Paul Helmke does not know what he is talking about:
Congress allows dealers to destroy criminal background check records after 24 hours, preventing the ATF from learning how well shops are following the Brady background checks requirements.
Dealers don’t have background check records. The FBI does. The dealers aren’t “allowed” to destroy the records, the FBI is required to. The rest of the sentence becomes nonsensical with the corrections applied.
But that doesn’t matter because I can’t even make even sense of some of the things the Brady Campaign (soon to be ex-) President says when there aren’t any factual corrections to be made:
It is time for Washington’s politicians to look out for average people who do not deserve to have unethical gun dealers – and the gun lobby that shields them — pushing illegal guns into their neighborhoods.
Which guns are illegal? Guns the spontaneously disassemble by the time you fire your 100th round? Guns that go full auto and don’t stop when you release the trigger?
And how does a gun dealer push them into a neighborhood? Does this mean the dealer pulls up in your cul-de-sac and pushes a pallet of guns without serial numbers out of his truck onto the pavement? No gun dealer does that—that’s more like something our government would do.
Don’t know why he’s complaining about it. It’s that exact “feature” that results in my transaction being held every time I buy a firearm.
The background info is updated when police shove information into it. They then verify if that information is still valid and dump it.
As usual Helmke and crew are talking out of their ass.
The background checks do work, since I’m here on a green card I have on average a two day wait on long arms, and have had longer than a week on a side arm, even with a State issued CPL. You know, because I could be a terrible threat to every day life in the USA, just like where I come from back in Canada.
The background checks work to keep a law abiding permanent resident unarmed for up to a week at a time, while criminals get stolen firearms in back alley deals – mission accomplished !
I take it you can detect just a scosh of sarcasm here…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t FFLs have to keep the records they use for the Brady checks (the Form 4471) forever? And if the FFL goes out of business, don’t they have to turn over all those forms to the ATF?
How is that allowing dealers to “destroy criminal background check records after 24 hours”?
Oh, wait. He’s lying. You can tell because his name is “Paul Helmke”.
I think it’s 20 years that they have to keep them on file, but yeah…if I were an FFL I’d keep them forever anyway just as a CYA measure
@Jake, The 4473 need to be kept for 20 years. But the criminal background check records are never seen by the FFL. They just get back a “PROCEED”, “DENY”, or “PENDING” result from the FBI.
If the result is “PROCEED” then the FBI must destroy the record of the transaction with 24 hours to prevent there from being a gun owner and quasi-gun (no gun serial numbers are reported) registration.
Helmke either doesn’t understand the system or is deliberately misleading people. If it is deliberate then I have to assume it is in an effort to get further restrictions on (or registration of) people exercising their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms or to get donations.
“Helmke either doesn’t understand the system or is deliberately misleading people.”
This logic comes up more and more often. I have to point out that we’re talking about someone who’s made a career in dealing with gun laws. Someone with a career in gun laws, or in what ever the subject may be, who doesn’t take the occasional five minutes once in a while during an entire career to check things like this MUST be deliberately ignorant at best. Remaining deliberately ignorant on the subject of your chosen career (while claiming to be an expert) is just the same thing as deliberately misleading people including one’s self.
That’s lying on two levels instead of only one. He’s misrepresenting himself as an expert, and he’s misrepresenting the easily obtained facts of the matter.
In short; he’s lying either way you look at it.
And as I’ve been saying; he, like all leftists, is counting on general stupidity and complacency to get his anti rights agenda through. Once we started educating ourselves thereby remedying the effects of public education, he was toast– a “dead man walkin’” with regard to his agenda.
We’ve caught Brady/VPC lying intentionally so often that there is no reason to give Helmke any benefit of any mythical doubt. I am confident he’s a liar.
Well, God knows, if we are talking about “general stupidity,” we are talking about Americans — because we are the most generally stupid people on the planet.
Well, God knows, if we are talking about “general stupidity,” we are talking about Americans — because we are the most generally stupid people on the planet.
I have a good idea why you’d think that Ubu.
Would do? How about more like has done.
Note also: “…Congress’ probe has narrowed to make the acting FBI Director Kenneth Melson the primary target.”
Funny…I though Melson was acting director of the ATF. Since I can think of no logical reason to deliberately alter the Dept. that Melson heads up, I am left with the only viable conclusion: Helmke truly is ignorant.
And later in the same paragraph: “But many federal officials, including Rep. Issa, are not doing their part to end the lawlessness along the border and in our communities.”
So…bringing to light and calling to task an agency that not only ignored, but actively violated the very federal criminal laws they were charged with enforcing is somehow not an active attempt at ‘ending lawlessness’?
Perhaps I should reassess my earlier conclusion; Helmke is not ignorant, he’s delusional.
Speak for yourself, ubu.
Notice that when ubu is done, Helmke is still either utterly incompetent at what he purports to be an expert on or a liar.
And frankly, we know which.
“Well, God knows, if we are talking about “general stupidity,” we are talking about Americans — because we are the most generally stupid people on the planet.”
I was going to disagree with you, but we’ve become a country where, whenever we encounter a problem, we demand government regulation to fix it, rather than look into our own character and ask ourselves “where did we go wrong?”–and as a result, we break things, and then make the things that are broken even worse. (Take Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. as classic examples, with their gun bans and high murder rates.)
When, on when, will Americans become wise, and reject these shackles that prevent us from doing great things? We should know better!