Of course they’re not going to do it, it’s the law abiding gun owner who will do it, reducing the availability of weapons to the black market dealers. Now they can’t just approach private owners to replenish their supplies, they have to find other sources.
Why do you want to make it easier for black market gun dealers to get guns?
How does your tough, new background check on law abiding citizens reduce gun availability to black market dealers?
Let’s say I’m a black market gun dealer. I have just run out of guns to sell to my criminal friends. Goodness, gracious, what to do now? Maybe I should buy another gun… Unfortunately, it’s TOTALLY illegal for me to own a gun, I’m a horrible criminal, if I consented to a background check, the computer would explode with how illegal it is for me to purchase a gun.
But look, there’s a gun owner interested in selling his gun privately. In this jurisdiction, there is no background check for private sales, so I can cleverly fool this person into thinking I’m not a criminal by not saying anything at all about how much crime is going to be done after I get this gun. I agree to his price, since I can get twice as much from my Black Market Criminal Friends, and purchase the gun.
BWAHHHAHAAHAHAHAAAA! Another gun in the hands of criminals, thanks to my clever ruse.
Now, let’s say background checks are required for private sales. I’m no longer able to go to a private seller to get a gun, since he’s a law abiding citizen, he will insist on following the law and I would have to go through a background check before being able to buy his gun. Thus, I must find a gun that is already in the hands of a criminal, someone who is willing to break the law to sell it to me.
My available supply of guns is now reduced from Criminals + Private Sellers to just Criminals, and I will be unable to increase the number of guns in the hands of criminals by buying one from a law abiding gun owner.
Is that how black market dealers obtain their stock? Can you point me toward a cite for that?
I’d just point out -
here it is the responsibility of the landlord to ensure that his tenant is in the country legally before renting his house.
If that can be done, why can’t the seller, in a private gun sale, be required to check that the buyer is legally allowed to own a gun?
Nope. It’s called self-defense.
The laws on this vary state by state. Many states have provisions that disallow sales if the seller knows or should know the buyer is a prohibited person. My understanding is that this is rarely prosecuted. But the main reason that a seller can’t be required to check is because currently private sellers have no access to the NICS system that is used to verify if a person is prohibited or not.
Exactly. That’s why I cringe whenever I hear the term “gun show loophole”. On this board, that has favorably morphed into the “private sales loophole” but even that isn’t accurate.
I want to characterize new laws to require private sales through dealers as “government over-intrusion between willing buyers and sellers for the disguised purpose of concocting a scheme to increase the ability of rogue fascists to confiscate weapons and deny the ability of law abiding people to purchase constitutionally protected arms.” Or GOBWBASFTDPOCASTITAORFTCWADTAOLAPTPCPA. California for short. 
<----I joke.
This was a concern when the current laws were enacted. If the general public has access to the background check system it is subject to abuse. George Jetson can use it to see if Judy’s new boyfriend is a felon. It is not just a hypothetical, as this has happened with licensed dealers. The threat of losing the FFL is one way to reduce such abuse, but if it were available to private sellers no such incentive would exist. The internet may be making such privacy concerns moot, but it was a real factor when the laws were enacted.
One means around this would be to issue some sort of firearms purchase ID card, that the seller would need some key piece of info from to be allowed to do a background check. This would give the agency assurance that the buyer had given permission for the check. The agency would reply with a thumbs up, or down, and a photograph from their files of the buyer for verification.
Frankly, as a firearm owner, I’d love some way to assure that any guns I sold were going to good homes. It is a factor in why I haven’t sold any guns except one swapped to a FFL as part of a purchase. I don’t know how many like me there are, but I kind of suspect that if buyers could be verified a fair number of used guns would come to market, possibly driving down prices a bit.
It would also give me a reason and means to verify the identity of a potential buyer prior to an in-person meeting.
Because landlords, like gun dealers, are engaging in commerce, which the government is held to have a broad power to regulate. Whereas private gun sales are more like a having a friend of yours call and say, “Hey, my cousin Luiz needs a place to stay for a couple of weeks; can he stay in your guest room if he gives you some money to help cover utilities?”
ETA: And there are laws covering what amount of sales makes you a gun “dealer”, just as there are for what constitutes being a landlord. And the government does crack down on people trying to skirt those laws.
No cite, but I wouldn’t expect it to be more than a minor factor in the overall trade. Straw purchases are, no doubt a much bigger issue, which causes me to wonder why straw purchases aren’t basically guaranteed jail time.
As has been noted by others in this thread, we have lots of lovely gun laws already on the books that are seldom enforced. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but one big one is that when plea bargains are reached, gun-specific charges are often dropped at the local and state level. Federal charges require federal prosecution. You’d have to ask the feds why they don’t enforce their own laws.
No snark, I bet if you checked into it, you would probably find that much of what you are proposing is, in fact, already the law. Rather than additional laws. which there is no reason to expect would be better enforced, shouldn’t you be demanding that the existing laws have some teeth?
You know its terrible that murder is illegal because only criminals get to murder since they won’t follow the law anyway. If they made murder legal then I’ll bet all the good people will only kill others who deserve it! :rolleyes:
Are you replying to anyone in particular?
If you told me that I had to pick one thing, cracking down on Straw Purchases or closing the Private Seller “whatever it is”, I’d pick the Straw Purchase thing, no doubt.
OTOH, a notable gentleman once remarked that the gov’t “can do more than one thing at a time.” So, I don’t accept that I, or any politician, needs to pick just one thing to work on.
I feel that making sure private sales of weapons undergo the same scrutiny as professional sales of weapons is reasonable, when our society needs to do better at keeping weapons away from criminals.
I never said you had to pick one thing. I am asking you whether you know what existing laws already cover and how often those laws are enforced. Straw purchases are already against the law. That law is seldom enforced. Seems to me the problem is lack of enforcement, not lack of legislation.
We prosecute murder, though. If we prosecuted murder at the same low rate (roughy one out of a thousand crimes) that we do gun law violations (particularly attempted illegal purchases), this would make more sense.
Otherwise, I’d say “Shut up, and quit asking for new laws. You don’t even use the ones we gave you.”
For straw purchases, I agree. The private seller issue is distinct from straw purchasing, since it needn’t involve a third party. I also wonder if the private seller process allows cover for straw purchasers who can at least claim that they were not straw purchasing, but decided after their purchase to resell privately.
Only if guns don’t really protect your family.
Why is that? I doubt it’s because the police don’t care. More likely it’s because of difficulty in coming up with strong evidence.
How about requiring the same kind of paperwork as when you privately sell your pickup truck? Even if the penalty for violations was mild, I think the paperwork requirement would be a tremendous deterrent.
I realize this is very different from a universal background check requirement. Which one would gun owners hate more? My idea, probably, this generation. Next generation, who knows?
There is already paperwork and a background check completely unlkke anything needed to sell a truck. If you want to know why federal gun laws are spottily enforced, ask the feds. It isn’t the responsibility of the state/local police whether they care or not.