What’s in the Cornyn-Murphy Senate gun control deal?

National Association for Gun Rights Position: OPPOSE

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• BANS gun possession based on juvenile records for all gun owners. This is retroactive, so if a gun owner committed a disqualifying crime at age 16 and he’s now 45, he would lose his gun rights as soon as this bill was enacted and would need to dispose of his guns.
  • Section 12001
    
• STRIPS gun rights for adults based on mental health care after the age of 16. If a juvenile is involuntarily sent to a mental health hospital – a decision often made by state social services authorities, not the parents – his gun rights would be stripped for the rest of his life.
  • Section 12001(a)(1)(A)(ii)
    
• Opens up decades-old juvenile records, dumps them into the NICS prohibited persons list, uses them to disqualify gun purchases for law-abiding adults. What state records would qualify and which would not are left unclear and would likely be up to the state.
  • Section 12001(a)(2); Division B, Title I
    
• Makes it much more difficult for 18-20-year-olds to purchase any firearm. The three-day waiting period would be extended to 10 days for anyone under the age of 21 if NICS found any hint of a “problematic” juvenile record. NICS would ask the state/local repositories for details on juvenile mental health/criminal records during that time.  
  • Section 12001
    
• Authorizes $750 million in federal funding for state “red flag” gun confiscation programs with NO due process protections. This funding is through an existing grant program, which the bill expands to cover state “red flag” programs.
  • SEC. 12003; Division B, Title I
    
• $300 million to dump juvenile records into NICS and start reporting on them without due process. $200 million would go to the states to cover their new juvenile records reporting requirement, and $100 million would go to meet the “additional resource needs” of the NICS system. This is a massive expansion of the NICS database.
  • Division B, Title I
    
• STRIPS gun rights due to toxic dating relationships or bad breakups. Misdemeanor gun violence convictions involving current or former “dating partners” (defined vaguely enough to cover close platonic friendships) would result in loss of gun rights.
  • Section 12005
    
• Could open the door for senior citizen gun bans via suspicious funding for the Medicare Improvement Fund. The bill leaves the amount and the purpose blank.
  • Subtitle B, Section 13201
    
• Opens up the floodgates for prosecution of law-abiding gun dealers. The new language defining “dealer” means that the FFL could be prosecuted for “dealing without a license” for selling guns later used in crimes. It is unclear how far this language goes and if it would apply to guns later sold to a criminal third party. In addition, if the FFL had “reasonable cause to believe” the gun will be used in a crime – whatever constitutes “reasonable cause” – he would be prosecuted under the new definition of gun trafficking.
  • Section 12002, Section 12004
• Criminalizes more private gun sales. This bill expands the definition of FFL to someone who sells guns to “predominantly earn a profit” instead of someone who does it to earn a living. This greatly expands the possibility of prosecution for dealing without a license for private gun sales.
  • Section 12002