One day after passing its first gun control legislation in almost a decade, the House of Representatives voted 228-298 to pass another, H.R. 1112, which would affect how people buy guns from licensed gun dealers, on Thursday.

Titled the "Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2019," the bill was introduced by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and it claims to "strengthen the background check procedures to be followed before a Federal firearms licensee may transfer a firearm to a person who is not such a licensee." Basically, where H.R. 8 aimed to increase the obstacles to private gun sales, this affects retail transactions.

Gun control advocates claim that the bill is an effort to close the so-called “Charleston loophole,” which is the gun-control term for the part of federal law that allows a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) to sell to a buyer if the FBI takes longer than three days to do the background check. This is how Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof was able to buy a gun despite a previous arrest that should have prevented him from doing so.

Under the proposed legislation, the FBI would have 10 business days instead of three. Furthermore, after those 10 days, the legislation would require the prospective buyer to petition the Department of Justice, which then has another 10 days to make the determination.

If you're already familiar with the process of buying a gun from an FFL, the proposal might raise an eyebrow or two for you. It did for House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins, R-Ga., who pointed out that the new procedures could be used to create a never-ending, bureaucratic wild goose chase for prospective buyers because of the different time limits based on calendar and business days.

“Now, I’m not sure if HR 1112 was written this way out of incompetence or malice,” Collins remarked. “I’ll let the American people decide on that.”

Three Republicans voted for final passage of the bill: Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Penn., Chris Smith, R-N.J., and Peter King, R-N.Y. Seven Democrats voted against it. Like H.R. 8, the bill has little to no chance of getting a vote in the Senate, much less passing.

The House Judiciary committee voted to advance H.R. 8, also known as the “Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019,” by a party-line vote of 25 to 13 on Wednesday.

This bill doesn’t have much chance of even being brought up for a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate, let alone getting to President Trump’s desk for signature. However, a line from one of the bill’s committee backers illustrates the kind of hubris behind this and other gun control laws.

“The president likes to rail against Chicago” on gun crime numbers, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said in opposition to a proposed amendment that would have exempted concealed carry permit holders from the bill’s background check requirements. “Chicago is only as safe as the laws in Indiana; California is only as safe as the laws in the states around us. And that’s why a federal requirement for all firearm purchases would protect Chicago as well as it would protect Indianapolis as well as it would protect Oakland, California.”

A hypothetical federal law would certainly apply equally in all those places, but the question of how much safer it would actually makes things is fair game for debate.

As I explained previously, there are already a lot of gun transactions that merit background check, and H.R. 8 would only extend those to private transactions between private citizens who are both residents of the same state. The question is, how many people who were already trying to buy a gun in violation of federal law would stop to comply with expanded background provisions?

No matter how high anti-gun states or the federal government try to stack the barriers to lawful gun ownership, those barriers are really only going to affect how the already law-abiding conduct themselves.

The guy who swipes a gun from a friend or family member and the guy who gets his hardware on a black market aren’t going to stop to run a NICS check. And people who commit crimes with guns in their possession don’t tend to get them from federal dealers or gun shows.

What the legislation would actually do, in practice, is create a bureaucratic and cost barrier for private, law-abiding citizens who want to buy, sell, or trade firearms with other law-abiding citizens. It would take away the ability, for instance, as Ranking Member Doug Collins, R-Ga., pointed out, of a domestic violence victim to borrow a gun from a friend without first getting a background check done.

In the meantime, criminals will still flout the system to get their hands on firearms, regardless of what the feds say about conducting background checks for private sales, and they can still move between different jurisdictions to do violent, criminal things.

Ultimately, regardless of what laws are passed, citizens are only free from gun violence to the degree that they can effectively fire back and neutralize it.

The Trump administration’s recent decision to ban bump stock devices should concern you, even if you don’t own a bump stock or even a firearm, a conservative House member explains.

In an interview with Blaze Media, founding Second Amendment Caucus Chair Thomas Massie, R-Ky., explained how the recent decision sets terrible precedents for both gun owners and non-gun owners alike. The DOJ’s new ruling is factually incorrect about how bump stocks actually work. The agency said that the devices violate previous federal firearms laws because they supposedly “allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.”

That’s not true. In reality, bump-firing a semi-automatic firearm still requires one trigger pull per round. The gun itself moves back and forth. And that doesn't require a special stock to do.

Massie also expressed his frustration that the decision was made without involving the legislative branch and said that he believes that House leadership asked the administration to do it in order to save elected Republicans from making a hard decision.

“I think they wanted to insulate members of the Republican conference that would have voted for a bump stock ban or would have voted against,” Massie said, adding that lawmakers “just didn’t want to be on record” on the issue.

Massie also said that banning the devices in reaction to their possible involvement in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting is premature, given that Congress still hasn’t been given all the information on what actually happened.

“We typically get briefing on things like that,” Massie said. “I’ve never seen a report on if any of the weapons in Vegas were actually modified to full auto instead of using a bump stock, which I suspect they were.”

But the biggest issue that affects people without guns is the kind of precedent that it sets for property rights, Massie explained.

“Even when the Democrats accomplished the so-called assault weapons ban in 1994, they allowed people to keep them, and they allowed them to be sold,” Massie said. By contrast, he added, the new ruling sets a precedent “that your property can be claimed because the executive branch changes its interpretation of a law that it had already ruled on multiple times.”

“And there’s no compensation, which is another concern of mine,” Massie continued, saying that “even the boldest Democrats” in favor of firearms confiscation measures understand “that they should be paid for.”

“It’s sort of an American principle that the government doesn’t take your stuff without compensating you,” the Kentucky congressman remarked.

However, in its ruling, the DOJ said that it doesn’t have the funds to compensate people whose bump stocks will be confiscated and that it doesn’t have congressional authorization to do so.

“I find it ironic that they feel empowered and authorized to change the law which they’ve already interpreted,” Massie said, “and then they say they can’t pay for them because they don’t have the authority.”

In conclusion, Massie told me that people shouldn’t overlook the implications of a ruling like this just because they don’t care about the fate of something that used to be a novelty firearms accessory until last year’s horrific murders in Las Vegas.

“I’m no fan of bump stocks; I think they waste ammunition and cause you to shoot inaccurately,” Massie explained with a laugh. However, “the precedent that this sets — allowing the executive branch to ban something that was legally acquired and then confiscate it and destroy it without compensation — is a horrible one.”

“Even if they were doing it in a different domain, it would be a horrible precedent,” he added, “but to have it in this domain, firearms, makes it much worse.”

A staunchly anti-gun California Democrat made headlines after he suggested using America’s nuclear arsenal against gun owners who refuse to hand over their hardware.

As reported at Fox News, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., made the remark on Twitter after another user said that Swalwell wants a war with gun owners: “Because that's what you would get” with his gun control agenda.

It’s easy to point out how insane it is that a sitting member of Congress is talking about confiscating the property of American citizens and using nukes against those who don’t comply, because it’s pretty insane. Whether or not you believe his claims of being facetious is up you.

But it’s also nice to see an anti-gun politician take the mask off for a moment to remind us what the debate about the Second Amendment is really about and why 2A exists in the first place. The talk about gun control is around these mythical “commonsense” laws that we can put in place that will supposedly make Americans safer through further firearms regulation. “We don’t want to take your guns away,” the argument goes, “we just want some common sense.”

But whenever gun control boosters start talking about these “commonsense” policies, things tend to fall apart when we get down to the details. So far, I’ve yet to run into a proposal that:

1. Is a legitimate policy innovation over what’s already on the books (i.e. isn’t just better enforcement of already existing law or stiffer penalties for breaking it).
2. Passes muster with the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments.
3. Isn’t completely ignorant of how guns work in the first place (e.g., defining “assault weapons” by common cosmetic features).
4. Would actually deter or reduce mass shootings or gun violence in quantity or severity, rather than just creating more soft targets – by disarming them – for those who were already going to break the law anyway.

This brings us back to the natural end of the gun control movement: bans and confiscation. Ultimately, this is where most anti-gun politicians and professional activists want to end up; those “commonsense” measures are stepping stones.

While some Americans would undoubtedly roll over and acquiesce to such an unjust action, a large number of them wouldn’t give up so easily. That kind of defiance against unjust rule is actually why America exists in the first place, in case anyone slept through the high school history class that covered what happened at Lexington and Concord.

In fact, another small dose of military history might actually help Swalwell understand the situation as well. In order to have to have the kind of “short war” that Swalwell predicts here, the U.S. government probably would have to go nuclear. Those who argue that the military could swiftly disarm the American public seem to forget that the two longest and most unsuccessful military engagements in American history have been in Afghanistan and Vietnam — against dedicated local populations with less sophisticated firepower and training.

But without historical ignorance, the American gun control movement wouldn’t exist at all. And statements and attitudes like Swalwell’s are exactly why the Second Amendment exists in the first place.