Firearm "Internet sales"? Do those actually happen?

Great Debates
41

Oh, for fuck’s sake, are you serious?

Legally, private transfers would be banned. I would not be able to sell/loan/give a gun to anyone without first transferring it to a firearms dealer. He will enter it into his inventory, then start the background check, and then if it clears transfer it to the recipient. If the background check does not clear and he has already accepted the gun into inventory, he will need to run another background check on me to legally give it back to me.

Saying “Oh, what do you mean, that’s still a private transfer” is intentionally disingenuous bullshit. If you think this bill would still permit “private transfers”, then what exactly do you call a “private transfer”, and what would a ban on “private transfers” by your definition look like? A ban on gun sales entirely?

42

Surely that post wasn’t addressed to me, correct, Absolute?

43

I should add I think a “gun purchaser/transferee” license that could be periodically renewed, with the status verifiable online is a great idea. I am not opposed to the idea of requiring a background check for all transfers, I just think the current proposals are a really poor way of going about it, and unnecessarily hostile towards gun owners, and I often get the sense that the latter part is the primary intent.

The wait time is really not the point (although the wait in Colorado stretched to almost 10 days during the recent hysteria - that was rather excessive, I think anyone would agree). The point is the inconvenience, the cost, the assumption of guilt, and the lack of flexibility. Let’s say I get a new gun and show it to my best friend. He wants to borrow it for the weekend and shoot it at the range - I’ll be busy and can’t come, but I’m happy to loan it to him. I know he has a zillion other guns already, and is not the mass murderer type anyway. Currently, I can exercise my own judgement and loan it to him without any trouble, without the government effectively stepping in and saying “No, you can’t do that, your best friend of 15 years might be a hardened criminal”, ignoring the small arsenal he owns already.

Now, I would not even mind if he had to just pay $30 once per year to get an ID card that says he has passed a background check, with a URL on the back that one could visit to verify if they wanted, and then be entitled to purchase/buy/be loaned/possess/use however many guns he wants. In some states, a CCW permit already does this in part.

Instead, with most of the proposed federal laws, the two of us would have to schlep down to some FFL holder, wait half an hour or something for the paperwork to go through, and then pay $30 for the transfer. Then, when he’s done with it after the weekend, we have to do the whole thing again, and pay another $30. With the time spent driving and fucking around with this, it probably adds to around 3 hours. Give me a break.

Yes, most of the proposed laws have some kind of exception for family members. This is so they can show a nice picture of a father and son holding hunting rifles and say “See, we’re not ready to totally eliminate your rights just yet.” I don’t find this terribly comforting.

When there are far superior options out there that do not compromise the stated intent of the legislation, I am not going to support something like this.

44

It was addressed at the collective body of people who are playing word games and attempting to claim with a straight face that inserting a federally-licensed dealer into the middle of every transaction does not constitute a ban on private sales.

45

I don’t understand - if I have a gun - and I want to sell it to my neighbor - can we go to our neighborhood gunstore and take care of it there?

Seems to me to be similar to selling a car. I can still sell a car to someone else - and the DMV/MVA has to be involved for paperwork. I consider that a private sale.

I am under the impression that those more along the gun control side consider private sale to mean “a sale that involves two individuals.” While those more aligned with the anti-gun control side think of private sale as “a sale that does not involve the government”.

What part am I missing?

Is there anything that requires a gun dealer to assist in the transfer/sale of a firearm between two individuals? I ask, because $25.00 seems a little lower than what I would have guessed, but maybe they do it in order to hopefully keep customers coming back for ammo - more stuff.

46

Also, I should add - I recently sold a gun online, to some random dude I had never met before. I insisted we do the transaction through an FFL so there would be a background check - I do not want to be responsible for giving a gun to someone who could not obtain one otherwise. The buyer was fine with it.

I do not mind the idea of these laws. What I mind is that the proposed implementations will impose, in typical Federal Government style, a rigid, inflexible, poorly thought-out, inefficient, unnecessary bureaucratic process that in the end will only affect people who are inclined to follow the law in the first place.

47

Many people live quite a distance away from a gun store. The attitude often held, if not explicitly expressed, seems to be “fuck those rural hicks, they can drive two hours for all I care if their nasty guns are so damn important.”

Well, this may differ regionally, but in every state I’ve lived in the seller can just sign the back of the title, accept cash from the buyer, and then anything further is the buyer’s problem to deal with.

48

Wait a minute. Loaning your gun to a friend for the weekend constitutes a “transfer” that would be subject to background checks? I agree that is a ridiculous idea. Who has proposed such a thing?

49

I’m not sure they’re playing games. They might just really be that ignorant. Bloomberg thinks “assault weapons” are full-auto. Obama thinks Lanza used a full-auto weapon. Gun control advocates really are just devoid of knowledge and information on the subject.

50

Senator Schumer (and Harry Reid). It’s in the text of the damn bill that I cited. Here it is again:

51

Ditka, that passage you highlighted means jack shit if you don’t have a definition of “transfer” from the same law that says the word means what you want it to mean.

52

Right, which is a less than 1% false positive rate if only 1% of original applications are denied. Better than almost any other non-manufacturing, non-technological process I’m familiar with.

Nonetheless, this is why I think we ought move to a licensing system–less risk of bad decision-making if the process is less just-in-time and rushed, and then you just have to make certain things happening to you (such as felony conviction, any unlawful firearm use, any severe/violent mental health issue, we can talk) an automatic cause for a license review.

53

You gun control sponsor Diana Degette, who thinks magazines can only be used once.

The misinformation and outright ignorance coming from the gun controllers is absolutely mind-numbing.

My guess is they’re not really that dumb. Don’t forget this, from Josh Sugarman of the Violence Policy Center: “The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

54

Fighting ignorance is a lot of work with this bunch.

First off, let me say that I absolutely DO NOT want “transfer” to mean what the ATF interprets it to mean. It pisses me off how broadly they interpret gun laws (Here is a recent example of what I consider an abusive interpretation).

Now, to get down to brass tacks: If you’d read a bit further, you’d notice that S. 649 gives some exceptions where background checks wouldn’t be required. Unfortunately, loaning it to your friend for the weekend so that he could take it to the range to try out wouldn’t count. You’d have to be at the range with him, and

I would have thought that that would make it clear to someone of average intelligence that loaning it to your best friend for the weekend would constitute a transfer in the eyes of the law. Apparently I overestimated average intelligence.

You don’t see how asinine it would be to include an exception that says, “you can loan it to your friend at the gun range as long as it doesn’t leave the gun range” if the law already allowed him to have it all weekend, in his home, his car, the range, back in the car, and back home again?

55

What other processes are you thinking of? I’d imagine that things like police checks for valid driver’s licenses or insurance do a lot better than 1% false positive …

And I don’t think you’re measuring “false positives” in the normal way. If I have a fire alarm and it sounds 1% of the minutes in a day, and only 1/100 of those is actually a fire, I’d call that a 99% false positive rate, not a 1% false positive rate.

56

Ditka, you are correct about their definition. Doesn’t bother me in the least, however. I think that background checks and the like are long overdue, and I’ll bet serious money I’m more heavily armed than you are and I live in the most restrictive state around. Loan a buddy a gun for him to hunt with? Allowed. Go to the range with? Allowed. Giving Jim-Bob a pistol to go plinking with? Not allowed unless you are there, and I think that’s a good thing. Let him buy his own firearms.

57

Those aren’t particularly instant processes–or rather, the substantiative part of the process (the eligibility check and issuance of certification) is the closest equivalent “process”, not the act of checking a number against a database at the traffic stop (which is a mechanistic, defined process, which naturally do have much higher possible success rates).

The biggest problem with the NICS system, IMHO, is that the paranoid wing of gun-rights enthusiasts won’t LET it store any useful information tied to gun owners, because of the fear that registration and confiscation are inextricably tied. So it’s a mishmash system that queries 3+ different databases by a name lookup, which relies on so many communications links and simple places for human error (like misspellings/transcription errors) that it’s amazing it works as often as it does.
Do you happen to have the statistics on NICS checks only using the recently implemented E-Check system (that removes a lot of the places the system can have transcription errors or delays)?

Regarding the definition of “False Positive rate”, I’m using it in an informal process engineering sense. The system delivers an incorrect “not eligible” result less than 1% of the time you use the system. I’ve seen different definitions of it in statistics (if I remember my statistics correctly, I’m technically using the false positive ratio–“number of false positives”/“total tests”)

58

You’re wrong. You didn’t read S. 649, did you? You can’t loan a gun to a buddy for him to “go to the range” and try out under Schumer / Reid’s bill. That would be illegal unless you did a full FFL transfer and he did a full FFL transfer when he returned it.

59

Now that they people no longer believe that assault weapons are machine guns, they have been using the term “military style assault weapons” as if that makes a difference. What makes them military style?

I have recently also seen the phrase “rapid fire assault weapons” in an apparent effort to try to make assault weapons seem more deadly than regular old semi-automatic guns.

They are sowing intentional confusion among an ignorant population. The gun control folks are engaging in Republican style disinformation and they should be ashamed.

Lets be serious. The current version of S.649 has ZERO chance of passage. It is about as significant as personhood bills passed by the House. A huge waste of time meant to try and make a statement without making a difference. If anything passes, it will be the Toomey/Manchin version which only expands background checks for internet sales and at gun shows.

Of course the gun nuts have started calling this the Schumer/Toomey/Manchin bill to rile up the base but frankly they’re starting to overplay THEIR hand now. The bill is basically meaningless and will not stop any sales to criminals, its like trying to stop a river by damming 2% of it.

60

“Go to the range with” meant “go with him to the range.” Sorry for the confusion.