Don&#x27;t forget who the biggest victims of background checks will be. Unemployable ex-cons. Anyone who&#x27;s been convicted at any time in their life will have yet another door to employment shut in their face.<p>Maybe 10 or 20 years ago, New Zealand decided to ban anyone with a record of sexual offending from being a taxi driver. That sounds good and safe to the average Joe but one poor man, in his 50&#x27;s I think, lost his job because he&#x27;d been convicted as a teenager of having sex with his then-underage girlfriend. They&#x27;d since been happily married and still were. Somehow that meant he was considered unsafe to drive people around in a taxi.<p>Background checks are a blunt and harsh tool to re-punish people for unrelated crimes.