BELLEVUE, WA – Today’s arrest of Raymond Lee Fryberg, father of Marysville Pilchuck gunman Jaylen Fryberg, on charges of illegally purchasing the pistol used in that shooting demonstrates the fatal flaw of so-called “universal background check” legislation, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said.
“Apparently,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “a permanent protection order issued against Fryberg back in 2002 never made it into the National Instant Check System (NICS). Penalizing all law-abiding gun owners because a system is flawed does not prevent crime from happening, nor does it keep the wrong people from getting their hands on guns.”
The government alleges that not only did the elder Fryberg provide false information on the Federal Form 4473 when he bought the Beretta pistol his son used in the October shooting, he also allegedly bought four other firearms at various times. It is not known why information about the protection order did not appear in the NICS system, but Fryberg’s status as a disqualified person apparently never showed up during NICS checks. But he apparently knew the protection order was still in effect months before he bought the handgun, and so did the tribal court.
“Instead of spending millions of dollars on initiative campaigns aimed at back-door gun registration,” Gottlieb observed, “Michael Bloomberg and other wealthy anti-gun elitists could better spend their money lobbying Congress to either fix the NICS system or scrap it altogether. Indeed, if billionaire gun prohibitionists really wanted to do something useful with their money, they could donate it to the government to pay for the fixes, including better data entry.
“We won’t forget,” he added, “that Nick Hanauer, the chief proponent of Initiative 594 last year, sarcastically joked on social media after the Marysville Pilchuck tragedy that ‘we need more school shootings’. It was a despicable attempt to exploit the shooting, and it is now painfully clear that the measure he and his elitist friends sold the public would not have prevented what happened.
“Buying elections to pass unenforceable laws that don’t prevent crimes creates a false sense of security that is dishonest to its core,” Gottlieb concluded.
