Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/01/most-black-market-guns-in.html
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Gun laws are very effective at achieving their intended goals in the state of Hawaii for some strange reason.
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There was a study in Pennsylvania a few years ago indicating something like 60% of firearms used in crimes there originated with 1% of firearms dealers. I strongly suspect we could significantly diminish the supply of firearms to criminals if we focus more on finding out how those criminals obtain those firearms.
We are seeing a spike in shootings here in Durham right now. The police dept. is frustrated because around half of firearms charges are dropped by the DA, and the gang reduction unit released a report that was interesting to read.
The mayor, who I like but disagree with on this, has said the solution is to get better background checks and close the “flea market” loophole. Which is fine, but we can’t do those things locally. However, we have a police department and a district attorney, and it seems like those are the tools we need to get at this flow of contraband firearms.
In the report, they interview some felons convicted for owning firearms. Several of them say the way to get a gun is to steal it. I wonder how often these guys are the ones actually stealing the gun, and how often they’re buying a stolen gun from some kind of middleman. None of them mention buying one legally themselves, so background checks aren’t going to work for them.
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Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Pretzel logic from the terrorist org. NRA.
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“But, but…I buy all the weapons in my collection legally! And even if I did buy one across state lines, I and the vast majority of other purchasers are responsible owners. Why are you saying this is a problem? By the way, did I tell you all the technical details of my latest acquisition? [gets out lotion and tissue paper]”
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Guns don’t kill people, guns owned by people kill people.
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Yup, the NRA is not only responsible for enabling mass murderers who buy their guns legally but also for flooding urban streets with illegal guns.
Any dipshit who talks about gun control laws “only affecting law abiding gun owners” can jump off a cliff.
Thanks to 1) The intentional hobbling of the ATF’s national gun owner data collection ability, 2) myriad of loopholes and loose state gun laws in parts of the country, there is no way to distinguish a “law abiding gun buyer” from an interstate gun smuggler.
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Here is how most illegal guns end up on the streets. They are bought like any other legal looking firearms purchase out of state.
The NRA has made any kind of interstate data collection on gun ownership impossible. A bigass loophole where smugglers are going through
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I was down in Florida several years ago and stopped at a small rural flea market. I was surprised by how many people were selling guns-- in some cases that’s all they were selling, a table with rifles, shotguns and handguns all lined up, set up between some woman selling home made honey and another guy with used books.
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For something that is designed to have a single purpose: To kill, you would think that something that is such a big public risk would be regulated at a federal/national level to have consistency. I do see how implementing such a thing on a national level might cause some issues considering states do enforce laws a bit differently but it might be something worth pursuing because whatever the US is already doing to curb gun violence is just not working.
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You’d figure something with such obvious interstate commerce issues would require federal oversight. Like the constitution says.
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Guns don’t kill people, they just make it insanely easy for people to kill people.
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People people kill people; and guns make killing people much fucking quicker & easier.
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Get rid of fucking trump, then we’ll get back to this.
There’s a big flea market that we have gone to in Hillsborough, VA. It’s about 30% gun show. We went in years past but there weren’t any good deals to be had. A lot of those sellers are have FFL, and so I think they’re required to do background checks wherever they sell. But you definitely also see individual people walking around with one or two guns to sell. I think the FFLs would be happy for individual sellers to go away, since they’re just competition that doesn’t even have to pay for a table.
@Mangochin I feel like those straw buyers ought to be fairly easy to target, even for our local police department, but it doesn’t seem like anyone is going after them. Here in Durham there’s not even really a reason to go out of state. A straw buyer with a CCW can buy as many pistols as he feels like at any of our many gun shops.
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Greetings from Canada, where Toronto has been seeing a wave of shootings this year. Roughly half* of the traceable handguns seized by police originate from south of the world’s longest vaguely-defended border, so we can relate.
*(The rest are thefts from the famous “law-abiding gun owners”, or come increasingly from straw purchasers — who buy guns legally, sometimes dozens in a year, then resell them on the street for massive profits. Why we don’t stop this is beyond me.)
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The problem is, they aren’t. Because of the lack of nation-wide gun ownership data collection, its next to impossible to flag these people down. The states which have these loose gun ownership laws have no intention of keeping an eye on who is buying guns there, how many and how often.
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Yup, which is evident to anyone who lives around here. A significant (minority) percentage of the people who work in the greater Chicagoland area live in Indiana. I have many friends who do that commute every day. In fact, I have to drive to a far NW Chicago suburb tomorrow evening, and my chief complaint is that it’ll take at least 50% longer than driving to the home of anyone I know in NW Indiana. It’s not really a separate state at all. In fact, NW Indiana stays on Central time, with Chicago, rather than Eastern time, like the rest of Indiana.
This is why it’s so easy for guns to show up in Chicago. It has nothing to do with the prejudicial remarks being said to smear “urban” citizens.
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The fact is that if we regulate cars to have licensing, VIN-numbers, transferable title, State-gov’t registration and mandatory insurance then there’s NO REASON outside of the NRA and Ammosexuals that we couldn’t do the same for guns.
Also, if we were serious about this – and we are not – it’d be simple: If a gun is stolen from you or bought from you and used in a crime, you do the time, too.
You’d see much, much better background checks.
Canada hasn’t has a double-digit mass shooting since 1989, and they still have free elections, journalism, non-gulag-based housing and several free (albeit sad) political parties. The only reason America is the way it is is the NRA, ALEC, Ammosexuals and Paranoids. And I’m tired of ceding both control of the dialogue and public spaces to gun-fans.
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