I am pro-registry but I have had this argument with friends from the LA riots and when they point out that some of them had their guns confiscated by the government, its hard to ask them to ignore any risk that a national registry would result in confiscation. Their story gets passed around as an example of people who actually used their firearms in defense of their livelihood having their guns taken away by a government that wasn’t there for them when lawless rioters and looters threatened their livelihoods. Think of it. You run your business, you pay your taxes and when the shit hits the fan, the cops literally drive past your store as it is getting looted to go protect neighborhoods in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Then you manage to protect your store from burning to the ground with the deterrent effect of an SK then a few years later, your government confiscates that gun from you. You can understand the distruct, can’t you?
Here’s the part you seem to be missing. The law said thqat SKS was not subject to registration (which had to occur by 1992), then after 1992, they changed their mind and decided they had to be registered, so a bunch of people registered their SKS. Then in 1999 they decided that registration after 1992 didn’t count so all those SKS owners violated the law by not registering their SKS by 1992 and now they had a list of everyone that registered after 1992 and they sent them letter with serial numbers.
It was a fuck up but the state decided to err on the side of confiscating guns that were registered late because of their fuck up rather than simply try to maintain a complete registry. IOW, these SKS owners were punished with confiscation for registering their SKS when they were told they had to.
When you realize how fucked up California is on gun control you can understand why Feinstein thinks her logic on gun control makes sense.
The concern about confiscation is that once the federal government has a list of every gun and who owns those guns (and within a few decades, that list will be fairly comprehensive), the government can pass laws a little bit at a time outlawing one subset of guns after another until we are left with gun rights a la Mexico.
Like I said I am in favor of a national registry (because universal background checks don’t really work very well without them) and I don’t think there is a chance in hell confiscation could happen at a national level. I would love to see the federal government try to enforce gun confiscation in Alaska or any number of other pro-gun states. But the precedent of (unconstitutional?) confiscation that was tolerated in one state makes some people nervous.
Sad but we very well may have turned the page on gun control for another generation. You can thank Feinstein and the idiots the anti-gun folks let drive the bus on this issue.
My thought is that we should do background checks prior to buying guns, have some kind of gun owner certification. Have it require additional training or background-checking for guns with higher firepower, such as full-on assault rifles. Renew it like a driver’s license, present it when you buy a firearm and then the NICS check becomes a “did this guy commit a gun felony since the last time we did a deep check on him?”
The quid pro quo I think the left should offer for that is to undo the ban on manufacture of full-auto firearms domestically, and let new examples of same enter the market. They’re vanishingly unlikely for a lot of reasons to be used in criminal activity anyway (largely, the kind of person who’s stable enough to afford one is generally stable enough to not open fire on a crowd of people, and they already require a much more stringent background check.)
I’m not really sure where I stand on registration of individual weapons.
I also think we, as gun owners, should put the idea of being responsible for the uses to which our personal weapons are put on the table. That is, I wouldn’t want to be inspected for a proper gun safe, but I would be willing to be additionally criminally liable if I didn’t have a gun safe and my toddler shot the neighbor or something over and above the negligent homicide charge. Similarly, I think unreported stolen guns that are used in a crime ought to incur some penalty for the person whose gun was stolen and who reacted by saying, oh fuck it, I don’t feel like talking to the police about it.
That sounds like a national licensing program. I think that’s a good idea.
The quid pro quo for licensing alone will never be reopening the NFA registry for machine guns.
None of this works without the registry. Without the registry, the anti-gun folks might as well just push for universal background checks (and don’t kid yourself, they know they fucked it up this time and they will get it right next time) and give nothing in return.
How big a penalty were you thinking?
I think the grand bargain should be licensing and registration in exchange for:
Federal pre-emption (see the Arizona papers please debate for an explanation)on gun laws, every gun that is legal in SLC will be legal in NYC, any special rules NYC wants must be passed by congress, no local rules apply any longer.
The license can act as a national CCW if you meet some requirements;
You make it a federal felony to disclose personally identifiable information from the registry. Enact HIPAA type rules for the registry;
The military starts selling surplus M-16s to properly licensed individuals at periodic auctions with proceeds going to the VA; and
You make confiscations illegal.
If the anti-gun folks don’t take this deal, they are being greedy.
If the pro-gun folks don’t take this deal, they are being greedy.
I’m on board (as someone that I guess is considered “anti-gun” around here since I supported the Manchin-Toomey deal). As long as we’re clear that the license has to be renewed at some reasonable period (as well as the short NICS check on a new purchase).
If you prove that you are a responsible, sane, and law-abiding gun owner then I don’t really give two fucks how many or what type of guns you own. But if you “lose” your gun and its used in a crime or try to give it to some unlicensed nephew or keep it loaded on the nightstand and a kid blows their head off then you better be ready to pay out the ass.
I’d love to add mandatory liability insurance at some reasonable level to maintain the license, but that seems unlikely and I wouldn’t hold out for it.
In the end it won’t ever happen, though. The NRA and 2A supporters will never go for it, no matter how many exotic guns you let back on the market.
It’s mostly a question of whether it will increase or decrease gun deaths.
Another consideration is the economic effect. Increasing the VA budget won’t help (or hurt) there. More laws that can send people to federal prison will hurt there.
Legalizing fully automatic weapons will result in a small number of high-profile tragic incidents so horrific as to have have a negative effect on tourism. You’ve got another bad economic effect right there.
This sounds to me a plan to make gun ownership more fun by increasing the range of toys you are allowed to bring into your home, and increasing the number of places where it is easy to carry a gun. There will be more murders, and way more suicides, in gun control states such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. I can’t see pluses that would outweigh this.
Doubtful. If we maintain the existing requirements (very strict) for owning a fully automatic weapon, I expect the rate of fully automatic weapon use in a criminal context will remain the same as it has been since 1938–there has never been a use of a legally civilian-owned fully automatic weapon in a crime. Period.
Doubtful, again. Consider–in states where records are available, there is a noticeable statistical tendency for Concealed Carry Permit holders (that is, people who are effectively in possession of a voluntary “gun license”) to commit fewer gun-related crimes than the general populace (not the “population of gun owners”, the general populace). It’s a simple fact of life that, in general, being known to law enforcement makes one less inclined to commit crimes.
Additionally, a national carry permit and a national licensing scheme will almost certainly INCREASE the efficacy of background checks (the current NICS is a complete joke, with incomplete records and poor searching–centralizing records and doing background checks in a non-instant manner prior to gun sales can only help), and harmonizing gun laws and carry permits nationally will permit the police to spend less time dealing with gun owners in technical violation of a carry law who have no intention of being anything but law-abiding.
That doesn’t even get into the fact that, surprise surprise, gun laws are often similar to drug laws in that the punishments for violations of same and spot-checking by the police for 'em are disproportionately applied to minorities and the poor.
As a gun owner, frankly, I think if your gun is poorly secured and it’s stolen/borrowed/loaned and used in a crime, you get charged with some aspect of the crime too. Someone steals your gun from your bedside table and shoots a guy, congrats, you’re an accessory before the fact.
Yes, it’s harsh. I don’t care–there are plenty of quick-access gun safes that provide adequate protection against misuse while still enabling you to get the gun within 15 seconds or so (I have test-driven some of the biometric-type handgun safes in this vein, and I didn’t even practice). There is no excuse for unsecured weapons in this day and age.
The negative publicity from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, giving people around the world the impression of Chicago being a dangerous place, had nothing to do with whether the tommy gun used was legal. I have no idea if it was, but that’s my point. Everyone in westernized countries, including potential tourists, will be aware that the US is the westernized country where criminals steal automatic weapons and occasionally create a miniaturized, but still horrific, World War I battlefield.
The question for me is whether those concealed carry permit owners are more or less likely to be involved in a deadly shooting where the victim is anyone other than an adult with criminal intent. I acknowledge that the concealed carry permit holders are by and large good people. I just think they are mistaken in thinking their gun makes them safer.
Maybe I am missing something, but it appears from this that you consider the lives of the majority of US gun death victims – those who shoot themselves – to be less precious. With the exception of the small number related to terminal illness, I don’t. So I would look at total gun deaths, not just ones associated with crime. This is admittedly a pure matter of opinion. It’s not a matter of opinion, thought, that you should include situations where the concealed carry permit owner is shot by someone else.
Big difference between “almost certainly” (better background checks) – which I interpret as a big fat maybe – and absolutely certainly, which is that people will purchase automatics when available for sale.
This is the lock-em-up mentality I – hopefully with respect – oppose.
Rather than having a big new licensing scheme that millions of people would violate, I would rather ban classes of weapons from entering the retail marketing chain. Then you will have fewer potential new perpetrators, and if anyone goes to prison for violating the, say, maximum magazine size limit, it will be a gun manufacturing or distribution executive.
Well, I do. How about we put a tax on gun owners so they have to pay the cost of putting large numbers of people in prison for gun law violations like failure to lock up their guns, subsequently used in crimes? Because I don’t see why I should have to pay for the side effects of your hobby.
I would expect that there would be a reasonable standard for what constitutes appropriate security, and that it will be fairly easy to meet–similar to, say, car insurance.
Personally, if a guy steals your safe, I think you’re all right unless you just don’t report it to the police for a week or something idiotic.
And yes, I’m aware that this proposal involves being willing to talk to the police when your guns turn up missing.
Why has this never happened, then? If the spectre of a legally owned civilian machine gun getting stolen and turned on innocents is such a high risk, well, surely it would have happened at least once in the seven decades our modern system for legal ownership of said weapons has been in place (which was implemented, I might add, AFTER the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.)
I’m not as concerned with whether or not it “makes me safer”, per se. It’s my contention (and it always has been) that the most basic natural right is the right to effectively defend oneself from force–literally no other right matters if you can’t prevent them being taken away by someone bigger. The ONLY thing that might get me to relax on this philosophical position is an effective SOCIETAL protection system–but that cannot exist under current U.S. jurisprudence as it is currently settled law that the police have no affirmative obligation to defend any given person at any given time regardless of their capacity or capability.
I consider suicide a right–as someone who occasionally requires treatment for severe depression. The answer to gun suicides is “more treatment/awareness for depression and suicide risk”.
This is just not even arguable. Any national purpose-built database will by definition be more effective than the current system, which involves checking only by name against at least three different systems under a strict time constraint.
The problem with this mentality is that it collides pretty severely with two separate problems:
given I think the main purpose of firearms ownership is an effective right to self-defense, there is no real way to usefully ban classes of firearms–the most useful weapons for crime are also the most useful weapons for general personal defense.
magazine size limits (and most “assault weapon” features) can be got around either with investment or training–it’s possible with not much work to get to a point where you can change a magazine in 3-5 seconds. Hell, I can manage the latter and I’ve never been in the military or done any formal training, I just wanted to play better Airsoft.
One can also look at successful systems from overseas and find numerous examples of systems with insignificant gun crime rates that focus solely on regulating gun owners rather than types/numbers of firearms.
It’s less a lock-em-up mentality and more of a faith that, when push comes to shove, the average gun owner will look at the exchange of “must be licensed/registered” for “national standards for gun regulations and CCW issuance” and think “hey, that’s a damn fair trade”. I don’t think we’ll see even 1% of current gun owners resist a law in this vein once it’s passed (mostly because I think a lot of the people who claim they would at the gun range are parlor pinks).
This is a silly argument–I may as well complain about not wanting to pay taxes to incarcerate drug users.
Yeah the license has to be renewed every few years. NICS checks become really fast with a national license, your license is valid or it isn’t.
Licensing and registration is supposed to discourage people “losing” a lot of guns. But legitimate and reported losses and thefts shouldn’t be punished. How do you square your last sentence against the constitutional right to keep a loaded gun on your nightstand?
It depends on what you mean by liability insurance. Typically, liability insurance will only cover accidents and cannot/will not cover liability from criminal act (I don’t have a problem with some sort of liability insurance of this sort). The sort of liability insurance that people have been talking about on this board basically amounts to holding gun owners financially responsible criminal acts committed with a gun.
They will never go for any sort of regulation. I support the second amendment and it is clear that licensing and registration are constitutional so the second amendment supporters you are talking about are actually supporting rights that exceed what the second amendment protects.
The only argument I have ever heard against licensing and registration is the fear of national confiscation.
My belief is that licensing and registration will severely constrict the transfer of guns into criminal hands. Criminals (and others who are not allowed to have guns) account for the overwhelming majority of gun violence in America.
There are registration requirements in several states and they do not seem to have trouble getting their citizens to comply with the law. The money doesn’t HAVE to go to the VA, there is some emotional appeal to this but we could just a readily have it fund a federal gun safety education program for middle school students.
There are over 100,000 machine guns in private hands right now and we haven’t had any problems for the last 75 years. These things are going to cost $10,000+ its not really going to flood the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant.
Licensing and registration is not just designed to piss off gun nuts. Its designed to reduce the flow of guns into criminal hands. We’ve more or less believed this for 50 years since LBJ tried to get it passed. over 10,000 of the 12,000 gun homocides every year are committed by people who are not legally allowed to have a gun. Licensing and registration helps keep guns out of those hands.
On the other side, we have over 100,000 machine guns and we have not had many machine gun murder in 75 years. Part of the reason is that machine guns cost at least $10,000.
I think that would be considered secured. My problem with that sort of exception is the guy who has a $150 Hi Point, you are effectively saying that they must have a gun container that costs more than the gun. Gun safety would be an important part of the licensing process and its not like we don’t see plenty of reminders of horrible accidents in the news.
Our current registration process has been pretty effective in preventing this sort of thing for the last 75 years.
There is debate whether CCWs reduce gun violence in an area but I think its clear that CCW does not contribute to gun violence in an area.
Gun suicides can only be prevented by totally banning someone from having a gun. Heller says we can’t do that. So if you want to reduce gun suicides, you are going to have to find some way other than preventing a national CCW or sale of surplus M-16s. You can kill yourself with just about any gun, permitting a greater diversity of guns (even machine guns) doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would increase suicides.
The absolutely certain increase in machine guns held by civilians is probably not a big risk compared to the huge expected benefit of having universal licensing and registration of all firearms.
considering that the vast majority of gun crime is committed with handguns, are you proposing that we ban handguns? I thought we had already established that an AWB was practically worthless.
We have licensing and registration requirements in other states and people don’t seem to be incarcerated in huge numbers in those places. Why do you think that a much simpler and clearer federal program would result in high incarceration rates?
How do you reconcile this with the SCOTUS statement that requiring these sort of security devices is unconstitutional?
I think SCOTUS is wrong, really that’s all there is to it. 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, in general, is somewhere between “it sucks” and “it’s actively schizophrenic”.