It should have come as no surprise that the Supreme Court of the United Starts held invalid the provision of the Brady Law that required the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of a county to conduct a background check of a handgun buyer during a 5-day waiting period.
On July 12, 1992, in an article of mine in the Dallas Morning News, entitled "President Can't Have Much Effect on Violent Crime," I wrote:
"Police powers" are reserved to the states by our Constitution. We have no federal police force like the Russian KGB, only investigative agencies that investigate specific federal crimes..... The government has not been able to provide an efficient postal service. This is one of the specifically enumerated constitutional powers. How can we expect it to reduce local violent crime, an area in which it has not the slightest mandate in the Constitution?......"
Writing on my Web page in August of 1996, I said in part:
In an article in the Wall Street Journal for September 17, James Bovard explodes the myth of the 40,000 to 1000,000 denials with hard facts from the General Accounting Office (GAO). He also points out that five Federal district judges have ruled that the Brady Act is a violation of the 10th Amendment (which reserves to the states all those powers not specifically granted to the Federal Government by the Constitution - among them police powers). The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a Brady Act challenge this fall. You may remember that the Supreme Court held the Federal Gun Free School Zone to be a violation of the 10th Amendment and struck down the law. The Brady Act is a more onerous invasion of "States Rights" and deciding against it should be a slam dunk for the Court.
To those who cry out that the gun lobby, led by the NRA, has once again used its influence to continue the carnage in this country by the use of handguns, please consider the following:This is not a victory for the gun lobby. This is not a victory for the NRA. It is a victory for all Americans who want to live in a country governed by the Constitution and with minimum invasion by the Federal Government. Over the past 30 years or so, the Congress has increasingly usurped the powers of the states. They have pushed the interpretation of the right to regulate Interstate Commerce and the Power to Tax to the very limits - far beyond any reasonable interpretation of the Constitution. Most people have never read the Constitution and very few are interested in the legislative process. So, with the American people oblivious to the steady encroachment on our lives, the Congress has quite often made a mockery of the Constitution.
Finally, Americans have begun to stand up to Big Government, but only in the most general of ways. It is time more people look at the legislation that is passed and demand that in the future the Federal Government does not subvert the Constitution as it has done so frequently in recent years.
With regard to the Brady Law: Twenty-seven states have their own version of the Brady Law. If you do not live in one of those states, and after studying the issue carefully, you think your state needs one, then petition your state legislature to pass such a law. Don't abdicate power to the Federal Government in Washington. Much of our problems as a nation stem from years of letting the Federal Government legislate in areas where it had neither a legal nor a moral right to do so.
The Brady Law decision by the Supreme Court is not about guns. It is about freedom from Federal tyranny. Make no mistake about that.
Richard Rhodes
06/28/1997