Say there is a good gun owner. His house is broken into, and he reports his gun stolen. Five years later, the gun is recovered from a crime scene and is traced back to him. Three years after that, the gun is found in a crime scene again, confusing the prosecutor who thought the gun was in a box of evidence from his first case.
Say there is a bad gun runner. He buys a gun, files off the serial number, and reports the gun stolen. He gives it to the bad guy who uses it in five murders in four states.
How do you write a law to punish the second guy without punishing the first guy?
(The sad thing is… the first example is based off an actual case study that I saw. The second one is pure conjecture.)
Easy; Regular re-licencing of firearms owners, inspection of their secure storage arrangements, and audits of their weapons.
Also, edge cases make for terrible examples. They’re hard because they’re hard. MrPenisTotem’s leaky-roof example is right in one minor respect: aiming to completely eliminate illegal behaviour is generally impossible and pointless to attempt. Murder is illegal, yet it still happens. The correct response to this situation is NOT to throw your hands up and say “well, fuck it - let’s just make murder legal then.”^
^ Speeding is an interesting case study here. Cars are literal time machines in that they save you time, but speeding is a bad idea because it exponentially^^ increases the risks and consequences to the driver and everyone around them. Most of the world has responded to this by setting a limit above which it is illegal to drive, and which you will be punished for if caught. Some of the world has responded by effectively throwing up their hands and saying “fuck it - we have other things to worry about.” Germany responded by saying “Hmm, how about if we engineered things so the risks were manageable - better cars, safer roads, better separation of different types of mobility, etc. Not everywhere, of course. But we could do it on the main arterial routes which will maximise the benefits of these time machines while managing the risks to all users.” Interesting, huh?
And I assume Bubba down at the swap meet has a plentiful supply of these forms as well?
Another question is:
You buy the gun.
…
Seven years later it gets used in a convenience store robbery by a guy who it turns out bought it from your brother-in-law who – honest-to-god, your honor – you sold it to just a couple months ago because you had no idea he’d served time for gun trafficking up across the state line.
Is anything there still enforceable? Is there any DA who’s going to waste his time trying?
Well, it sounds like no changes are necessary! Surely, since this process is so straightforward and traceable, and, as we are told, straw purchases of this form are one of the most common channels by which illicit weapons are obtained, that there are loads of convictions, right?
Which is self-confessedly non-responsive to the original argument. The fact remains that car registrations exist as a thing, a largely positive thing, despite the fact that most – the ‘vast majority’ was a phrase that kept coming up – car owners and buyers are perfectly well-intentioned. It seems a threshold level of bad intentions is not some magic requirement before a registration policy can be discussed.
That said, there are plenty of overlaps policy wise. Car registration and driver licensing are invaluable in solving crimes such as thefts, hit and runs and vehicle dumping, in enforcing regulations like emissions standards or possession of liability insurance, and in requiring at least some modicum of training. The fact that it’s all self-financing is an implementation detail - to do the same with guns would seem to be merely a matter of setting the fees high enough, no?
If you’d like to question the prudence, fine. I just don’t see how that has anything to do with whether or not it’s analogous to car registration.
Which is exactly why I couched the whole thing in terms of flows. Just because it never completely stops doesn’t mean you have to settle for a torrent instead of a trickle, though.
Nor is it a great argument against building out structures that have proven effective at pinching off entire pipelines.
I mean, that’s a good point. I don’t necessarily think anyone’s going to be served by tying up 100,000 extra prison beds with these people, but in some cases, maybe. And a follow up check should be mandatory.
It almost certainly comes down to enforcement budgets. But, weirdly, I don’t expect that the usual ‘gun lobby’ suspects have a good record when it comes to allying with progressives for more cash.
Same as with research. A lot of unknowns and unknown unknowns, and better research could help point the way to actually good, lower impact policy to reduce harm. But we don’t have it.
Likewise, people who assert that NICS is the be-all and end-all need to do some fact-checking:
Stats on 2018 were worse. NICS gets flooded with requests and the three day timer times out before they can complete the check. As a reminder, that’s how Dylan Roof was able to purchase the firearms he used for his racist murders.
People oppose things like key escrow – or whatever magic π=3.00 third party access the FBI wants to invent – because those pose real, practical detriments to secure, legitimate use.
Meaning almost nobody’s opposed, in principle, to properly warranted searches and surveillance. They’re opposed to, e.g., [insert rogue state or mafia group here] inevitably hacking the escrow server and then spying freely on your business plans or installing ransomware on everyone’s devices. Or to the threat of unlawful govt/corporate spying that could discourage otherwise lawful activities, like political/union organizing, romantic messages, etc.
It’s not clear to me how firearms registration falls into either of those categories. Registering a firearm at purchase doesn’t prevent you from using it safely and freely. It doesn’t mean it’s less (lawfully) useful, or that it’s going to suddenly stop working one day, or get hacked by a dude in Lithuania and start firing in the wrong direction. It doesn’t mean there’s a tracker on the gun telling the government where you are and how many times you’ve pulled the trigger, making you think twice about going to the range as often.
At the outside, I guess you could argue that a registration database, if hacked, could set you up as a target for thieves. But the sort of people who would be the ripest pickings there aren’t usually secret gun owners anyway. And it doesn’t scale – bad guys still have to physically come to your house, not just download every iphone chat in the world at a click.
More basically, having a list of things is just not the same as ongoing spying or surveillance.
The former is, in fact, pretty routine. Cars, trailers, boats, houses. Even bicycles. And spouses and children. The sane among us don’t scream and holler about our civil liberties when the building inspector comes to our house and checks that we have the right number of outlets and fire exits. Or the public health official requires proof that our bodies have the right number of vaccinations. We don’t think twice about filling out warranty cards. It’s uncontroversial that at least the phone company knows the bare fact that you have a phone, and even what the number is, and it’s understood that the government can get that information from them pretty easily.
That’s all on top of the, I think relatively intuitive, idea that maybe a gun is a very powerful thing which deserves a lot of respect, and of which ownership is a special responsibility.
So, your theory is “We don’t know if the laws we have are good or not because they aren’t enforced, but we can fix this problem by simply writing more laws?” Writing more laws isn’t going to help one bit if they aren’t enforced like the old laws.
What I’m saying is that we should really try enforcing the old laws before we write any new laws, and frankly I am uninterested in adding more bad laws because “think of the children and DO SOMETHING” instead of understanding the problem and actually doing things to solve it while protecting legal gun ownership.
As an aside: @JonS and @jacklecou
The FBI runs a great database called the Universal Crime Reporting database. It contains troves of information regarding gun crime in the United States. There’s plenty of data there to get started on the research. It’s honestly what informs most of my opinions on the subject, such as my belief that any gun control that focuses on long arm bans is so completely ineffectual that it has to be in bad faith.
Yep. It is a public, free open resource. You may have to download the data and do some number crunching in Excel to get the data you want. But you can download the data to Excel and do whatever number crunching you want. There is data based on victim and offender demographics, location, weapons used, and so on.
Not sure where you got that from my post, but nope. I’m saying that, if the FBI wants more than three days to finish their check, give them more time. The majority of the time, they complete it quickly. But it’s fundamentally ludicrous to say, “times up! Gotta sell this gun now, even though you’re 98% of the way to blocking the sale to a violent felon!”
If you need a gun in less than three days, you shouldn’t get one.
Closing the private sale loophole and improving NICS are new laws that help enforcement of the old laws. And please, for the sake of civil discourse, don’t paint others as hysterical unless you’re ready to receive the same treatment. Let’s see how that goes. On one hand, you have people who have lost loved ones who are trying to keep others from experiencing that pain. On the other you have people who want something that goes BANG! Totally even moral ground there…
It is fundamentally ridiculous to me that looking up a name and a social security number on a list isn’t something that can be done instantly online. The fact that it can take up to 3 days is mind boggling stupid to me.
Isn’t it amazing that you assume everyone who has been touched by gun violence will automatically be on your side? Well, obviously, right?
Oh, except no. I’ve been shot at several times. Lost friends and family members to gun deaths.
I have accepted that bad guys are going to have guns, at least for my lifetime. I want my family to be able to purchase tools to defend themselves if they so choose. That pain you talk about? That’s why.
This is a little misleading. A casual reading of that might lead one to assume that this was a failed experiment because none of these lawfully registered guns were ever used in a crime or something.
But Maryland’s story, at least, has nothing to do with that. Probably a lot of those guns were used in crimes, eventually. Or are being used right now. Some of them definitely were. And the filed casings might have helped.
Problem is, 1) contracting cockups meant the imaging and matching technology they were using – from the early 2000s, mind – just couldn’t do the job. And 2) It was canceled after just fifteen years. Just about the time the first guns registered in the system would have finally been dribbling down into the black market.
That fiasco kind of burned policy makers in other states and the national level on the whole idea, but the basic concept is still technically sound, AFAICT. And not especially expensive. Worth a…shot.
If you’re such an expert, you should totally help out the FBI.
Read my post. I didn’t assume anything about you. Rather the opposite - I pointed out that your characterization of gun control advocates assumed rather a lot about them, and if that is how you go about disagreeing with people, you need to be prepared to be on the receiving end of that kind of rhetoric. Look how well that went.
Well, thanks to lack of centralization, my understanding is that it’s actually a bunch of searches in a whole mess of federal and state databases. There isn’t one list.
Even so most clearances take no more than a couple minutes. It’s just when there are inconsistencies or red flags, someone needs to step in and manually sort it all out.
You can thank a combination of under-funding, and outright congressional prohibitions on effective record keeping. It not only slows down checks, it also slows down investigations, prevents discovery of patterns of sales that might reveal illicit activity, etc.
Modernizing and centralizing is a no brainer that should be everyone’s wishlist here, which would include making NICS searches as painless as possible all around. Guess which lobby generally opposes that though. (Hint: starts with ‘g’ ends with an ‘un’.)
Really? Conservatives seem to love giving money to police agencies. Of course that’s been starting to change with paranoia about the deep state out to get Trump.
Wow. I can see the investigations being hobbled by budgets assigned to that, but they do manage better than 1-in-9. But I’m baffled at only 12 prosecutions. I would think nearly every single investigation would result in prosecution. These are literal slam-dunk cases. And of course, if they’re not being prosecuted, I can start to see why they’re not bothering to do all of the investigations.
The last true conservative left the Republican Party a decade ago and turned out the lights. All that’s left are cave trollies who thrive in the darkness.
The standard of freedom is that you get to swing your arm only so long as you don’t hit somebody else’s nose by doing it. Many of these other things you mention might seem to be simple personal freedoms but they are restricted because they often hurt other people. I used to live in Southern California, where fires are a real problem. Many of these fires don’t have natural causes but can be traced to things like campfires and fireworks. And drunk driving and fast cars often hurt innocent bystanders. And we might be facing a new pandemic due to exotic animals being sold in Wuhan.
I feel like the dot marked ‘guns’ in particular is a weird kind of singularity in the political multispace, especially for “conservatives”.
You have all this stuff – skepticism of authority, law and order tendencies, racism, actual police and LE viewpoints, fetishization of the Constitution, sticking it to liberals, etc. – coming together at one point. Compass needles that you might think would normally point one way or another end up bending around at madness-inducing non-Euclidean angles and interfering with each other, usually just before getting sucked in and swallowed under the event horizon of the gun lobby.
On AK-47s and their uses: As a conscript, I was trained to use the Finnish RK 62, basically a higher-tolerance, improved AK-47 variant. It’s a good infantry weapon, but the auto-fire version the army uses has absolutely no legit civilian use. And for the semi-auto version, there are much better hunting weapons available.
