Yes, but only if we identify an apt name can we hope to gain shared understanding of meaning. The central point of the article, however, appears to be about breaking a complex problem down into smaller ones, which is not the same as “naming” things.
And yet it appears those are homonyms with different origins, and there’s not much of a relation, see etymology sections 1 and 3 here:
As long as violence is seen as a legitimate way to deal with a problem, and guns are abundant, there will be gun violence. Both are a substantial problem in the US, and you need to solve both to reduce gun violence.
Only because it is, in fact, wrong. If you’re a dealer, than you must have a FFL, and you must run a background check through NICS or the equivalent state system. It’s possible to be a private citizen at a gun show, and be selling part of your collection, and therefore be exempt from having an FFL. But if you’re in a business of selling firearms, you must have a FFL, and every commercial FFL must run a background check on any transfer.
There are way more car owners than that, yet somehow the vast majority of car titles are properly registered and transferred. Probably even fewer people are buying them for crimes, too, at least intentionally. I’m not sure how “the vast majority” is really an excuse here.
The thing about the private sales loophole is that almost no other gun control measure – short of outright bans – even means anything without closing it. Want to prevent felons from buying weapons – first you have to know they’re trying to buy one. Want to confiscate weapons from a domestic abuser or unstable white supremacist or somebody? First you need a record that they – or somebody close – owns some. Want to trace weapons used in crimes back to their owners and hold them responsible somehow? First you have to have a record of their claim that, oh, they sold it a couple months ago, officer. Want to mandate insurance policies on weapons, or proper storage procedures? First you need a record… You get the idea.
Heck, as you say, you don’t even know how big a problem this actually is. Nobody really does. That’s kinda one of the main features of untraceable arms sales.
Then the average person wouldn’t mind going through a few proper procedures.
I also highly doubt that the venn diagrams of ‘people willing to turn a blind eye for a few bucks as long as there are no real consequences’ and ‘people who are willing to actually be held accountable for turning a blind eye’ are the same circle. Pull the other one.
It is certainly 10 times harder when those sales are potentially untraceable. OTOH, with a record, you could simply flag related gun owners for interviews, or at least follow up with accountability if their weapon is actually used by an acquaintance in a crime.
I would think that was the idea. Some of those sales are probably being arranged through whatsapp and settled through venmo or something anyway these days. Shouldn’t be impossible to make an app for that. (Easier said than done, I know, especially for a federal agency, but it is the year 20 friggin 20. Let’s raise our expectations.)
The reason for car titles etc is for tax revenue. Although you can sell your car to someone without any sort of NICS check or anything, just sign the title over. It really isn’t a good analogy here.
I will state that actual registration on a national level will be met with extreme resistance in the US because of registration leading to turn ins in at least 3 cases in recent history. Just like no one wants the gov to have a back door on their phone “just in case it’s used in a crime”, no one wants to a registration law where at any point it could be used for a forced turn in or confiscation. (and this isn’t paranoia its happened in democratic countries within my life time.)
And yes, it is worth looking at the percentage of abusers to see if it is worth concocting a new scheme and whether or not that scheme will actually be used to solve crimes. Maryland had a program that every new firearm sold in state had to have a spent case on file to create a “ballistic finger print library”. After 15 years it was scrapped because it solved zero crimes. Canada scrapped its rifle registration program for the same reason - it didn’t help solve crimes.
There are ~80,000 failed NICS checks per year, for various reasons. Obviously not everyone of those people deserve jail time, but IIRC there are only a few dozen people charged per years due to this. It seems to me if you wanted a list of prohibited person trying to buy one and pursue them, here is where one would start.
The reality is the VAST majority of private gun sales are two legal people BSTing between each other. Require a NICS check and all that does for those people is add $10-20 bucks to the cost and is an inconvenience.
For criminals - who mostly get their guns from thefts, the black market (criminals selling to criminals), and straw purchase (friend or relative who is legal buys one) - they will continue to skirt the law. This added check does not effect them. And we do know through studies that these are the three most common vectors for criminals to get their guns.
For the record, I am not completely opposed to a NICS check for private sales, but I see it doing next to nothing to reduce violent crime for the reason above. And I find it absurd if I buy gun from my dad or a friend needing to go through a check.
So…the only possible public interest in tracking gun sales would be to collect taxes?
Ok, fine. Let’s tax gun sales!
I mean, first of all, owning a gun and owning a phone are not the same kind of thing. Which leads me to second, I don’t really care whether people are worried that registration might facilitate enforcing a new law. Third, I suspect I’m not alone. For example,
An August 2019 Fox News poll of registered voters found 90% of respondents favored universal background checks.
Admittedly, universal background checks aren’t quite the same as universal registration, but they’re close cousins. Universal background checks would at least be a good start, and if the records are retained, it provides some degree of traceability too.
The point isn’t necessarily to arrest someone just for trying – that might be justified in some cases, but it’s not the main thing. The point is to prevent people who shouldn’t have a gun from getting one. That is, ideally, what each of those 80,000 failed checks represent.
Like, if you’re an abuser, maybe you go try to buy a gun without really thinking about what you’re going to do with it, but then you get denied, and maybe you think better of the whole thing.
The problem is, maybe you don’t go to the gun shop first, maybe you go on craigslist and connect up with Bubba who’s selling off some extra stock from his collection, and he thinks you’re a nice enough guy…
One, again, ‘vast majority’ can’t do the work for you here. The problem isn’t with the vast majority. It’s with the minority that is using that ‘vast majority’ – and its reluctance to take meaningful precautions – to hide out among.
It’s like saying “the vast majority of porn actors are disease free”. True, maybe, but that would be a terrible reason to oppose a proper testing regimen.
Two, I don’t see how you can possibly know this anyway. That survey I quoted before showed that about 2/3 of such purchases were between strangers. And that’s among people willing to answer the survey. Suppose that “legal person” you’re selling to (and how exactly do you know this, without a background check?) is legal themselves, but is just a little happier to sell to someone else without asking questions?
Right. Another way of saying that is that we know very few of the guns used in crimes come from sources where background checks are in use.
What does that tell you about the effectiveness of background checks?
Adding an enforceable background check/and or registration requirement to gifts or sales to a friend or family member (your “straw purchases”), and to any and all quasi-legitimate sales channels by which guns might be entering the so-called “black market” would hardly hurt things here, would it? Guns don’t just magically appear there, and a requirement that all purchases must be accompanied by background checks gives law enforcement a good tool to tackle those straw-purchasers, middlemen and gun-runners.
I’m happy to come back and have this conversation when 100% of those guns are traceable either to an actual theft, or to an at-the-time lawful purchase which could at least theoretically have been pre-empted if we knew how to proactively detect bad guys better. (Since ‘irresponsible’ gun owners are often perfectly lawful and responsible until they ain’t.)
Then we can have a conversation about how 200,000 “lost or stolen” guns every year is maybe a little excessive…
Of course not, it doesn’t effect you. Why would you care. Most people don’t care about the government keeping tabs on them until it directly effects them. Keep voting to extend those Patriot Act powers!
I am just sharing the information that a full registration scheme will be met with opposition because of the UK, Australian, and now New Zealand. You could probably get a user license law passed with less resistance.
This is a separate issue than background checks, so conflating the two doesn’t help your argument.
8% of the US population are felons. We can extrapolate ~8% of the population buying guns are felons as well. I contend it is probably less than that because a felon has more to lose being caught with a gun, and many ex felon are trying to tun their lives around.
Most guns found on criminals were stolen, bought on the black market, or were straw purchases (friends and family). You an google for some surveys on that. Two that I remember were from the Bureau of Justice, and other I think from the city of Pittsburgh. Incomplete data, but real data that does give a snap shot of what is going on.
But like I said, let’s say that you need a NICS check to buy a gun privately. You are a felon. You no longer will attempt a private sale with a stranger. You will continue to use the other three already popular methods listed above.
Completely ineffective when they are circumvented! You sound like someone who thinks if we just “build a wall” its going to keep people out of the US. Gee, if only there were ways to go over, under, or around a wall! Oh no! I guess we are foiled!
Also, while gun violence has been reduced after the NICS check system was established, that downward trend follows all violent crime from its height in the 90s. So how effective NICS has been at reducing gun crime is up for debate. Though I suppose it is better than nothing. (Current theory for the reduction in crime is reduction of environmental lead.)
Yeah, well, wish for a cure for cancer and world peace while wanting Utopia like goals.
Then, I’m sorry, where did that argument that gun registration and car registration are totally incomparable things go again?
Just throwin’ stuff to see if it sticks?
Riiight. Because tracking ownership of purpose built weapons is exactly the same as tracking phone calls or whatever. There’s just no possible principled distinction to be drawn between those things.
Only reason a guy could possibly have for ignoring the protestations of gun owners in particular is that he’s not personally affected. Not like they could just think maybe owning a firearm engenders a certain heightened degree of responsibility or anything.
Sarcasm for sarcasm, because you can’t possibly be serious.
Again, can’t tell if you’re serious. You’re certainly not thinking about this very hard.
See, you’re listing three things all in a row there, but they’re not like things.
To start with, the outer two – loss/theft and grey-market transfers – are amenable to reductions via policy.
We could, for example, discourage straw-purchases and grey-market sales by establishing an unambiguous background-check and/or registration requirement – it wouldn’t stop anything completely, of course, especially where coercion is involved, but it’d at least become harder to find some innocent go-between and tell them “it’s no big deal, you just hand them over to me, no background check required”. Because, you know, a background check would, in fact, clearly be required. That also makes it way easier for law enforcement to break up trafficking. Sold a gun without a check? That’s an automatic crime, no special aggravating circumstances or airtight case required.
Similarly, as I hinted, there are various policy measures that could improve that ‘lost’ and ‘stolen’ figure. Require stricter inventory control at dealers. Mandate some modicum of proper storage by private owners, and/or insurance policies that penalize those that can’t be fussed to actually keep track of their deadly weapons. Put repeat offenders in carelessness or cluelessness on a list and stop them from losing more. Or just generally reduce the number of legal firearms out there to be stolen - buybacks, higher taxes, manufacturing quotas, whatever.
But, “aha!,” you say. (After getting through the requisite throat clearing about how such measures will go over like a lead balloon with “responsible” gun owners.) “There’s no point in doing any of that stuff, because there’s still that middle one. The crims are just gonna go to the…[sinister music] black market. Cir-cum-vention. [Shrug] What can you do?”
And that’s where you’re engaging in sleight of hand.
Because you threw “black market” in the middle of that list up there like it’s some kind of magical pot under a felonious rainbow that guns just pop out of.
It’s not. All of the weapons on the black market had to get there in the first place somehow. It’s only ever the proximal source for weapons – the thing you write down in studies when it’s too hard to figure out what the real source is – it’s never the ultimate one. Sometimes the ultimate source is a long time ago – I think the average is 10 or 20 years, and a half dozen owners. But there was one.
Of those named, only the outer two are actual sources. Pathways for weapons to make that transition from the light side to the dark side. All the guns that are on the black market had to pass through a chokepoint somewhen. One that was, by definition, at least half in the light, and amenable to regulation.
And the size of the pool of guns in the black market isn’t necessarily monotonically increasing. It has outflows as well as inflows. Those guns are often passed around for a long time, but they do still eventually get worn out, discarded, turned in, seized. Cut the inflows enough – and maybe ramp up the outflows – and the pool grows scarcer.
Exactly! Or like patching a leaking roof. We fixed one hole, to the point that there’s almost no water coming in that way, but the floor is still wet and the level in the basement isn’t dropping.
Oh well. The rain is obviously “circumventing” us. There’d be no point in putting similar patches on, say, the other obvious holes in the roof, and then toweling up or bailing out the accumulated water.
Nope. Nope. We’ve tried everything already. Just gotta learn to live with wet ankles.
Sure, although I suspect that’s trivial to get around.
“Why yes Mr Gun Store Owner, of course this firearms purchase is for myself. I know that straw purchases are illegal. Here’s the $100 I owe you.”
[5 minutes pass]
“Hey ho. Whoops, I don’t want this firearm I just purchased. Time to sell/transfer it.”
[10 minutes pass]
“Sure bro, you can buy this firearm off me in this private purchase we are conducting. That’ll be $150 thank’s. What’s that? No, I don’t want to know your name. See ya!” [ ← HINT: THIS IS THE GUN SHOW LOOPHOLE IN ACTION]
[4 days pass]
“Oh, hello officer. No no, I certainly did not purchase that firearm merely to transfer it immediately. Yes, I understand it may look that way, but really what happened is that I changed my mind and then made a private sale. No, sorry, I don’t recall who I sold it to. Good day.”
I am curious, what factors are you using to determine what someone does or does not need in an activity that you admittedly don’t take part in? I am originally from South America but have no clue what llama breeders need or do not need to get them to mount eachother.
The reasons we track all the car stuff is to tax them for property tax and registration. It isn’t to keep cars out of the hands of prohibited people. In fact you can own a car with out a drivers license. The bureaucracy surrounding all this is worth it to the state because they make money off of it. Conversely I gave two examples where registrations were dropped because it didn’t actually DO anything to reduce crime and sucked up budget money.
No one is saying that one COULDN’T build such a system for firearms. I am questioning the prudence of doing so.
It isn’t exactly, no, but similar. Just like most gun owners aren’t doing anything illegal with their guns, neither are most phone owners. But WAAAAYYY more phones are being used in crimes, from harassment, to online predators, tracking people, arranging other crimes, fraud, theft, human trafficking, sex work (though that should be legal), and even terror events. In many cases they are used to DOCUMENT the planning of crimes or while they are being committed. It is why the authorities are investing heavily in “Stingray” type devices and want to outlaw encryption and pressure manufactures to put in back doors to unlock them.
But the average persons’ hesitancy to let the gov. have a back door to their phone is the same hesitancy others have to let the gov. having a list of everything they own.
There comes a point in time where you need to accept SOME water is going to get in. Because the issue is not a physical entity that we can just make sure is secure, but a messy chaotic place full of people who don’t obey the rules. Unless you want to take overarching draconian actions there will always be abusers of any system.
Please look at all of the other systems we have in place to prohibit things, and yet we are still awash in them. Booze during prohibition. Illegal drugs. Hell, legal drugs have a big system of checks to make sure only people who need certain drugs get them, and yet we still have people abusing everything from pain killers to Prozac and Adderall. Cigarettes to minors (I guess they vape now, but still.) Weed became so prolific we are finally coming to our senses and saying, fine, make it legal.
I am not 100% opposed to every idea, but I am opposed to most of them because while I think many ideas have good intentions, I can see right now how they aren’t going to do much to stop criminals. Some level of hindrance is prudent. I think the NICS system is a good one and should be beefed up. Right now it fails because we don’t have authorities reporting everything to the database that they should.
Already we ignore prohibited persons trying to buy guns via a NICS check. One would think that would be ripe for a sting event. Or even just a search 3 months later to see if they found one somewhere else. Many times people who fail on the NICS check are LYING on the form, which is SUPPOSED to be a punishable offense. No one is.
I just checked again - wow - the numbers went up in 2017 to 112,000 denials, 12,710 investigations, 12 prosecutions. When people are caught making straw purchases, they are rarely punished as well. Why don’t we go after some of these low hanging fruit instead of concocting new laws that we will only half as enforce.
Like I said, NICS for private sales would be mostly an unnecessary nuisance for the average user, but livable. If they could make it so regular people could run the check, people would.
Straw purchase are not the gun show or private sale loop hole. It is having a “clean” person go buy a gun for you at a store (or a show, i guess). They go through the NICS check fine, and then give the gun to whomever they bought it for. Dealers even refuse to sell to some people because clearly the gun is for the person over their shoulder telling them which one to look at and which one to get.
These people are already committing a crime buying a gun and giving it to the prohibited person. That is already punishable by law. Adding NICS checks requirements to private sales won’t stop a straw purchase. They will still go to the store, buy the gun, and then give/sell it to their friend. Why wouldn’t they, because it is doubly illegal now? Is the idea that just one more law broken will be one law too far?
My understanding (I am not a gun owner) is that you have to complete a form in the gun shop stating that you are intending on keeping the gun for yourself, or transferring it to a named individual (and that individual is background checked). The form is an affidavit and you sign it under penalty of law.
The question is - OK, so you buy the gun. You take the gun out of the store. You give the gun to your friend who is a felon who needs a gun to go kill his soon-to-be-ex.
Can you propose a law that would prevent that? I mean, other than the one that we already have that makes it illegal and gives it a 10 year prison sentence if you are caught?
The straw purchase law requires you to NOT do something. That’s kinda hard to track, and even harder to prove.
The proposed change requires you to actively DO something, which is easier to track and trivial to prove.
Sure, either way if you are intent on breaking the law it won’t make a difference. But it does prevent nudgenudgewinkwink noncompliance that is super easy to avoid the consequences of.
