Set aside for a moment your concerns about government regulation of guns. Those concerns are legitimate, but they could prevent you from appreciating a salient point about subsidiarity in this Newsweek article.
Mystified by the fact that local background checks of potential gun purchasers are associated with lower homicide and suicide rates than federal background checks, a gun-control advocate offers a theory:
Why are local checks so much better? “We hypothesize that it’s due to
access to additional information that’s not available at the federal
checks,” says [researcher Peter] Layde, “particularly related to mental-health issues and
domestic-violence issues.”
Hmm, local governments ? closer to the people ? have better information to make public policy than the federal government? Who knew?
Not content, though, to accept the idea that some government policies are best left to state and local governments, Layde offers this gem:
“In an ideal world,” says Layde, “you might not have to have the local
agencies involved if you just reliably got all the data they had up to
the federal level.”
I hope I never see Dr. Layde’s ideal world.
