> The universal background check law means that it's illegal for me to give or lend my firearm to my brother, my cousin or my good friend. The existing law was fine: it should be illegal to knowingly transfer a firearm to someone ineligible to own one.
To improve the efficacy of the existing law, I think it would be useful to provide a free and anonymous service to the public that allows private gun owners to query the ATF, asking if a particular person is ineligible to own one. Use of the service would not be required by law (and possibly would be done with the permission of the person in question? I'm not sure there; there might be privacy concerns) but would allow law abiding citizens, who almost certainly have no interest in selling guns to criminals, to make an informed decision when selling a gun privately.
Yes, at least. I'd be mildly concerned about people like landlords misusing the system, but I suspect that you can already determine if somebody is a felon with their SSN?
To improve the efficacy of the existing law, I think it would be useful to provide a free and anonymous service to the public that allows private gun owners to query the ATF, asking if a particular person is ineligible to own one. Use of the service would not be required by law (and possibly would be done with the permission of the person in question? I'm not sure there; there might be privacy concerns) but would allow law abiding citizens, who almost certainly have no interest in selling guns to criminals, to make an informed decision when selling a gun privately.