Common sense gun legislation?

Great Debates
361

And what places are those, where a shooter would expect to encounter people with guns? Shooting ranges? The notion that mass shooters avoid guns is laughable. People who legal carry make up a tiny fraction of the public. They are not choosing schools, theaters and churches because there are no guns, it is because there are groups of people in enclosed spaces that are easily slaughtered. They are not afraid to die, most commit suicide.

More guns would not make a significant difference in the mortality of their attacks. Ronald Reagan was surrounded by good guys with guns, highly trained ones at that, and they could not prevent Hinckley from shooting the President and three other people. They didn’t even get a shot off. Why do you think you could do better?

362

I am not trying to brag but I think I am better trained to handle a gun than the average NYPD police officer. They are required to fire about 50 rounds/year and hit a man sized target from 7 yards away with 37 of those shots. This is a ridiculously low threshold. Those 13 misses don’t magically disappear, they keep going until they hit something.

363

I would agree that they rarely fire their weapons, but when they do fire their weapons, they really need to hit their targets.

364

For a few thousand dollars, you can take a week long class that teaches you how to build an AK-47, and then teaches you how to use the AK-47 along with a pistol during tactical training session taught by former military instructors from around the world… and you get to keep the AK-47 at the end of the class. There is a lot of training available to civilians. Of course most civilians don’t take anything more than a gun safety class (or whatever you need to get a CCW).

365

I did not say anything about “no prior planning or thought or preparation.” Indeed, many, if not most, suicides involve prior planning. Suicidal ideation is not itself impulsive in most cases; it is a lasting and ongoing thing. Few people suddenly decide to die out of the blue. In fact, having a plan in place is a major risk factor for suicide, which sounds kind of like a no-brainer.

But where impulse comes into play is at the moment of decision. (And really, “impulse” is a poor word choice, particularly since “impulsivity” is a term of art in the psychological field. Apologies.) The time between making the decision to attempt suicide and the actual attempt is very often quite short. There is an acute period of heightened suicide risk that is rarely more than hours long and most often measured in minutes.

Not sure if you have access to these, but more depth is found in:

Hawton K. Restricting access to methods of suicide. Crisis. 2007;28 (S1):4-9.

Simon, T.R., Swann, A.C., Powell, K.E., Potter, L.B., Kresnow, M., and O’Carroll, P.W. Characteristics of Impulsive Suicide Attempts and Attempters. SLTB. 2001; 32(supp):49-59.

Deisenhammer EA, Ing CM, Strauss R, et al. The duration of the suicidal process: how much time is left for intervention between consideration and accomplishment of a suicide attempt? J Clin Psychiatry. 2009;70(1):19-24.
My point is that in many cases, if not most, the direct impulse to act on suicidal thought is acute and brief. When it occurs, plan or no, the easiest route is, well, easiest. And it doesn’t get much easier than a firearm.

Thanks. How many of those defensive uses are ones in which, as you say, “guns are used to thwart crime where no shots are fired and nobody is injured?”

366

Really? I asked this in another GD thread about guns and have gotten no response, so I’ll try again here: What percentage of people that own handguns use them recreationally on a regular basis?

367

Once you have licensing and registration in place, background checks and licensed sellers only (or selling with a licensed seller intermediary) are kind of inevitable results.

I don’t know what you mean by industry standard safety devices. For example, most revolvers don’t have a safety. You pull the trigger and if there is a bullet in the chamber it fires. No one has ever seriously suggested modifying this design. There is already an age restriction to buy a gun from a licensed dealer (18 for guns, 21 for handguns). Using a gun in a crime usually carries stiffer penalties already at the state level in most states. Are you suggesting a federal law?

What types and why?

Why do you need increased fees? Are we trying to deter people from getting a license? What training requirements and why?

There are already some modification restrictions (you can’t modify an non-NFA firearm into an NFA firearm), were you thinking of anything else because I tinker with my AR-15’s a lot and I don’t see why anyone would care if I customize.

Correct me if I am wrong but the argument here is that you can run away or bumrush a shooter while they are reloading, right? Then isn’t the logical magazine size limit a limit of 1? How many innocent children should we let a deranged killer shoot before we have an opportunity to bumrush him? On second thought, isn’t the logical magazine size limit zero. We should force the deranged killer to throw the bullets at the little innocent children. What you are proposing is to have our gun policy driven by some infinitesimally small portion of our gun deaths and throw away any chance of having anything that could make much more meaningful impacts on gun violence.

Once you have licensing and registration, why do you need purchase limits? I suppose if the limits were high (like 10 handguns/month with no limits on long guns), it wouldn’t really be a problem but it seems like you are trying to prevent straw purchasers and licensing and registration already does most of the heavy lifting in that area.

Unconstitutional (see, Heller)

May be unconstitutional depending on the requirement.

This is probably the next big supreme court case. If the local police can exercise discretion regarding who can carry concealed, then it might be unconstitutional. Either because it is an effective ban on carrying or because it is used discriminatorily (see Jim Crow).

I run through over a thousand rounds in some months. What sort of limits are you suggesting?

I don’t think there are many things on your list, outside the stuff you think are no-brainers, that have a chance of being passed.

368

The primary benefit of licensing and registration is that it would make life a lot tougher for straw sellers.

369

That doesn’t mean that what you would propose would be an improvement. It certainly doesn’t mean that your proposal would get any traction.

370

I’ve been a proponent of licensing and registration for a long time. I would couple it with pre-emption of state laws and repeal of the NFA “ban” on SBR, SBS, suppressors.

371

I was responding to a comment that the NRA opposes EVERY attempt to regulate the sale of guns. This is clearly not true.

372

This is basic foundational information.

There are a few laws that you might want to familiarize yourself with before you form an opinion about how poorly guns are regulated in the USA.

layer state and local laws on top of that.

373

WTF are you talking about. That is not what the article says.

Can you point to the part of the article that leads you to believe that the industry turned on one of their own through their NRA proxy? I think you may have really read this article to say what you think it said but I cannot see any evidence that supports your narrative. Can you point it out to me please?

The article specifically points out that the NRA punished Smith & Wesson . I was there. I remember when it happened. This was a case of the NRA bullying the industry, not the industry turning on one of their own.

Also the NRA is not an industry lobby. I can point to several documents that prove that the NRA is primarily funded by individuals and that it does not lobby on behalf of companies (one of the restrictions on the first amendment is regulation of lobbying and the NRA is not registered to lobby on behalf of industry). The NRA no more lobbies on behalf of the gun industry than NARAL lobbies on behalf of Planned Parenthood or the ACLU lobbies on behalf of the NY Times.

374

There’s one I’ve never understood. Why is someone I know is armed (and therefore can observe his actions) more inherently threatening than someone who I don’t know is armed (and therefore would be surprised by) if he became hostile?

Or are we assuming that, magically, criminals wouldn’t carry concealed, since they didn’t get the OK from the government?

375

The problem, as others have pointed out, is that “guns in the house” is a catch-all category that ignores context. How a gun comes to be fired in a home varies drastically depending on circumstances, many of them under human control. Far fewer children are going to be harmed in a home where a gun owner conscientiously keeps his guns locked in safe, as opposed to jerks who leave them laying around where children can get at them unsupervised.

In fact, this is emblematic of the whole controversy over guns. Guns don’t do anything by themselves; it’s the person owning or holding a gun that determines what’s going to happen with it. For example, before carry laws were liberalized, people opposed to carry were certain that the result would be an epidemic of shootings. Yet this did not happen; why? Probably because before Shall Issue became the standard in many states, most of the people who did carry were doing so illegally. The majority of those were at high risk for misusing guns, or as one researcher put it, “how young men will answer narcissistic injuries and territorial affronts, and what one may or may not do in order to get money or drugs or sex”. IOW, the anticipated results of increased carry were based on the most crime and violence-prone members of our society, and extrapolated from those outlying examples.

Yet despite the fact that, unlike say second-hand cigarette smoke, the benefits or harm of gun ownership are strongly dependent on their owners, gun control advocates insist on ignoring human factors and lumping all guns and all gun use and misuse together, and treating guns statistically as if they were vectors of a disease. Gun owners see this as utterly unfair; like an occupied village in World War Two being subject to collective guilt and mass reprisal for the actions of a single partisan.

376

Wait. You said:“make gun owners civilly and criminally responsible for whatever happens with their guns.”

This does not require irresponsible behavior unless you think mere ownership of a gun is irresponsible.

If you are only talking about people who don’t secure their firearms then I would ask you for another example in where we assign CRIMINAL liability to the victim of a crime because the thing that was stolen from them is later used in another crime.

This sort of vicarious criminal liability is used in felony murder where you are assigned with liability for a murder that a coconspirator commits during the commissions of a some other felony you commit together.

Sometimes we assign liability (as in damages, but not jail time) for bars if their patrons drive home drunk and kill someone.

It seems like you are just looking for really draconian laws to impose on gun owners to make gun ownership so burdensome.

We already have laws on the books for reckless endangerment etc. You seem to want to assign criminal liability just for owning a gun that got stolen regardless of whether I had it in a safe and immediately reported the theft.

377

No, they don’t and I think they are wrong on this. Their objection to universal background checks is that you almost need a system of licensing and registration to enforce the law. I support licensing and registration, they do not.

I think it is just a matter of time before we get licensing and registration depending on how long it takes for the gun control side of the debate to stop shooting themselves in the foot every time they get an opportunity to pass licensing and registration.

They could have passed a licensing and registration regime when they created the background check requirement after the MLK/RFK assassinations. But they chose to go for impossible to achieve (and ineffective) goals and missed their opportunity to do something meaningful. Same thing happened after Sandy hook. Now it might be years before another opportunity like that arises.

378

Bad guys would have a monopoly on the civilian ownership of firearms if we did what you want.

The LA riots are a case where private ownership of firearms prevented the destruction of a neighborhood of small businesses and the financial ruin of the families that owned those businesses.

379

I guess I was saying that you can get in trouble for squandering police resources. For example, you can be fines up to $2500 and spend 2 years in jail if you use 911 to annoy or harass people. The punishments get more severe if it the harassing call results in death or injury. If you falsely report a crime where one does not exist (very few states require a permit for open carry, you can either do it or you can’t, permit requirements are usually for concealed carry), you can get arrested.

380

There is an entire class of people that are not possess guns. Felons are included in that class.