As I was perusing the various wares at the show an FEG FP9 showed up, and at a very good price.  Having recently lost my Hi Power clone to a child who chose it for their 21st b-day present, I have been hoping to find a good deal on an FEG, FM, or Kareen Mk1.  This fit the bill.  (I wrote a detailed description of the gun in the handguns section.) A sale price was negotiated with a couple of magazines and I was on my way...Or so I thought.

After agreeing on the price and writing up a (now required) bill of sale, the seller and I were off to stop one on the bureaucracy train, the 4473 table.  One of the FFL's at the show had graciously agreed to run the private party sales on 4473's for his shop at no cost.  (I gotta think he regrets that now).  To accommodate the number of purchases, several tables were set up throughout the convention hall were buyers could obtain a 4473 and fill it out prior to heading to the FFL's booth for the final check.  When we arrived at the table we were #4 in line, and they were out of 4473's.  I had to wait there for 15 minutes for more forms to show up.  I cranked through the form pretty fast and was informed I now had to wait for an escort to take us over to the FFL booth.  All told I spent about 30 minutes at stop 1.

Next we were ushered over to the FFL's booth - AKA stop 2.  Now this poor guy was running a full booth.  Guns, ammo, accessories - The whole shebang in addition to his Samaritan duties running background checks.  He had four or five people helping him at his booth, but only one computer to handle his sales of invoiced items and background checks.  He was in full emergency mode with a stack of invoiced sales and background checks waiting for his attention, and a group of surly customers and third party buyers waiting on him to complete his work.  I spent about 30 minutes at this stop waiting for my paperwork to reach the top of his pile.  Once it did it was less than a minute for the thumbs up to come back, and a slip of red paper to be issued to me.  This paper was my "get out of the gunshow" proof of background.

At this point the seller released the gun to me, I released my money to him and I headed for the door.  I wasn't sure what the purpose of the red paper was yet, but figured I had to be about done.  This was when I hit stop 3.  At the exit I had to show my ID, the gun and they red paper to the gun show attendants.  They retained the red paper.  This stop passed reasonably quickly, taking only about five minutes.

All told, this process added over an hour to what should have been a 5 minute transaction.  And it distributed my PII (personally identifying information) to three additional parties, two of whom had no need for the information at all (the FFL who was dragged into my private business and the convention center who kept the red paper with my name, phone and DL number).

We have a state preemption clause, but the county asserts that they are not passing legislation, they are regulating commerce on county land (they own the expo center).  The state is updating it's preemption law today to make it clear to the county that they can't do this, and there is a lawsuit.

I will add this.  Philosophically I disagree that background checks will have a meaningful impact on crime, if any at all.  I also find them to be an infringement on 2A rights.  However, background checks for gun purchases through FFL dealers have been tested by the court and found to be within the interpreted bounds of legitimate government concerns.  It seem therefore to me only a matter of time before private sales go this way as well.

The big miss here for the pro-background check crowd was the opportunity to make this quick and painless.  A simple mobile app that made CFP status available to the guys running the exit could have cleared the vast majority of purchasers without any registry of the transaction and without any risk to PII.  Those without a CFP could have completed a background check in the ticketing area if they wanted to be able to buy a gun.

If they had made it quick and painless, they would have increased acceptance of the process at gun shows.  Instead, they generated a huge amount of backlash at the state capital and at the county level.

Three, but who's counting?

That said, it doesn't take rocket science to figure out how the process you went through could have been better, SQLBullet, or how it should have been done to make it far less time consuming.

As it is, is one hour of your life worth making sure someone who shouldn't have gun doesn't get one? I would say so.

I would also say that trimming 45-50 minutes off that is a worthwhile goal, though.

As it is, is one hour of your life worth making sure someone who shouldn't have gun doesn't get one? I would say so.

I can't speak for SQL (or anyone else, for that matter), but for me, I reject the concept of Federal background checks entirely, be they quick and painless or long and cumbersome.  The feds have no business "making sure someone who shouldn't have gun doesn't get one."  Furthermore, in a state like ours with preemption laws in effect on the matter, the issue certainly isn't a county one either.

Infringing on my right to arms neither makes me freer nor makes me safer. 

As it is, is one hour of your life worth making sure someone who shouldn't have gun doesn't get one? I would say so.

Is it worth checking IDs and confirming them when someone votes? Isn't that worth the hour it would take to confirm the voter is who they are and are legal to vote?

Is it worth checking IDs and confirming you are a citizen when walking down the street? Isn't it worth the hour to make sure they are not escaped criminals or illegally here?

Is it not worth having to supply your ID and linking it to all online actions you take? Is that not worth the hour to make sure you are not doing illegal activities on the web?

Is it not worth checking IDs and confirming and recording who was at any protest? It would seem worth the hour spent checking each person to confirm no bad actors were there. Antifa are all good people doing good things. They do not need to wear masks right? I mean knowing who they are and recording it is only a positive thing for safety.

It is only a little time. Surely it is worth it to make sure bad things are not done by bad individuals right? It is really for the safety of all of us that we interfere with your rights. What harm could come?

... And yeah, not all domestic abusers use guns, but 1 in 9 background checks catches a domestic abuser.

National reject rate for DV/Protective order based on the 2018 NCIS report is 1.1 in 1000 (https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2018-nics-operations-report.pdf/view pgs 13, 18).  Seems like your stats are off by several orders of magnitude.  2018 was the most recent data I could find on their site.

And this gets to the crux of the ire I have.  I don't doubt that 1 in 9 background checks of any type may match a domestic abuser.  But the vast majority of those checks are for jobs, or volunteer work, or who know what - that isn't gun related at all.  But someone has put that statistic (maybe true) out there in the context of gun buyers (not true) and now you are repeating it.

Also of note is the fact that Law Enforcement officers are arrested at a similar rate of 0.79 per 1000 (https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf pg. 2)

I would also comment that in the three instances I am aware of rejections, two were bench warrants that were a mix up in the court (fine paid but credited to the wrong case) and one was a mixed up identity (same name as a felon).  However, these rejections still would appear in the stats.  I don't know what the overall error rate is in terms of false rejections, but for the rejections I am aware of it is 100%.  The guys at the gun counter were one of the bench warrant rejections occurred told my work associate that the majority of the time the get a reject it is an easily resolved clerical error.

Actually, I think you can kill someone with a vote.  Or, are we not counting the votes of judges and legislatures?  Is it just the votes that put into power the killers?  The abortion issue comes to mind.

Whether firearm or car or any other object, it matters not one bit what one owns.  It matters everything what one does with what one owns.  I don't care if anyone owns a car, rifle, power tools, or any number of things that might cause harm.  I only care that the owner uses their property in a way that doesn't infringe on the rights of others.  I demand the same respect from others.  What I own is my business.  What I do with my property only becomes the business of others when its use infringes on their rights.

Booksmart, I agree with you that rights come with responsibility.  We are responsible for our actions and should be held accountable when we abuse the rights of others.  I just can't agree that the rest of society should have their rights restricted to arms because of the actions of a few.  Punish the criminal, not everyone in society.

As it is, is one hour of your life worth making sure someone who shouldn't have gun doesn't get one? I would say so.

Now, multiply that hour by everyone who did a non-FFL gun purchase at that show.  How many people was that?  Tens? Scores? Several hundred?  Now do that on a statewide scale.  We honestly have no idea how many wasted hours you're talking about, because there's no way to accurately measure how many person to person firearms transfers happen.  (Correct answer: None.
 But a lot are lost in tragic canoeing accidents.) And of course, most FFLs won't do it for free.  So you're imposing an indirect user fee on people who aren't breaking the law, and 99.9% of whom aren't the ones causing the problem you're allegedly attempting to solve.

We know from the 2018 Johns Hopkins study that universal background checks had no statistically significant impact on firearms homicides in California.  https://fee.org/articles/california-s-background-check-law-had-no-impact-on-gun-deaths-johns-hopkins-study-finds/

And universal background checks in Washington state didn't stop 3 'prohibited persons' - two of whom had over 80 arrests, and multiple felony convictions between them (and should probably had more, except the King County DA's office is one of those soft on crime types) - from getting guns, and then getting in a gun fight on a busy street in broad daylight, displaying NYPD worthy shooting skills by hitting 6 bystanders, one of whom died.  (The media initially tried to bill it as a mass shooting, but backed off once they realized all 3 had gang ties.)  https://www.timesunion.com/news/crime/article/Men-accused-of-murder-in-Seattle-shooting-plead-15068932.php

The big problem with universal background checks is that, in order to actually be effective, it requires universal gun registration.  Because unless you know who owns all the guns, you can't be sure people are actually complying.  And universal registration is not going to happen.  Heck, it's pretty much impossible, since there's no way, short of KGB/Stasi tactics, of even figuring out how many guns there are in the United States, much less who has them.

It's a pipe dream that makes proponents feel like they're doing something, with the actual effect of stigmatizing gun ownership (this is a plus to gun controllers) and making gun ownership more of a hassle.  Of course, the smug satisfaction of virtue signalling and sticking it to those deplorable bitter clinger rubes is it's own reward.

One last parting thought....

As it is, is one hour of your life worth making sure someone who shouldn't have gun doesn't get one? I would say so.

What about the people who are actually going to need the gun, but bail on the process because they don't have an hour to spend and don't know they will need it?

Guns are used in defense, alot. In fact, a CDC study indicates it is at least 66.6% more often a defensive use than a criminal use.  The low boundary of defensive use was 500,000 times a year, and possibly as high as 3,000,000 times a year, against 300,000 criminal intent uses.

When you create this kind of barrier to ownership against a largely law abiding group, you are creating more victims of crime than you are saving from crime.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-time-the-cdc-asked-about-defensive-gun-uses/#668de84f299a

https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/unpublished-cdc-study-confirms-2-million-defensive-handgun-uses-annually/

https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3 - Paywall

No.  I am responding to your assertion that....

... one hour of your life worth making sure someone who shouldn't have gun doesn't get one? I would say so.

You can't turn around and kill someone with a vote.

You most certainly can, it just takes longer.  In Virginia, we're experiencing the playing out of an attempt to kill a free state, and that attempt could very well result in loss of life.

You can kill a state with a vote when legislators move to regulate things they don't understand -- such as guns -- and depend on voters who have no understanding of same.  That reaches much farther, as others have already stated better than I could, when both voters and legislators/political bureaucrats have lost the understanding of individual freedom, the Constitution, the principles that make for balancing of governmental power/authority and individual freedom/responsibility.  No free law-abiding citizen needs government permission to own the means of protection of self, family, and community.  Government is not parent.

If they're not barred from owning a gun, they obviously have other avenues available to them where the time constraint won't be an issue.

You keep blaming the fact that you had to wait an hour on the fact that a background check had to be done, while admitting that at a normal shop it doesn't take that long.

The bottle neck wasn't having the background check, the bottleneck was one guy who was badly underprepared.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to still be holding to the notion that the delay was not an infringement of rights.  Is there, in your opinion, a delay that would not constitute an infringement?  A few days (like mandatory waiting periods)?  A few weeks?  A few months (like for NFA items)?  Would a few years still be OK as long as in the end SQL gets his pistol?

If there is a point at which delay crosses the line into infringement, when is it?  How is the determination made?  Under what criteria is the time period judged?  Who decides and how?

Are rights subject to technology?  In other words, do rights exist without NICS?  Specifically, does SQL have the rights to purchase, own, and carry a pistol independent of the existence of NICS?  If NICS is shut down by the Fedreral government for a "NICS holiday" for 30 days, are rights infringed for a month?  Or is that an acceptable inconvenience?

You see, for me there is no gradation where inconvenience slowly becomes infringement.  For me it is a binary situation.

Did the Federal government require the filling out of a 4473 before a right could be exercised? Check.
Did the Federal government require a NICS check before a right could be exercised? Check.

It doesn't matter how long it took to fill the form.  It doesn't matter how long it took to do the check.  The procedures themselves were infringements.

You can keep your shades of gray.  I'll keep my rights.

I'm still curious to know at what point you think inconvenience becomes infringement and how that point is determined.

You did not answer his question. 
You answered a question no one asked; How long should a background check take?

I'll try to rephrase his original question:
How long can a right be delayed without it being an infringement of that right?

We, and the ghost of MLK, would like to know your answer.
 

I answered your question: in a perfect world, the 30 seconds for the system to run the background check is all the time that should be needed. 

I think the "3 days to prevent a 'moment of passion' purchase" is a bogeyman invented by hoplophobes - I would be surprised if anyone had ever impulse purchased a gun to shoot someone (I think if they were that mad, they'd be far more likely to grab a chair or something heavy & blunt). 

I definitely think a full week is overkill.