Guns: rules and rights [View all]

Constructive ideas:

- BGCs (background checks) We have them now but only for guns bought from an FFL (Federal Firearms Licensee), an all business gun dealer. Cousin Bubba can still sell his gun to someone else with no BGC at a gun show, yard sale or parking lot. In most states privates sellers like that are restricted by law from having access to a BGC. One thing that can be done now is at least allow private sellers to access a BGC via local law enforcement.

- Pass a bill funding CDC research into violence and gun deaths. Congress has avoided the topic since the Dickie Amendment.

The Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1996 omnibus spending bill of the United States federal government that mandated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control." In the same spending bill, Congress earmarked $2.6 million from the CDC's budget, the exact amount that had previously been allocated to the agency for firearms research the previous year, for traumatic brain injury-related research.

The amendment was lobbied for by the National Rifle Association (NRA), and named after its author Jay Dickey, a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Arkansas. Although the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly ban it, for about two decades the CDC avoided all research on gun violence for fear it would be financially penalized. Congress clarified the law in 2018 to allow for such research, and the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996.