way in a Democrat controlled State Legislature could give pause to other Republican controlled states trying to go down the Texas path in outlawing abortion.

This specific legislative initiative would, in a sense, be designed to fail, and thus to bring down the Texas law with it. That's why I threw out banning ammunition sales without a background check rather than guns themselves. Make it seemingly outrageous for gun owners the way the Texas law is for women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to control their own bodies.

There are other ways for a blue state to enforce background checks, but that isn't the point.