What is the argument against extended background checks?
What is the stated argument against them, as opposed to the assumed "argument."
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And, of course, some states will do with background checks as is done with voting registration or abortion... delay and inconvenience and expense.
Look at what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin... you need a photo ID to vote, then he shut down half the DMV offices in Democratic areas. Oops, budget cuts, yanno.
And other stuff... remember the mandatory transvaginal (penetrative) ultrasound to get an abortion? And a waiting period? And then your doctor is forced to conceal true information (or dispense false information) about abortion.
How about same-day voter registration? That's going the way of the dodo, too. And the League of Women Voters doesn't do registration drives in some states; the laws are so convoluted and the punishments so strict that they can't run the risk.
I personally think the federally-licensed agent who runs the purchase through NICS should be on record for selling the gun, with the transfer agent keeping the details of the sold gun (make, model, serial number), as well as a copy of the photo ID of the buyer and the seller.
If the cops need to trace a gun found at a crime scene, it should be a routine matter to get a warrant for the seller's records and see who the gun was sold to and who sold the gun.
If the seller can't keep proper records, pull the license and toss them in jail.
Nobody likes being on a list. They get hacked too easily, or lost, or exposed by a mishandled FOIA request, or future lawmakers change the law and now what should have been private... isn't.
There's a bunch of stuff I don't want others to know, including the government. What I do in the bedroom, and with whom, for example. Who I vote for, what I read, what I eat, what I drink, what I write or draw or take photographs of. What I listen to or watch, or what I record. Where I go, the path and method I chose to get there, and how long I am there.
Etc.
If the government told people that they were going to register all personal computers (including laptops, tablets, and smartphones) to protect the children from child predators, I think there would be a huge outcry over it and it would not happen, regardless of the stories of molested/abused/murdered children that became part of the corporate media conversation.
They have to buy it or subpeona it. It's also incomplete. For example, the stupid little barcoded keyring cards I have for CVS, Shop Rite, and Stop & Shop aren't mine. It's stupid that I need to have one to get a decent price on something (especially CVS, which is already way overpriced), so I caged them from my parents and grandparents.
It's not perfect. Obviously I leave a trace as I wander around. But there's a difference between sporadic knowledge, privately held, and complete knowledge documented by the government.
This is one of the issue with universal single payer health insurance, because then your entire medical history is stored by the federal government. But, unlike my preference in savory snacks, access to my complete medical history can and probably will be critically important to my life at some point. And the government is no worse than private industry at safeguarding date.
It's been argued that we've never really had privacy as a culture or as a people; hundreds or thousands of years ago, even in little villages, the gossips and such knew private information: who was cheating on who and with whom, who the father of the baby REALLY was, who had been having fights, who broke the neighbor's window, etc.
The difference is in the technology age. Now such things can be centrally stored, accessed at will from anyplace on Earth, kept literally forever, and correlated with a billion other people's activities to look for patterns.
The same people that get outraged because the NYPD wanted to retina-scan all the arrested Occupy protestors want the NYPD to keep a very careful tab on the guns that I own, up to and including having to bring them to the police precinct station yearly so they can be verified. As an example.
