Perhaps the risk-reward ratio for a rehabilitated murderer owning a gun might be more favorable than for the average firearms owner.
Another group, albeit quite elderly by now, consists of living individuals who murdered in the 1940’s or early 1950’s. Most of them would have been released before October 1968, when it was legal for American ex-cons to buy a gun. They could have bought a gun back then and still have it.
Right now, they would likely only be prevented if they purchased from an FFL holder. If I sold them a gun in an arms-length transaction, it would be illegal on their part, but not on mine, in Texas at least (as far as I know).
Don’t have a link handy, but I saw in the paper recently that a gun store owner was successfully sued by the survivors of a murder committed with a gun he sold. IIRC it was the first such successful suit in American history. Somehow they were able to establish that the straw purchase was so blatantly obvious (among other things, when the “buyer” realized he didn’t have enough cash on him, he and his “friend” stepped outside, and he returned seconds later having miraculously found more cash) that the owner was negligent in making the sale. I imagine that it is pretty rare for a plaintiff to be able to meet that burden of proof, though.
That’s the same case I recalled earlier; however most of these answers ignore that fact that the OP excludes knowing straw selling by affirming they should face legal sanction. Which also means ‘illegally held’ guns aren’t the issue either.
What he asked was should a seller of a gun bear legal responsibility for how it is used hereafter.
I am fairly okay with assigning liability to the gun seller under circumstances like Badger Guns’. It’s a pretty high bar to show that a seller should have known what a gun would be used for.
After Sandy Hook, Senator Coburn offered a compromise that would’ve allowed (even required in most cases) private sellers to verify that the buyer passed a background check. Democrats rejected his proposal, largely because it didn’t give them the registration they crave (cite).
How would that be different than the scenario we have right now? There would be some non-zero amount of people subject to background checks that weren’t before. I’d say that’s a net positive. I would have an incentive to use it were I to sell a firearm I own because I have no desire to sell to a prohibited person. I would conjecture that most gun owners would not want to sell to prohibited persons either. And since it’s already a crime to sell to a prohibited person knowingly, this would have given people an avenue to verify the status of buyers.
It is why gun rights advocates are so skeptical of universal background checks. We could have them today - but it seems like registration is the real goal.
The goal is accountability. Recording a sale is not “registration.” It shows that a gun passed through your hands at some point, of course, as well as those of the buyer, but it says nothing about where it is now.
If every (legal) sale gets recorded, then it amounts to registration. Gun grabbers would have a database of firearms and who owns them. That seems to be their goal. They reject any background check system that doesn’t allow them to assemble this database.
This seems like a bit of unsubtle sophistry. Can you explain how recording all sales and showing who purchased all firearms is different than a registry?
If that’s what the Democrats were asking for, you might have a point, but they don’t want the sellers recording them. They want FFLs recording them, which amounts to registration.
Okay, so where in your linked story does it say that the Democrats rejected the proposal because FFLs would not be recording the transactions?
ETA: I think we both know that Coburn was offering an illusory compromise. Once the legislation passed, the pro-gun side would refuse to fund the private background check database.
The Democrats didn’t really want universal background checks. They want registration. They get irked when someone suggests a solution that doesn’t allow them to make lists of firearms and their owners.