You must be using the term “private transfers” in a different way than the rest of us.
Private, in that two people can transfer a gun whenever they want. They just have to go to an official to stamp some papers and get a background check.
If you want to sob about how this is onerous, feel free.
I’m just trying to clue you in on what the rest of us mean by “private transfers”.
This ATF FAQ describes what we commonly refer to as a “private transfer” rather well:
Those are the types of transfers that Obama, Schumer, Reid, and Bloomberg are seeking to criminalize. I oppose their criminalization.
The NICS system is nice in theory, but poorly executed. In fact, the federal government has done a horrible job of administering NICS. The system should be shut down (based just on the sheer incompetence of those trying to run it), not expanded.
In 2012 they delayed 8% of transactions, meaning that the would-be buyer had to go home empty-handed that day, while the people back at NICS tried to get their shit together and figure out if John Q. Citizen was actually a prohibited person or not. In December 2012, the average hold time for calls to NICS rose to more than four minutes. That’s the average. Some wait times were much longer, prompting 1 in 10 would-be purchasers to abandon the transaction (perhaps “Instant” should be removed from the NICS acronym).
Of those 8% delays, 7/8 were actually just fine to buy the gun, but because NICS does such a bad job, they didn’t know it and made the person wait. Correctly anticipating what a bunch of fuck-ups the NICS folks were likely to be, Congress told them they could only make the citizens wait 3 days before they had to allow the transfer to go through if they couldn’t come up with a clear reason for denial. Even after all that, of the 1% of transactions that NICS denies, they still get some of them wrong. In 2012 there were thousands of individuals who were denied transfers by NICS that shouldn’t have been. These people’s RKBA were infringed by the Feds, and they had to submit to a lengthy and expensive appeals process to fix the feds’ screw-up. “Onerous” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Here in Michigan we already have a system that I think is the best of both worlds for private handgun sales. You go to your local sheriffs office and they run the background check. If everything clears they give you a purchase permit. With this permit you can then go and buy a gun from a seller. With this system you are not beholden to a gun shop to make your transfers for you. You could go to a gun show and pick up any one gun you chose. CCW holders do not need to apply for a purchase permit.
So, CNN has obviously got the crusading spirit wrt gun control lately. That said, they have a video piece here that, in fairness to both sides of the debate, shows the gun show loophole problem that legislature such as that being proposed would, in theory, close. I have no real issue with closing this loophole, though personally I don’t think it’s a major problem. Basically, if someone could afford the prices shown in the video then they probably aren’t common robbers or gang bangers, which account for a large percentage of the gun crime that happens in the US. Still, I have no real issue with closing this loophole and requiring the same background checks done when you purchase a gun in a gun shop, from a dealer or on the internet. It would slow down sales, but I’ve seen my dad buy a gun from a dealer in a crowded store (and what gun store isn’t crowded these days?), and the whole process from selecting a gun to filling out the paperwork and getting the background check took less than 30 minutes.
That’s what I was thinking as well- if my buddy wants to sell me a pistol, I just have to go pay him whatever he’s asking, and he gives me the pistol, and everything’s legal.
That’s where I have a hard time understanding how these background checks are going to be implemented effectively- how would the government ever know that the transaction took place in the first place? You’d almost need some kind of auditing system, which would be absurdly expensive and hard to administer.
By 90%, I assume you are referring to the issue of background checks.
The results from nearly a dozen reputable polling firms (including Fox) all find similar levels of support.
Who did this police survey that gun types have been bandying about with such fervor? PoliceOne? Who is that? How did they do the survey? I looked around a bit, and could find no details. Until they make with the evidence, I am highly dubious.
ETA: It reminds me of the stock that conservatives put in the “unskewed polls” thing during the Romney campaign. “All the results of other polling says this, but this one survey says that!”
A lot of people buy guns online. I have no idea how they avoid a background check without breaking current law. The background check that anti-gun folks think is going to be such a huge win is really a fig leaf to cover up how little they actually got accomplished because they overplayed their hand earlier on. I think the bill under consideration only closes gun sales at gunshows. It does nothing to prohibit sales I make out of my trunk in the 7-11 parking lot.
I don’t doubt that 90% of Americans support universal background checks, regulatory loopholes are never popular. Cops don’t think that outlawing private transfers is going to make a difference because people are still going to buy guns and sell them to criminals unless you keep track of who is supposed to have which guns with some sort of registry.
If 80% of cops supported licensing and registration of guns, would you support it too. Its not like the cops are highly informed citizens (on gun violence at least) one minute and then the instruments of tyranny the next, are they?
I think you can buy a handgun at a gun show with a driver’s license.
If you go to gunbroker.com, you will see some sellers who refuse to accept paypal because of ebay’s policies. The only one that sounds legitimate to me is that paypal will cancel your account if you use the paypal account to buy or sell firearms.
I think the bill under consideration only regulates sales that are actually made at a gun show, I don’t think it covers private sales i might make out of back of my car in the 7/11 parking lot. This is only based on stuff I read on some senate home pages.
Yeah, going through an FFL means its not private anymore.
To be fair it was kind of a hectic month when it came to guns. The new law would give precedence to background checks at gun shows so that it really should be fairly instant but the “no” answer will probably pop up a lot more.
A national gun license is probably the way to go (think of it as a national CCW permit, heck, lets make it a national CCW permit). Renew your license every few years online and your good to go.
Its getting a lot better, the shelves are starting to fill up again, you can find P-mags for under $30. You can find AR-15s on the walls at prices that approximate what they were the day before Newtown (which were already inflated because of the Obama re-election). What you can’t find is any ammo. I’ve resorted to buying reloads from a friend of a friend and using laser training.
If beat cops overwhelmingly supported licensing and registration, would you support it too? What if the license gave you national CCW? What if we made it a crime to use the registry for anything other than tracing recovered firearms? What if we forbade gun confiscation at the national level?
No. I would probably only support licensing and registration if a super-majority of Americans owned assault weapons. I would simply not trust any future forbidding of confiscation to last.
Oh, now you are! Confirmation bias anyone?
“Private” has a lot of meanings. I was taking “private” in the sense of “concerning an individual person” – i.e., the seller and buyer are private individuals, not businesses. If most people are taking “private” in this context to mean “not a matter of public record”, then yes, I acknowledge the proposed legislation would no longer allow private transfers. (Although I suppose only the fact that a background check occurred would need to be public record, not the details of the weapon transferred.)
It’s an important distinction to me, because I favor background checks even for one individual transferring a gun to another individual, but I wouldn’t favor banning the transfer of guns between individuals altogether.
Actually, I think what I’d really prefer is a nationwide license to possess a firearm, which would be issued automatically to anyone who asks for it who is legally allowed to own a gun (i.e., who is mentally competent and able to pass a background check). Then any sale or transfer of a gun would only require you to check that the person had a currently valid gun-owner’s license.
It seems to me that this would be easier for law enforcement. That is, it’s easier to establish that someone found to be carrying a gun is not licensed, than to establish that a proper background check was not conducted at the time they received that gun. To establish the latter, you’d need a record of every transfer of firearms, which I think the gun-rights advocates would find more onerous.
I was referring to Airman Doors’s “As for who wants that banned, look for virtually the entire Congress with a (D) next to their names.” But again, I thought the phrasing being used referred to banning any transfer of firearms between non-gun dealers. I agree that most Dems probably want background checks on private sales.
Horrors! Someone had to wait 5 minutes before they could buy a gun. This is certainly a sign of the End Times!
I think this is probably the largest point where most folks would disagree with you. NICS does some good, and needs to be revamped and properly funded rather than torn down because of 8% delays (of which you said 12-13% actually were prohibited from gun ownership). I won’t be as snarky as silenus, but I do have to agree–is it actually a huge problem to not get a gun that day because of a 10-15 minute wait? It takes longer than that to fill out the form around here (if you’re me, anyway).
The appeals process needs to be streamlined, sure, but that again I suspect is a manpower issue. I am unconcerned with a sub-1% false positive rate, personally–being in a field where we claim to expect five nines, I am generally pleasantly surprised when less mechanized/rigorous processes can accomplish a <5% defect rate.
Are you seriously arguing that a <1% false positive rate outweighs the benefits of the true positive rate enough to tear the whole thing down?
Granted, you can also feel free to ignore me, because I’m one of those multiple-gun owners who doesn’t actually think that licensing and registration would be an infringement on my rights, because I’m not actually afraid of meaningful confiscation ever becoming an issues–and it’ll be much LESS of an issue if we can apply the same kinds of sensible regulations found in other first-world democracies (which mostly focus on regulating the owner, rather than the firearm) that appear to work quite well.
So this is really a fear that one day the federal government would do what California did? I understand the fear, the California confiscation affected many of the guns that were used to defend my neighborhood from looters and rioters during the LA riots. But unless you think the federal government is going to approximate the political landscape in California, I don’t see how that happens.
I think we are likelier to see the second amendment repealed than a national confiscation of any sort of gun. I don’t think you could get enforcement of a law like that anywhere outside of places like California. I was recently in Utah and people were upset at the notion of an assault weapons ban that would restrict their ability to buy new firearms of their choice but laughed at the notion that anyone would come and try to take away their guns, they would literally have to roll tanks through the streets of downtown Provo to get that law enforced.
Also, as a law abiding citizen (we are all law abiding citizens right?), if the duly elected government passes a law that prohibits the possession of assault weapons, then do they really need a registry to get you to give up your gun? The only people who would not give up their guns are people who would not obey the law (AKA criminals) so the registry would at the very least level the playing field because they would know where virtually all the guns are after a few decades (and it would take at least that long for the world to change enough for nationwide confiscations to become viable).
So is confirmation bias what you call it when someone calims that Kellerman is objective and beyond reproach while a source that he doesn’t know the identity of yet is obviously suspect. Are they saying that the anonymous author of the study or poll is suspect because of the results of the poll? NOW who is the Republican trying to unskew the polls?
If it were only 10-15 minutes, that wouldn’t be a big deal. Of your average 100 would-be gun purchasers, 70 get the green light right away (70% of the time, it works every time), and 30 get the 10-15 minute delay (I kind of glossed over that part in my initial summary). After that brief delay, 22 of the 30 get the green light. It’s the remaining 8 that get a longer delay. How much longer will vary, but it’s usually measured in days, not hours. 7 of those 8 eventually get the green light. 1 of those 8 get denied, and some smaller fraction of them actually appeal the denial and get it overturned. I’m not really concerned about the 22 / 30. I’m more concerned about the 7/8, but I’m really concerned about the < 1% that are wrongly denied and have to work through a painful appeals process to get exercise their right.
The true positive rate is only ~1%, and the government declines to prosecute almost all of those, so I don’t see much real benefit to it and a whole lot of inconvenience (I’ll avoid the word “infringement” here) and wasted time, effort, and money.
And just to clarify, the final denials are 1% but the false positive rate of NICS is much, much higher. This 2011 article estimates that it’s somewhere between 94.2% and 99.98%.
There’s a huge difference between supporting a law and thinking it will work. Do I support a law closing the gun show loophole? Hell yes. Do I think it will significantly reduce violent crime? No way.
Why do you support something you don’t think will work?
Because it might work, and reduce gun violence a little bit. At the very least it makes it a tiny bit harder (but not hard enough) for people who wouldn’t pass a check to get a gun. It’s not an unreasonable burden on legitimate gun purchasers.
Text of the bill:
Huh? The text doesn’t say anything about prohibiting transfers. It addresses background checks.