Just because Bill Gates is really good at making money he believes that he knows how to run your life better than you do. Recently his charitable foundation made a $1 million donation to a campaign in Washington state trying to prohibit private sales of firearms:
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, have donated $1 million to a Washington state campaign seeking to expand background checks on gun sales, bringing the total amount the campaign has brought in up to nearly $6 million.
The donation to the Initiative 594 campaign was given Friday, but it was not made public until Monday, when it posted on the state’s Public Disclosure Commission website.
I-594 would require background checks for all gun sales and transfers in Washington state, including at gun shows and for private sales. Under the measure, exemptions would exist, including gifts within a family and antiques.
Gun control advocates try to criticize anybody who opposes mandatory background checks with variations of “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.” They imply anybody who opposes background checks has a criminal history. But they are also dishonest about what they want. While they claim that they want to prevent criminals from purchasing firearms what they really want is to prohibit you from selling your property without government permission. I cannot read minds but I will go so far as to imply most gun control advocates want this prohibition in place because it makes the burden of gun ownership higher and therefore would further discourage it. Additionally mandatory background checks would allow the state to more easily restrict firearm ownership by creating more criteria for what defines a prohibited person and having those additional criteria enforced by federally licensed dealers.
In the end laws restricting individuals are always about trying to control the lives of others. Those who advocate them, such as Bill Gates, are control freaks and deserve to be ignored by the rest of us.
The reason they want this is it turns the 4473 into a real registry instead of just the most inefficient registry in the world. As now you don’t have unrecorded transactions happening. After you get this step 2 is to repeal the law that says the FBI has to throw away results from NICS checks or else repeal the law that says the ATF can’t digitize records it gets from FFLs that close and pretty soon you start to get to a searchable database of all gun owners.