At last - a little bit of sanity on gun control - from the U.S. Supreme Court?

U.S. Supreme Court: You Can't Lie About Your Gun Purchase, No Matter What Your Reason (Click here to read more)

By Nicole Flatow June 16, 2014 at 1:42 pm Updated: June 16, 2014 at 2:05 pm
.
Lying about your gun purchase is never okay, the U.S. Supreme Court held Monday in a divided 5-4 ruling that upheld a robust interpretation of federal gun law. The ruling preserves the ability of federal prosecutors to crack down on what are known as "straw purchases," one of the most common ways of illegally trafficking a gun.
.
Straw purchasing works like this. An individual who wants to buy a gun with the intent to commit a crime does not go to the store himself to buy it. He gets a third party to buy it. That third party goes through the background check. That third party's name goes into the database, and the individual who ultimately desires the gun may not be traced back to the purchase.
.
Prosecutors have sought to crack down on those purchases by enforcing gun law provisions that make it illegal to lie about who the gun is for. But gun activists raised legal arguments that these purchases are not necessarily banned if the third party could have also been a legal purchaser. And they found a sympathetic plaintiff to become the face of this issue in the case decided Monday.
[''']