They are often stolen from legal gun owners who are not as careful securing them as they should be. And some legal gun owners sell them…
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The background checks would be a lot more useful if there wasn’t an easy workaround.
As for passing a sniff test, I observed this in a sporting goods store:
Guy walks in with Nazi and white supremacist tattoos all up his arms. Wants to buy a gun and a big, military-style knife. Passes his background check and they are required to sell him the gun. They refuse to sell him the knife. Too sketchy.
That’s the country we live in.
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Oh, well, if you have an anecdote, I guess that means you win the debate. Especially with added Nazi tattoos for dramatic effect.
The one caveat to that is it appears that many businesses that once supplied medical marijuana have switched to recreational, as it is more lucrative. In Colorado, it is becoming problematic for those that were relying on medical cannabis. That said, it’s more of a growing pain than cataclysmic, so long as people don’t rely solely on a “market solution”.
(I’ll leave it at that here, to get back to the topic at hand.)
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I wasn’t relating it to an argument point, so unfortunately, it doesn’t score any points. Strictly for entertainment value.
As for the tats, feel free to imagine Deadhead dancing bears if it helps you cope.
I was talking private sales exercising discretion. Back when FB allowed private sales it was common for local sales to insist on a CCW license, as it was a way to insure the person buying wasn’t a felon. There is SOME risk to the seller if they sell to a prohibited person unknowingly, and people usually take some precautions. (It is illegal to knowingly sell to a prohibited person.)
That’s rather bizarre they opted to not sell them a knife, but would a gun.
I imagine FFLs have SOME discretion, but tattoos alone isn’t/shouldn’t be a deal breaker. It sounds like this guy was a real piece of shit, but if he hasn’t committed a felony or domestic violence etc, then he won’t have done anything to lose his rights. Conversely, the same goes with tatted up minorities whom half the people are going to assume they are in some sort of a gang, when more likely they just have tattoos.
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I hope you can appreciate the difference between a tatted-up minority with “gang-looking” tats and a white guy with a swastika on his arm… you can make a whole lot of valid inferences about one of those people, and it’s not the former.
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How do you get “waving away gun violence” when I am repeatedly calling for solutions to gun violence?
No, it’s math. You want fewer guns. Fine - but almost all guns are never used for bad stuff. That’s the point.You can have fewer guns - it won’t do a darn thing.
So, it is racist to point out what the data says is the problem - narco business and gangs? Hey, why not call me sexist, too? After all, it’s mostly guys doing this. Oops - young guys. Call me ageist as well.
Prisons? Are our museums prisons? Our public auditoriums? Stadiums? Airports - they all prisons? Good grief - this is one idea that seems to make sense to protect the lives of our kids and all you can do is politicize it. And yeah - if it costs billions and it saves the lives of our kids it’s a bargain.
Absolutely. If you got white power tats on you, you are clearly a piece of shit. If you have actual gang tats on you, probably a pieces of shit as well. But most people with tats just have tats. I am not sure on the legality of denying a sale based on horrible tattoos. If that is allowed, it is going to result in way more racists refusing sales to minorities, vs normal people refusing sales to overt racists.
If you want a real world example on this, not a hypothetical, it used to be fairly common in many states to need a sheriff to sign off on a pistol purchase. The state I moved to, Missouri, had this as law when I first moved here. It was part of the various Jim Crow laws.
Well, it’s not like more guns has been fixing this problem so far… in fact it almost seems like it’s been getting worse the more guns we add. Who could have predicted that?
I feel like I need to point out that museums do not as a matter of course have metal detectors and security checkpoints at every entrance – some do at the front door, sure, but the overwhelming majority of the ones I’ve been to don’t even have that much. Metal detectors are only a recent innovation in the stadium business as well – growing up, I never had to go through one to get into a baseball game or concert or live event. I also don’t think you’ll find many people here sympathetic to the notion that airport security is a good model for securing schools; airport security is pretty universally considered invasive and degrading, costing billions of dollars while not actually solving any real problems and routinely failing to catch dangerous objects in spot checks (and hey, remember that time Adam Savage managed to walk onto a plane with 12" razor blades he’d forgotten he was carrying?).
Why stop at just hardening primary and secondary schools, though? What about other places mass shootings have happened, like movie theaters? Concerts? Malls? Conventions? Street fairs? Fireworks celebrations? College campuses? How much would it cost to harden every theater, concert hall, convention center, park, boardwalk, college quad, and commerce center in America? Why should we accept subjecting ourselves to constant security checks at every turn, when it would be a lot cheaper and more cost effective to just reduce the number of guns? The fewer guns there are, the less society needs to be worried about someone violent bringing one literally anywhere.
I think you’ve glossed over my point slightly. Someone with a swastika on their bicep or “1488” on their knuckles is clearly identifiable as a white supremacist/Nazi. Unless you’re intimately familiar with the particular gang-related tats that gang members get, odds are it’s going to be difficult to separate “gang member” from “regular person with a mean-looking tat”. I think we can have a reasonable argument over whether or not the person with a tat of questionable provenance should be considered a piece of shit and/or have those tats be considered a warning sign for violent behavior. Whereas statistically, the guy with a Nazi tattoo is almost certainly going to fall into “red flag” territory, and frankly has no business owning any sort of gun for any god damn reason.
I don’t think that we should make it a legal requirement to not have any threatening-looking tattoos if you want to buy a gun, but I do think that “I’m not going to sell a gun to a Nazi” seems like perfectly acceptable grounds for an individual to choose to refuse that person service, since “Nazi” is not (yet) considered to be a protected class in this country. I would also hope that those sorts of things would correlate to the kinds of behavior that would surface in a background check, but if wishes were fishes etc. etc., especially these days when a documented history of white supremacy doesn’t seem to be an inhibitor to gaining a high-level security clearance at the White House.
(Funny how with all this looming fascism and tyranny on our hands in this country, all these guns don’t seem to be doing a single god damn thing to stop it like everyone has spent decades promising they will. Instead they get used to get into standoffs with the Bureau of Land Management over cattle grazing fees, and to take over state parks, and to mow down over 100 people at an open-air concert from a hotel room across the street.)
(Speaking of, metal detectors and security checkpoints managed to do fuck-all to prevent the Vegas massacre. Should we also put metal detectors, security checkpoints, and hardened, restricted access points in every hotel in the country? What’s that gonna cost?)
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I think we are mostly on the same page.
The thing is, not everyone even knows what the common white supremacist symbols are. My black friend (also my shooting buddy) is making his own RPG and I am making the character sheet for him and he wanted some of the stat boxes to be a “plus sign in a circle”. And he sends me a picture of the white power cross and says, “Kinda like that.” 0_0
So your point that other than say “MS13” in black letter, most people can’t ID gang tattoos is a valid one. But my point still stands that people kicking out others because they are 99% sure they have gang tats is going to happen more often than kicking out people for white power tats.
While not all white supremacists are violent, too many of them are. So I can’t really disagree with you on that. But I don’t think one can legally deny people on that alone.
Well, you got people punching Nazis. And despite if one thinks they have the moral high ground on the issue, it is still illegal and there will be real world consequences. Even with the BLM and that Oregon stand off, it was mostly bloodless (IIRC they shot one of the Oregon guys.)
While the policies have changed some since the 90s, remember Waco and Ruby Ridge when the gov wants to get violent. Remember that we view the OKC bombing as not a fight against a tyrannical government literally murdering civilians but as the worst domestic terrorist event in history. It really will have to get a whole lot worse before violence is deemed acceptable. (Note, not defending McViegh, just saying that was his reasoning.)
I already mentioned this a month ago when an article related to the legal fallout was posted: people checking in with firearms, air rifles, and paint markers is a common thing across the nation in the US. There is even a large, fairly well known training site just outside Las Vegas. You add hunting trips and competitions, and you start to realize even if you don’t see it or like it, it is pretty common. (not to mention all the CCW carriers.) This is why it is perfectly legal to fly with a firearm, just have to follow some protocols (checked in, locked, etc)
In this case they had no idea what the guy was bringing in as he did it over multiple days with regular suit cases. But I would also contend ONE event shouldn’t make the TSA move into the hotel lobby.
Which is why IMO any gun control legislation in the US should be shall-issue as long as some objective requirements- for instance not having a criminal record or any disqualifying medical conditions and having a safe place to store the gun- are met.
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