It was almost the perfect plan. And if it weren’t for those darned kids at the FBI, Michael Bloomberg might have gotten away with it.

By all accounts, the billionaire dropped at least $20M through his various anti-Second Amendment groups in an effort to get Ballot Question 1 passed in Nevada. The proposal would require virtually all private transfers of gun ownership to be contingent on an FBI background check. And on election day, the measure passed. Great news for gun grabbers, right?

Well… it was. That is to say, things were looking good until the FBI came along and said they wouldn’t be participating in the program. (RGI)

The expansion of gun background checks approved by Nevada voters last month will not happen as expected, based on an opinion released Wednesday by the Nevada Attorney General’s Office. Ballot Question 1 requires that private party gun transfers – with a few exceptions – be subject to a federal background check through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System administered by the FBI. The FBI sent a letter Dec. 14 to the state of Nevada’s Department of Public Safety saying it would not conduct these checks. The department asked for a legal opinion on the letter’s ramifications.

No matter how the vote went, this announcement basically imploded the entire program. Having the plan in place only works as long as the facilities are available for sellers to obtain the mandated background check and the only avenue provided under the legislation was to have the FBI do it. But they don’t have the resources available to cater to this program so they won’t be participating. This leaves a situation where otherwise legal sales couldn’t take place due to reasons beyond the control of the seller. In other words, the measure is completely unenforceable.

Our colleague Bob Owens at Bearing Arms is clearly finding more than a little amusement at Bloomberg’s utter collapse in this battle after apparently making it across the finish line.

Like good little liberals everywhere, Nevada’s anti-gun Democrats expected someone else (in this case, the federal government in the form of the FBI) to foot the bill for their edict. The feds have rejected it outright. Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt has noted it is entirely unenforceable (PDF). Mike Bloomberg is out the $20 million or so he spent pushing this faulty referendum into being.

We could spend another year debating the need for a father to get a background check on his son or daughter before passing on a hunting rifle to them, but that’s really not the point here. As Bob points out, this is a case of a poorly thought out plan which relied entirely on their program being paid for by somebody else. And in this case they put the law up to a vote before even asking the “somebody else” in question whether or not they were willing and able to provide the required resources.

As an old English teacher of mine used to be fond of saying, a failure to plan ahead on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on mine.