I completely agree, though it doesn’t make me feel any better. The English translation of “straw purchase” is “gun in the hands of someone who isn’t supposed to have one.”
Agreed again, though I’m not entirely reassured by either of those numbers. 18,000 lost or stolen firearms is still a lot of firearms unaccounted for when it isn’t next to the unbelievably huge number 80,000,000. I thought
at first I had misread the statistic for 2016 total firearm sales when I looked it up.
If it was oriented with edge facing the sensors it may have looked like a pen. Or maybe they were asleep. (Yeh, I’ll go with option #2.)
When we flew to Vietnam via Hong Kong last year, my wife and I just took carry-on. I hate to go without a pocket knife, but that wasn’t possible, so after carefully reading the latest rules I settled on a small pair of Tullen shears (actually harder to use as a weapon than most scissors) and my wife had a cheap little pair of Chinese folding scissors. The Tullens I had picked up at a garage sale for $1.00, so I was quite prepared to lose them.
Security at Toronto picked up on the Tullens and asked to look at them. The boss measured the blade length (they have a small ruler on the side of their ID tags for the purpose), said “Cool”, and waved us on. I don’t know if they even spotted my wife’s scissors. So I was pretty pleased with myself. There was also no problem on the Hong Kong/Vietnam or the Cambodia/Hong Kong legs of the trip.
At the Hong Kong airport coming back, however, the security guy reacted with a mixture of delight and horror. No, there was no way I could board with anything sharp, and both scissors were confiscated. They also carefully inspected the nail clippers in my wife’s backpack, but I had cunningly brought a pair that didn’t have the folding nail file, so they grudgingly allowed it.
From that experience, and from what I have read, the application of the rules is completely arbitrary, and needless to say there is no appeal. You will probably get away with scissors, but don’t take any you can’t bear to lose.
It would be if they were actually checking all 80m and only 9k were unaccounted for, but that isn’t quite what is happening. that is 9000 out of a sample of 18000 total which is half of them, 50%, which is not quite such a low rate. must be referencing something else, maybe used in a crime but unrecovered?
i want to imagine improvised zip guns and ray guns from the future, etc. but the reality is probably less exciting. 
maybe they don’t know which type of gun was used because it wasn’t recovered or recorded or?
Any firearm with a bore over .50 cal and “without sporting purpose” is a destructive device. That’s why the street sweeper and AA-12 need NFA paperwork and stamps. 12 guage shotguns are exempted from the destructive device listing unless they’re politically offensive enough to convince the ATF to stop exempting them.
Er - what? No, 18,000 isn’t a sample size. 18,000 is the total stolen/lost gathered by the ATF.
I was comparing it to the number of owners, which is ~80million (granted an owner more than likely got more than one gun stolen, and possibly more than one lost, so the 9,113 lost isn’t the necessarily the number of people).
I guess if you wanted to compare sample size, the 18,394 is the number reported lost or stolen is out of the estimated 390 million in the US.
i get what you are saying with this, but i’d put forward that the 390 million aren’t part of this data sample at all, they are unaccounted for. you can’t extrapolate what percentage are lost or stolen, only the percentage reported. if you knew what ratio reports, then you could math a percentage, but we don’t. does that make sense?
The security breach came two weeks into the government shutdown, during which TSA agents have been required to work but have not received paychecks.
Is this the new slavery?
How is being forced to work for free and not being allowed to formally protest not slavery?
You know that great-uncle Bob had a gun, but don’t know whether it was a rifle or a shotgun. Bob dies, you’re clearing out his house, and the gun is nowhere to be found. Hey presto, lost gun of unknown type.
OK, I see what you are saying, we can’t positively know the number, because it is just the reported number. The actual numbers could be higher. But at the same time, can’t you say that about a lot of stats? How many assaults? Even murders are under reported because they are just missing and never found.
Are these stats still useful to at least get a handle on the prevalence of how often things are lost and stolen? Even if the numbers are under reported and the actual number is 2x or 3x more, it still gives a decent picture of the overall frequency. Which is what my point was with telling the estimated percentage of gun owners losing weapons. I acknowledge this isn’t a set in stone number, but the real number should be close to it.
You can quit.
It’s not that they are being forced to work, it’s that, unlike other employees not receiving pay, they are being told they will be fired if they don’t work.
I don’t think that’s right or fair (and if your private-sector employer did this to you I’m sure it would be illegal), but it doesn’t rise to the level of slavery.
I had the same problem when I boarded the Statue of Liberty ferry so I hid my knife in the bushes in Battery Park an retrieved it upon my return. I’m still puzzled as to why the National Park Service prohibits knives on the ferry.
Probably the same standards as the airport TSA stuff.
Although pre-9/11 you could fly with a pocket knife under 3". I wish they would go back to that. The ironic absurdity is coming back to the US from Toronto they would let me fly with my knife, but not with a cigar punch that LOOKED like a bullet.
It might not be disturbing for Americans, but I would say very disturbing about Americans.
bzzt
That’s from the FFLs. In other words, dealers. Loss would be anything that takes the guns off their books that’s not selling them, and not being stolen.
Example would include: employee breaking the gun, FFL being a commercial range, and just wearing them out.
You’re right, thanks for pointing that out.
The problem of lost and stolen guns is actually much worse than those numbers suggest.
Based on numbers from the National Crime information Center, 182,901 guns were stolen and 6,582 were lost in 2012.
Doesn’t seem as though things have gotten better since then either:
It’s never wise to underestimate the stupidity of Americans when guns are concerned. Cheers!
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