By Greg Drobny
Let’s imagine you’ve just had a hard day at work. That coworker—you know, the one who won’t stop talking—has gotten on your last nerve.
Most of the time you can ignore them, but today they just had to tell you about the latest fight with their mouth-breathing significant other in excruciating detail. You feel like “Jack’s complete sense of disgust” from Fight Club.
So the clock finally ticks down—slower than normal due to the story about who loaded the dishwasher wrong actually bending space-time to simultaneously lengthen the story and take hours off of your life—and it’s time to go home. On the way, you stop at the liquor store to find your favorite bourbon.
Ahh, bourbon. That’ll take the edge off the mind-numbing display of domestic vacuity you were just witness to.
“Alright, just sign here, here, and here, and hang out for an hour or so while we run the check,” the clerk says to you as he puts the sweet nectar out of your reach.
“Umm, say what?”
“Your background check. We have to run your background check before you can take the bourbon” he states matter-of-factly.
Clearly he doesn’t understand your situation.
“Hey man, I just want to go home, relax, and blow off some steam by sipping bourbon and playing Call of Duty.”
“I get it, I truly do. But….the law is the law…”
How does that grab you? Does that make any sense at all?
Of course, you’ve already made the correlation and some of you may actually think “but guns are different!” and started coming up with all sorts of reasons why this is a flawed analogy. You’ve either dismissed the idea as being absurd or are forming a rebuttal as we speak.
To those who fit in that category, I suggest that you keep reading because you’ve probably missed the point. 
Here’s the skinny: any time you require a person to do something like a background check prior to purchasing something, you are essentially forcing them to ask for permission. You are requiring a certain hoop be jumped through prior to taking ownership beyond just the exchange of money for a product.
“But wait!” you say, “we require background checks for people in all sorts of jobs!” and believe that this somehow justifies a background check on a firearm. I’m sure you can think of several instances in the business world where background checks are a normal part of life.
This is flawed thinking for two reasons. First, it’s never good to argue in favor of something simply because something similar already exists. It implies that the first thing is obviously good and noble because it exists. “Well, we are already killing 100 puppies a day, so I don’t see why 200 is a big deal.”
Second, and more importantly, requiring background checks for employment is actually a far worse comparison to firearm purchase than the alcohol analogy. It’s a greater leap for a number of reasons, but this will be pretty straight forward—because I am thinking of the children*.
Have you heard of this Constitution thing? If not, that’s okay because most pay it no mind, anyway. Which is why I’m not going to worry about it right now (if politicians play this way, I might as well do the same).
Instead, I’m going to demonstrate this from the concepts that the Constitution (sorry, last time I promise) was built upon—the idea of natural rights.
Let’s say you come to me for a job. I have need of someone who can work long term—a year or more—at selling ice cream to neighborhood kids (told you I was thinking of the children). I simply can’t cover the ground with one truck in my booming ice cream novelty business, so I need another driver.
Is it in my best interest to find someone trustworthy who doesn’t have a criminal record? Of course—again, I’m thinking of the children.
However—and this is important—is it the right of that person I’m doing the background check on to work for me? Am I infringing on his rights by not hiring him?
Conversely, is it your personal right to defend yourself, your home, your family, and sip bourbon, possibly even at the same time?** It is important to draw this distinction, as it carries with it some fairly large implications.
Poster version.
Rights don’t come from a government. If they did, they wouldn’t be rights.
Again, people would think it patently absurd to suggest that alcohol would need a permission slip, yet barely bat an eye when doing the same for a firearm that could very well be used for the protection of one’s family (bourbon, though wonderful, probably can’t boast the same).
There really is no way around the fact that a background check is not only asking permission to do something, but it is treading into the waters of pre-crime. Yeah, I know, Tom Cruise is basically a walking douchecicle, but that movie touched on some interesting concepts—not the least of which being the idea that we can prevent something that hasn’t happened yet by pre-judging an individual based on probabilities.
Did I just make a corollary between background checks and friggin’ Minority Report? Yup, that happened. But Spieldberg films aside, pre-judging people for things they haven’t done yet is taught as being bad behavior in elementary school (children!); why is it suddenly okay as adults?
Free men do not ask permission to bear arms. It’s a fundamental concept and one that we would all do well to understand.
*This automatically guarantees that I am on the right side of things if I offer this first, right?
**I don’t personally recommend this, as alcohol and firearms are a potentially unstable mix. Unless you’re a federal agency, in which case it’s totally fine.