So, by your own admission, you’re in the anti-gun camp? I’m glad to see you finally pick a side! Although it has been clearly evident from your history exactly which side you’re on, so your “outting” comes as no great surprise to me.
Lighten up. It’s a fucking joke.
I am not anti-gun. I am pro-reasonable gun control. I am decidedly anti-gun nut.
And what you call a “gun nut” is to me simply someone who has said, “I have had enough.”
Enough of the distorions, enough with the lies, enough with the attacks; here I stand, and will move no more.
Sigh.
I never made any claim that they were. My sole intent in making my argument has been to advocate a position whereby the laws about selling handguns, especially in private sales, is made both stronger and more uniform. This way, we can be more certain that, when a handgun is found in the hands of someone who shouldn’t have one, that person has come by it illegally rather than by duping an honest citizen into making what that citizen believes to be a legal sale.
This, presumably, is in contrast to the pro-gun sites, which i’m sure are all models of probity and honesty, and completely free of any distortion.
You’re kinda making my point for me here. There is, as you say, “no Federal requirement for any private citizen (not-a-dealer) to conduct a background check on any legal private transfer, as long as the sale is legal by federal law.” But the fact remains that there are areas of the law that allow private sales without background checks, and i don’t think this should be allowed anywhere, even if it’s only to someone else from the same state. I really don’t see the big deal about requiring these checks for all purchases. You are free to disagree, but don’t try to steamroll me by pretending that the loopholes i’ve described don’t exist.
And your point is?
The vast majority of prescribers and users of prescription drugs also conduct their transactions legally. Doesn’t mean that everyone does, or that dishonest people don’t try to get around the law.
But that raises the same question again: if he doesn’t tell me, how the hell am i supposed the know? If the law required checks on all sales, private or otherwise, this uncertainty could be avoided or, at very least, reduced considerably.
And again, i never said they were the main source. My whole position is predicated on the belief that some people are going to engage in illegal activities, and we should do what we can to make that more difficult, and that we should also enact laws that draw a firmer distinction between legal and illegal transfer of weapons than currently exists in the case of private sales in states like Texas.
Did you mean “anti-anti-gun nut”? 
So, without any evidnece that there’s an actual problem (just a theoretical one), you would have the laws re-written, and inconvenience millions of American citizens, just to calm your fears?
Show where they’re wrong, I’ll admit it. In all my research, evrything I’ve found on pro-gun websites and from pro-gun organizations has been independently corroborated with sources such as the Justice Dept. (and it’s various agencies), FindLaw, the Supreme Court website, etc. Search my posts; you will not find a cite to a pro-gun website anywhere; that doesn’t mean that I don’t get information or ideas from them; just that I don’t post it up here without finding it somewhere else first and corroborating it.
Unlike the anti-gun assholes of The Striaght Dope (like Elvis), who routinely show up in these threads with their “facts” hot off the Brady website, and then get all miffed when no one will take them seriously. In fact, it is indicative of the liberal, intellectual double standard of The Straight Dope that anti-gun websites are routinely cited and expected to be taken at face value, but a pro-gun website is dismissed out-of-hand as “biased.”
And you’re making my point for me: you’re whinging about some hypothetical (unproven) problem, not shown to be a creditable or even a marginal problem, and asserting (as your own opinion) the need to change our ways of conducting commerce to reduce or eliminate a problem that hasn’t been shown to even exist to any degree except in the minds of gun control organizations and people like you.
The point is I have a shit-loads more experience with guns shows and the gun-purchasing process than you do, and that the “gun show loophole,” while a technical reality (inasmuch as no private citizen is required by Federal law to conduct Criminal Record Checks through NICS, whether they sell in a newspaper, by word-of-mouth, or at a gun show) is a chimera, a bugaboo, created out of whole-cloth by the Brady Campaign.
You may call me a “liar,” but be prepared to back it up with some kind of proof.
Well, you could ask him to produce a Criminal Record Check from your county courthouse or local police dept as a condition of the sale. I’ve requested them for about $20 from the Dallas County Courthouse before, but they are now available online for $5.50. They look like this. Or you could start a petition to your state’s DMV to begin issuing driver’s licenses with prior felon notification printed on the driver’s license.
As a free citizen, it is up to you to make the effort to obey the law, or suffer the consequences when caught. If you aren’t comfortable with conducting the transaction, and are in fear of possible repercussions, get out of the private sales gun-selling business.
Like, say, investigate, arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate criminal wrongdoers? Without getting into the private affairs of every citizen who could possibly do something wrong? Sounds like a recipe for a socialist police state. I’ll pass.
Our current system of getting criminals to turn state’s evidence works fine; prosecutors just need to come down like a hammer on the buyers and suppliers of illegal guns, like with Project Exile.
And you also missed my point about Texas’ laws: those are in addition to the federal laws, NOT in place of.
It occurs to me that you may be laboring under some misconceptionsabout the political entities we in the United States call “states.”
Up through the first half of the 19th century, each state was pretty much its own sovereign “republic,” with certain political attributes (necessary for admission to the United States), but not necessarily required to be “uniform.” Indeed, even in these times of sweeping Federal powers, there is considerable difference in the political “tone” of the separate states, and their approaches to dealing with problems. Because of certain similarities in political structure, these approaches or methods will have certain attributes in common, even with sometimes radically different outcomes.
For instance: California has banned private possession of fully-automatic weapons. Nevada, right next door, has not. California residents cannot, by federal or California law, travel to Nevada and purchase fully-automatic weapons; Nevada probably has no law prohibiting non-residents from purchasing fully-automatic weapons, as it is already prohibited by federal law, which all states must meet at a minimum.
It might appear to a foreign observer (or a newcomer) that the states are merely smaller (and more manageable) political subdivisions of the United States, and that living in one state is no different than living in another, and for the most part, that is ture.
But each state is somewhat unique in its political structure, its “culture” and history, and its approaches to the different problems facing society. Differences do exist, and a person could conceivably leave one state where a particular activity is pefectly legal, and go to another where it is a crime.
Persecuted much?
I think that rather like me, ExTank is really tired of the anti-gun bullshit that follows around the refrain of ‘reasonable gun control’. We’ve heard this phrase before, hundreds upon hundreds of times before from people like Sarah Brady.
They’ve always meant ‘one step closer to a total ban than where we are right now.’
Didn’t miss that at all; every point i made was made in full cognizance of this fact, as i’ve made very clear in my posts. I’m really not interested in debating any longer with someone who keeps misrepresenting my position.
Actually, i’d be willing to wager that i’m at least as informed as you about the nature of states as political entities in Ameirca, and about the late eighteenth-century debates that determined the relationship between federal and state power in America.
But as your main interest seems to be a pissing contest, and a sense of persecuted martyrdom, i’m not sure there’s any point in continuing with this.
Precisely. My point is that (contrary to widespread misinterpretations/misrepresentations) Miller does not support any limitation on the who has the right guaranteed by the Second Amendment (i.e. it doesn’t deny that the right belongs to each individual), but rather supports a definition of the scope of that right (i.e. it indicates that the government can prohibit you from keeping a supply of bombs in the garage).
Which, if the Second Amendment did merely protect the rights of states to have their own militia forces, would be un-Constitutional to the point of totally negating the amendment.
[ digression ] My understanding is that nuclear launch controls are specifically designed to require at least two people to cooperate, to prevent unauthorized launches by someone whose brain has been tainted by impure bodily fluids. [ /digression ]
If I may make an observation here, it seems to me that some of the people participating in this thread are bemoaning the lack of decorum and civil opinion backed up by substantive unbiased citations. Surely that type of discourse isn’t routine here in the Pit and expectations that others adhere to it are misplaced. If one is genuinely seeking that brand of courteous argumentation, you should be eschewing this forum for Great Debates. This particular forum provides a much different setting where folks can yell at each other, stomp their feet, wave their fist in the air. In the midst of such, it seems to me, the expectations (probing questions, substantive responses, erudite opinions, instructional citations, tempered rhetoric) which are routine in GD simply cannot be reckoned on, and it is unreasonable in the extreme to request these things of your opposition. Even further, when you make these kinds of demands, to many—such as myself—you are the party who ends up looking rather foolish.
It’s as if you’re asking someone to lower their voice—while yelling at them.
With about 236.000.000 guns out there, do you think 500.000 stolen is unlikely? Anyway, my source was an article from the National Institute of Justice, referenced in the ‘What’s with the guns’ discussion thread.
As to the serial number thing and more detail on guns travelling around in the U.S., check this out.
(Also recommended reading for Mhendo.)
Quick disclaimer: I did indeed mistakenly attribute ExTank’s words for UncleBeer’s. You two do look so much alike when you’re covered with foam, but it’s my error nonetheless.
“State militia” “National Guard”. It ain’t that hard, amigo.
If you’d actually read anything I’d said before teeing off on it, you’d notice that I had indeed noted that. If you’d read the cite as well, you’d know that the Supremes confirmed in it that the National Guard *is * the militia the Constitution calls for. Like it or not, that’s the fact.
Only in your dreams.
Also in your dreams. What part of “The Law of the Land” do you not understand?
That’s no more than a vehicle to cite the relevant Supreme Court rulings, which can be found in many places if you don’t like that one. Why can we not expect you to take the finality of Supreme Court rulings seriously? Is it that you simply hate America?
Serioulsy, pal - if UncleBeer now thinks you’re being an intemperate fool, you’d really better go lie down, ya know?
Nice misunderstading of my post ya got there, Elvis? Does stupidity come naturally to you, or do you have to work at it? 'Cuz, goddamn, it oughtta hurt to be so stupid.
I’m not complaining at all about the invective in this thread. I in fact said that the Pit was just the place for such and that it can be quite reliably predicted to occur in here. (Bright fucking deduction, eh?) What I did complain about are the calls for unbiased citations and the misplaced expectations some people seem to have for decorum—all while shouting at their opponents.
I’d thank you for this, but the stubborness you displayed in getting to this point seems to obviate the need for that. It is nice to see, however, that one may indeed make the horse drink after you’ve led him to the water. Even if it’s only a sip.
Arwin, thanks for posting your first link. I’ll buy it, though I honestly didn’t suspect the number of non-commercial gun thefts would be that high.
You’ve given me a lot to think about there. :rolleyes:
Speaking of misunderstanding:
And that is indeed what I summarized as your calling ExTank an intemperate fool.
Now perhaps you’d better go lie down too.
Well, 0.9% isn’t that high, but since there are so many guns out there …
The second link puts the number higher, btw:
“The sources of guns are numerous, diverse, and diffuse, a state of affairs that should not be surprising in a nation with over 240 million guns circulating in private hands (Kleck 1997, p. 97), at least 750,000 of which are stolen each year”
As a general principle, i completely agree with you. I’m not saying anyone is breaking any rules, or that abuse and foot-stomping has no place in the Pit.
But i also believe that there’s no reason why the Pit cannot also contain reasonable argument. Pit threads tend to take on a life of their own—some are flame-fests from the beginning, while others follow a more temperate course. I’ve been known to disturb temperate threads with angry outbursts, so i’m not suggesting that i have some monopoly on moderation or anything. I’m just saying that, in some debates i’m in the mood for abuse and invective, and in others i’m not.
I originally wasn’t going to weigh into this thread at all, largely because there’s a certain inevitability about the trajectory of Straight Dope Pit threads dealing with gun ownership. When i did decide to make some observations, i promised myself that i wasn’t going to start calling people “gun nuts” or ridicule their arguments out of hand, as i might once have done.
I’ve already made clear that my own position on gun ownership has shifted somewhat over the past few years, from one of absolutist prohibition to one that would simply prefer a better and more nationally-consistent system of regulations. All my arguments in this thread have been made in a good-faith attempt to combine my own revised position with an understanding of how gun owners feel and my beliefs about what constitute reasonable restrictions and legislation. I don’t expect everyone to agree with my position, but when some people started insinuating that my genuine attempts to outline my position constitute simple stupidity, lying, disingenuousness, or bias, then i lost my inclination to participate in this particular thread.
I guess i should have stuck with my first inclination, and just left people like ExTank to wallow in his sense of persecution.