Well that’s the strategy:
“We need to ban long guns because they’re too powerful and they’re scary-looking and school shooters use them.”
“We need to ban handguns because they’re easily concealable and often used in crime.”
“Ban all guns? Who said anything about banning all guns? You’re crazy, you gun nut. I bet you believe in black helicopters and chemtrails. I’m not talking to you anymore.”
It’s a seamless garment of refusing to admit what the agenda is or actually defend their beliefs.
Good ideas Airman. I would offer two more - or extend your proposals for 2) and 6).
2b). There should be an annual license fee or tax on each firearm. This could be scaled according to the actual use of the item. Hunting arms (assuming you can prove you hunt) would be the lowest, followed by match arms and if permitted, self defense and so on with the higher taxes reserved for arms that have no demonstrated practical use.
This could be hard to delineate, but the intent is similar to auto taxes where a daily commuter econobox pays less than an luxury sedan or heavy truck. I’m sure something equitable could be worked out.
2c). There should be a tax on each round of ammunition sold and lesser taxes on supplies for reloading. To continue the metaphor used for 2b), this is akin to gasoline taxes.
6b). In addition to the criminal penalties for improper use or irresponsible loss of a firearm resulting in a crime, there should be civil liabilities for non-criminal damages. Liability insurance (probably at very low cost because of the low probability of losses) should be encouraged, perhaps required.
The intent of the additions to 2) are to directly and equitably defray the costs to society of gun ownership that result from accidental or criminal misuse. 6b) is similar, but for personal damages.
(Offered by a gun owning veteran who grew up as a hunting, reloading, sport shooting, Rifleman-reading citizen interested in rational control of firearms)
Using weasel words like “fairly recently” and “relentless drive” isn’t convincing. When recently? What drive? It doesn’t matter what small, fringe group you can find to support your belief. The fact is that guns are legal almost everywhere, and this pervasive need to see it in places where it doesn’t belong is your side’s extremism. The NRA said as much in its press conference, calling for guns in schools whether they want it or not, and essentially saying that its their fault that there are shootings. If there are mass shootings at hospitals, you can bet their response is to arm doctors and nurses. At churches, arm pastors.
There is no serious drive to ban guns. Most people don’t want them all banned, just some of them like assault weapons. And just because there exist some who favor banning, then all sensible laws restricting guns are impossible? If there are vegans, I guess we can’t regulate the meat industry since that will lead to forced farm closures and suing steakhouses out of existence, huh?
What would be the purpose of taxing it, if not to reduce legal ownership? It does nothing to curb gun violence. The thrust of this thread is that there can be common ground between gun control advocates and gun rights advocates. For me, that common ground must be grounded in reality and focused on things that would actually reduce gun violence, not punitive actions against gun owners. This is no different than a poll tax.
As for penalties for improper use - those already exist. And for irresponsible loss - what the hell is that? My car gets stolen and it’s used to murder a bunch of people…unfortunate but not my fault. The same situation but instead the person uses the gun I have locked in the trunk and now all the sudden it’s my fault? That’s and absurd result.
You say “just some of them like assault weapons” as though that’s a category that we ought to be okay with banning. We’re not. It’s an unreasonable expectation.
QFT. Any “Gun Rights Advocate” that would support banning “assault weapons” please raise your hand. If you support banning a commonly used weapon that has usefull self-defense and target shooting applications you’re not much of a “gun rights advocate”.
As to what we would support, what about a national implementation of Florida’s 10-20-Life “Use a Gun and your Done” law [which could put Zimmerman away for life if he’s convicted of so much as felony assault]. I don’t have a cite but I recall hearing it appreciably reduced gun crime in Florida.
In my conception, reporting a lost firearm will indemnify the owner. It would prevent tacit straw purchases with a clear chain of ownership. Just as you would immediately report your car stolen as soon as you found out about it, you should do the same with a lost firearm.
Anyone who favors banning “assault weapons” is being disingenuous. Either you want to do something about gun violence or you don’t. AW’s are a minuscule blip in the stats of gun crime, yet because of a lack of knowledge, as well as some significant momentum in the media, the cry is being heard far and wide. If you really want to take a bite out of gun crime, start with the guns that actually contribute to the problem on a large scale, or admit that they are next.
Quit being pussies in other words.
Nevermind
It is no more a poll tax than your annual automobile registration and personal property/ vehicle use tax (if your state or local gov’t has that).
As I said, the purpose would be the same as license/taxes on vehicles, gasoline, tobacco or alcohol - to defer local and state costs incurred by their use - legal or not. If your local or state government decides to skip license and or taxes fine, but it should be part of the conversation we are all having these days.
I fail to see why owners if firearms should get a pass and force all citizens to defray the costs associated with gun ownership.
If you want to talk about punitive taxes on gun owners, consider the $200 license established with the 1934 law governing machine guns. That was equivalent to a month or two of pay back then and was admittedly put in place to discourage ownership. I am not proposing anything like that (or arguing that the $200 fee should be indexed for inflation).
You do what you can. Because there is no way to ban handguns, you have to limit where there is the will to do so. Especially considering that no one uses an assault weapon for defense, each life lost due to it is a preventable tragedy. Like someone else mentioned in one of the many gun threads, it seems like just because a law won’t prevent 100% of gun deaths, gun rights people say its ineffective and refuse to consider it
Banning assault weapons should be a starting point to the debate, not the endpoint
The definition of “assault weapons” is arbitrary. I don’t care that much if they’re banned, but on principle I’m against an assault weapons ban, because I’m not convinced that it would actually do anything meaningful. I think the assault weapons ban of 1994, as well as renewed calls for one now, are the product of lazy politicians who just want to be able to say “there, we did something” without actually tackling the issue of gun regulation in a substantial way.
A quick look at the numbers shows it to be a waste of time and political capital. Of course that isn’t stopping the campaigns of misinformation from attempting to make a change. Feinstein’s bill to be introduced January won’t take a single gun or high capacity “clip” off of the street, but the mere suggestion of it being introduced is making sure that thousands and thousands more of the things are being made, distributed, and sold. That will be the legacy of her attempts, more guns, not less. Way to think that through Di!
Unless they add some sort of confiscatory measure to the bill, it’s not going to change anything. If that sort of addition is made, it won’t pass. So it comes down to the fact that it is time for some political honesty (lol). Either they want to get serious about gun crime or they want to make it look like they are doing something. The proposed AW ban certainly makes it look like something is being done and not much more. If that’s enough, more power to ya.
It’s not that an assault weapon ban wouldn’t be “effective enough” or any such nonsense. This isn’t about the millions of the things that are already out there, or the fact that any such law, to have a chance at passing, must be effectively toothless.
It’s just an inherently unreasonable thing to do. Even according to Diane Feinstein’s own numbers, so-called “assault weapons” have been used in fewer than 400 murders since the last ban expired. 400 in eight years. Compare that to maybe fifty thousand in that same period of time for handguns.
Making assault weapons the starting point of your debate accomplishes two main things:
It leads those of us on the pro-gun side to conclude that you’re not really interested in public safety, you’re interested in getting all guns of all kinds out of private hands. If you’ll glibly condemn assault rifles even though they kill fewer people in the U.S. than bee stings, what reason do we have to think that you’ll stop until we’re down to antique muzzle-loaders, and then start thinking about a way to do away with even those?
It makes us less likely to compromise with you on anything else, including policies that have a chance of actually reducing violence. Even if you succeeded in restricting semiautomatic rifles, how much more dearly do you think we’ll cling to our handguns?
When you decide to begin with a policy that would have a negligible effect on violence even if it worked perfectly and all the scary black rifles disappeared overnight, you make it the end of the debate.
I could get behind that as well though I’d want to explore the negative impacts of having a national registry. It seems reasonable enough in an effort to combat straw purchases.
The key difference is a driving an automobile or other use/sin taxes aren’t taxing activity that is a fundamental right recognized in the bill of rights. An ownership tax on firearms is a poll tax and I fail to see how that would pass constitutional review. Even if it were to be sustained on review, I would never be able to support it because it is almost entirely punitive and hurts law abiding gun owners without any potential to reduce gun violence.
This is exactly the attitude that will make no headway with gun rights advocates. It reveals that the true aim is to ban what you can. It is entirely an incremental approach without any basis in reducing gun violence. A complete non-starter. It results in poorly crafted useless laws in a an effort to feel good. I personally find it intellectually vacuous and lazy.
People do in fact use .223 caliber center fire rifles for self defense. People very very rarely use .223 caliber center fire rifles in homicides. Less than 400 since 2004 which is less than 0.5% of all gun related homicides. Claiming that center fire rifles aren’t used or useful for self defense is ignorance or cognitive dissonance.
There have been a number of items in this thread where I think both sides could agree. Why not start with those? They seem to have potential to actually contribute to reducing gun violence. That is the goal, right?
Because ultimately, most of the items proposed that might have some agreement between sides will prove to be ineffective in preventing the headline grabbing shootings. This then encourages more legislation by one side and even more push back by the other.
There is a fundamental set of differences between the person that is as equally and staunchly anti-gun as I am pro-gun. In the spirit of intellectual honesty, I will admit that I am no more interested in finding common ground with them than they are with me. Although I have not proven myself a danger to anyone, there are those on the anti-gun side, the media, and in these multiple threads who want to take what is mine.
Anytime I compromise, I therefore lose.
And you, by your intransigence, are risking my life and the lives of all Americans. You don’t fucking need guns with magazines that hold 50 rounds. You don’t need guns that can fire 20 rounds in 10 seconds. You may not want to take my life, but you want to make it a hell of a lot easier for others to do so. Therefore, it is my moral obligation to limit weaponry as much as is politically possible with the ultimate goal of taking your guns away, forcibly if necessary.
And these people are fools, confounded by the paper-thin deception of a scary-sounding label. They are the same sort of fools who believe the lie of “illegal combatants”, or that a man is a terrorist just because the government says so.
If you want assault weapons banned, I challenge you to say so without the shorthand. State outright that you believe that spears are such a terrible threat that a perfectly ordinary semi-automatic rifle should be banned if you can stick a knife on the end. State outright that you believe a shotgun is more dangerous if the grip is not an integrated part of the stock.
Silly stuff, this. Yes, we know that you gun lovers know more about the stuff than we do. We get it. Message received. You want laws that make sense, use your knowledge to help us write them. What we need to do is ban weapons that can hold more than X rounds or shoot more than Y rounds in Z seconds. We just need values for X, Y, and Z.
…and since this is totally missing the point, you get nowhere. Again.