Hiring someone to kill someone else is conspiracy to murder. Having your gun stolen and being charged with murder is a totally different animal.
Yes most have criminal records but only felons, fugitives and wifebeaters are denied access to guns as a result of criminal record. People under indictment for a felony are also prohibited persons. So most gun murders are probably committed by criminals who did not possess the gun legally.
Also minors cannot purchase guns legally and commit about 1000 (out of 14,000) murders a year.
What’s wrong with registration? If you are saying that it is a stepping stone to something else then isn’t that “something else” the goal?
Every argument I have heard against registration (aside from the objections of the ACLU) have been a slippery slope argument. The argument is that registration will lead to something else.
Wait. Wasn’t the Coburn bill defeated mostly by Republicans? IIRC only a handful of Democrats voted against the bill.
Can we please not conflate Democrats with gun control? There are plenty of Democratic members of the NRA.
For criminal liability? Usually. Yes.
On the one hand, he HAD to know that selling an AR-15 in Massachussetts was illegal. On the other hand, WTF!!! There has GOT to be more to this story. The ATF doesn’t even go after felons that try (and fail) to purchase a firearm.
I meant for civil liability as well, but negligence is a factor there as well, even if the defendant or respondent or whatever they are called did not break the law.
I wouldn’t put it past law enforcement to make an crime seem bigger than it is. For example, the Newburg Four, while admittedly scummy, are a pretty far cry from al Quaeda, but that is how the FBI painted them. I am sure you are familiar with the expression, “make a federal case out of it.”
I believe the fear is that confiscation is only really possible through registration. And while plenty of people like you and me, and in the absence of the threat of confiscation, even Bone and HurricaneDitka probably don’t have a problem with it per se, but there are a lot of people who want to ban civilian ownership of firearms outright.
The opponents of registration kind of have a point as tragedies are followed by calls for new gun control measures. If registration is fully implemented, what’s left to call for?
There’s also the fear that firearms will be confiscated by mistake, as in the aforementioned case of David Lewis. Perhaps such confiscations should be followed by a hearing where the state has to show that it has a good reason to confiscate rather than force the burden of proof on the other party.
I do feel that registration would have a positive impact on crime committed with firearms, although it would take a while to realize that. Unregistered firearms (and there will be a lot of them for a long time) will continue to fuel the black market.
You think this is an isolated incident? The BATFE is a fucking joke.
The BATFE targeted brain damaged mentally incompetent people:
The BATFE convinced mentally disabled people to tattoo themselves to advertise fake storefronts in their stupid fucking stings, then arrested them:
The BATFE doesn’t go after felons that try and fail to purchase a firearm because that would be too much work - they’re too busy trying to arrest mentally disabled people they’ve convinced to commit crimes. Fuck them.
From the first link: "(I)f you want more federal gun-control laws, keep in mind that this is the agency that would be enforcing them."
First off - as I make two separate posts aware of the irony, can you not make 10 replies in a row that are relatively short responses? It’s terrible to read. Just a request.
Second - there is nothing wrong with a slippery slope argument if there is in fact a slippery slope. A slippery slope argument is only fallacious when the consequence would not follow from the original proposition.
Third - there have already been confiscations.
Fourth - It is offensive and misguided to burden individuals who have done nothing wrong so that people who have actually done something wrong may be deterred. It also wouldn’t work.
Fifth - there are multiple ongoing efforts to use registration lists to expand the population of prohibited persons. Recently the Obama administration pushed the idea that anyone who was on Rep Payee should be a prohibited person which is ridiculous. Having a registration list simply provides more targets as more and more items become banned. There is a proposed ballot initiative in CA to register all ammunition now. Stupid laws once enacted are difficult and resource consuming to overturn or repeal.
Sixth - Registration is not the end goal - complete prohibition of private firearms is the goal of gun control. It isn’t the goal of everyone, but it is the goal of enough that it needs to be resisted every step of the way. See the Hughes Amendment.
Seventh - getting on the list of prohibited persons is like the no-fly list in some places. No due process to be stripped of rights and registration facilitates the violation of those rights.
Any action that can potentially lead to any ban or confiscation should be opposed as if it were the same.
I don’t believe Coburn’s proposal was ever brought up for a vote.
The article said, “Senate Democrats … have abandoned discussions with GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, leaving the legislation – at least for now – without backing from a pro-gun Republican.”
I realize that there are some members of both parties that buck their party on RKBA issues, but in general Democrats support gun control and Republicans support the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
I also agree with what Bone said about the ATF. They are a horrible, terrible, dirty rotten, no good, very bad federal agency. What you call “defanging” I see as an effort to rein in an out-of-control agency. I applaud the Republicans’ effort on that front.
**Note to posters: **
If you are finding the small text hard to see and/or read just hold down your [CTRL] key while rolling you mouse roller up or down
I agree that it would take a long time but so would a complete gun ban.
As for confiscation. A really totalitarian regime can do it without a registry. There are 300 million guns in America. If it was really a tyranny that wanted to confiscate all guns, about 90% of these guns would be surrendered voluntarily and about 90% of what is left would be confiscated at the point of a gun.
They have disarmed the populace in many places without a registry. Sure you can hide a gun or two but they can effectively disarm the public without a registry.
Or just install NoSquint and adjust each site’s font exactly as you wish for once and all.
That’s fine, but defunding the agency rather than making any effort to reform it is unacceptable when your entire argument against new legislation is that the agency (should) make it unnecessary.
Walls of text are hard to read too.
I have spurts of downtime so my posts come in spurts.
“a slippery slope is a logical device in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any rational argument or demonstrable mechanism for the inevitability of the event in question”
-Wikipedia
There is no inevitability of confiscation that results from registration. in fact registration is not even a precondition to confiscation. It might make confiscation easier but it would make local confiscation harder without the cooperation of the federal government. Remember Red Dawn? The commies broke into the gun shop and pulled out all the gun sale records that the gun shop was required to maintain locally. If those records were in Washington DC, the commies would have had to take over the federal government and not just a gun shop on Main Street.
Not at the federal level. In fact we have had a federal registry of automatic firearms for over 80 years and they have not used it for confiscation.
We do this all the time. Have you ever been through airport security?
Furthermore, I always try to propose licensing and registration along with universal carry permits and the pre-emption of all local and state gun laws along with repeal of the part of the NFA having to do with suppressors, SBRs and SBSs.
Did the machine gun registry cause us to start targeting people on the registry?
There is a registry of SBRs, SBSs and suppressors. After the Hughes amendment, has anyone tried to ban any of those things?
I have also always proposed HIPAA type penalties for improper disclosure of registry information.
The hughes amendment was simply a back door ban on machine guns by closing the registry, the hughes amendment could just as easily have been an amendment that added a ban on machine guns. The threat of bans will always be with us regardless of whether or not we have a registry, the registry doesn’t make the political process any easier. We have seen them try to ban things like Assault Weapons and it blew up in their face, I was embarrassed for them, it was almost cringeworthy embarrassment.
Wait. WHAT!?!?! We both agree that prohibited persons should not get guns, right? So why wouldn’t you prefer a situation where we could take guns away from prohibited persons? or are you saying we should get rid of the prohibited person rules?
And that is the slippery slope argument. Lets treat something that might lead to a second action as if it were the second action itself.
You’re right. I misread the article.