How To End Mandatory Background Checks

OK. Let's say you're a politician who, for whatever reason makes you different from all the other politicians, wants to get rid of mandatory background checks. What would you decide on as the best way to effect your change?

How about this: use the media's self-preservation instinct to get them to start screaming about the potential misuse of the information by the government.

And it looks like that is exactly what is starting to happen in places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where reporters have to have an annual background check to cover the state government and in Chicago, where the city government requires both a background check and fingerprints.

And all the sudden reporters are coming up with the same concerns that they so flippantly dismissed when the background checks didn't involve them:

"Who would have access to these background checks? It's hard for me to believe the police department will do background checks and not put that information in a file. Who will get it? An alderman with a grudge? Even if there's nothing illegal (in the background check), who knows what will show up? You should see the messages I'm getting from members. The scenarios are endless."

It's amazing how they're just now starting to realize that government doesn't always keep its promises. They're now starting to realize that having the FBI amass a great big file on you isn't as great an idea as them getting a big file on the nutcase down the street.

Background checks are useful in some areas, like with childcare workers or law enforcement or the medical profession. But over the last few years they've been getting abused by overzealous regulators who would require background checks for the guy working the midnight Quiki-Mart shift if they could figure out a "rationale" for requiring it. As such, with so many checks being done, the effectiveness of the system is going down and the possibility for error is climbing - with pretty nasty and hard to reverse consequences to the investigated if there's a mistake made.

Maybe now that the reporters are the target of the investigations we'll start to see them calling for a rationalization of them.

But I doubt it. Once they scale back the investigations on the media it'll be back to the same old: good enough for thee, but not for me.