I see. Yea, I’m down with redefining “dealer”.
My concern is that the government could just enter entire serial number sequences from all the major manufactures and produce a list. What I was thinking was a system where the government enters both the name of the person AND the firearm serial number and the return value is only TRUE or FALSE. The gun is either registered to that person legally, or it is not. For a stolen gun, it’s easy to know the owner. Run the serial number, and the gun comes back stolen, and the original owner is known because that’s part of the report.
But when someone happens to be stopped for whatever reason, and that person has a gun, the police will run the serial number to see if it is properly registered to that person. I think a list that allows the cops to do this, but prevents the government from maintaining a list of gun owners would work.
I brought up block-chain because that would be a method of keeping the list accessible, but ensuring the list was not owned or maintained by the government. This list would not be centralized. It would be everywhere. And possibly, it could allow people to transfer one firearm to another person without the government involved at all. Nobody would have to be involved except the two people executing the transaction. Yet, the list gets updated. I don’t know how we’d motivate “miners” to crunch the block chain for each transaction, though. Some kind of incentive that escapes me at the moment. Like I said, it was just a passing thought I had while posting. I haven’t put much thought into it.
And if people confidently opined that guns were the ONLY contributing factor to suicide rates, you’d have a point.
FTR, and speaking as a relatively frequently suicidal person, I’m reasonably sure the people who actually like me, of which I’m assured they exist, are thankful that I don’t have a suicide button. And that because I don’t have access to such button I’m forced to consider personal pain issues, and have the time to worry about how it’s gonna look and who’s going to find my lifeless corpse and so on. Not to mention, I don’t enjoy the benefit of Japan’s culture being altogether understanding of ending one’s life for some reason.
There have been plenty, plenty, PLENTY of nights where, had I had the option of going “fuck it all”, I would have. Whether or not my staying on this fucking rock is a net positive is up to y’all, really - my point is, because I don’t have a gun, I never impulsively blew my brains out. Or have I ?! You decide.
Well, I’m certainly glad you haven’t decided to go that route. That said, France, which is listed as your location, actually has a higher suicide rate than the US. France is in the top 20 countries (17), while the US, with all our guns, is actually at 27. This is suicides per 100k.
I think it’s as Bear_Nenno said earlier…(to paraphrase) suicide isn’t a gun control issue, it’s a mental health issue. Unless you think that (magically) taking away all our guns would actually put us further from France, say, than we currently are? If we dropped down half (well, a bit less than half of our suicides are from guns, around 19k verse the 49k from all methods, but it would be a significant drop if indeed taking away guns stopped all those or even most of those suicides), we’d be close to the bottom, if not THE bottom of industrialized countries. Which seems rather unlikely, as just taking away guns doesn’t solve any of our racial or socio-economic issues, let alone stuff like wealth disparity and US work ethic (i.e. Americans generally get less time off than many other countries workers do).
True. As I said, I am not speaking for them, they may have other ideas as to how to combat gun violence, but I do think that we are all coming from the same place. My point in that statement was in response to the OP’s remark that many gun activists consider gun control proposals to be intentionally crafted to harass et al. gun owners. Well thought out or not, that is not the intention behind proposals, the intent is to reduce the harm the guns cause to society.
Many gun rights activists do come into these conversations with the idea that the proposals are meant to hurt them, and so react with extreme hostility towards them, rather than working with them to find a good solution that works for all parties.
Now that I have a new term to google, I can agree with you on this, that there are a slight majority of states that have some sort of law that limits a child’s access to household guns. I was looking up laws about storage, and was only finding a short list.
Looking at the list, however, I only see 14 that have laws about storage, and only 3 that impose criminal liability for negligent storage. I took your earlier comment to mean that there were already laws on the books that covered all the guns, not just that there were some states with some laws.
Is that something that would pass constitutional muster? And if it is, is it something that gun rights advocates would allow?
I mostly agree, but the other half of this is that we are trying to come up with laws that would be least burdensome to gun owners. I do believe that a proper “due diligence” is a reasonable standard.
Though I agree with bumping it up to a felony. Maybe a hybrid, strict liability as a misdemeanor, negligence makes it a felony?
Yes, we do.
Not extremely ambiguous, no, but I wanted to be sure. Would you put any liability on the minor? Obviously, if a 17 year old uses a crowbar to get his father’s gun, and murders someone with it, they would be charged with murder (possibly as a minor), and if a 2 year old finds the gun in the couch cushions and shoots someone, that’s entirely on the person who didn’t secure the gun, but would the different owners of the guns both be facing the same consequences?
Also, a 17 year old who has an accident with a gun, is that 17 year old liable at all, or only the homeowner?
That’s exactly how it plays out right now, I hear all the time in the gun community that people will not report their stolen guns to the police, and it’s not even because they think that they will get into trouble. My reason for the partial buyback for reporting stolen guns is to encourage doing so.
You are correct that my proposal includes some form of registry, otherwise, there is no way to account for anything. You CAP laws would fail, as it would be impossible to prove that the kid got the gun from the house, rather than finding it on the street.
It would largely eliminate impulsive suicides. It is a bit hard to estimate how many were impulsive and how many are planned, as an exit interview can only by definition account for unsuccessful attempts, but, according to many studies I’ve seen, somewhere between a quarter and half of suicides are done on impulse.
This makes sense from personal experience. I went through a bit of a rough patch a bit over a decade ago (during the recession), and I really didn’t want to get up to go get rejected from another few minimum wage jobs. I, a few times, considered going down the street to the gun range, renting a gun, and taking care of things. But, by the time I got out of bed, dressed, and out of the house, I was feeling better, and instead went to yet another interview. If I had had a gun on my nightstand, maybe I wouldn’t have.
Men make up the vast majority of gun suicides, and most of them are in the age range of being very able bodied. Reducing the threat that these men face will reduce their likelihood of feeling they need a gun, which reduces the chances that there is a gun around during a moment of despair or depression.
In any case, I don’t really see the need to focus on suicide so much, as I see that happening as a side effect of decreasing criminal access to guns, not something that requires any action on its own.
And if people make the calculation that they need a gun, then I support them in that. I just see that having fewer guns in the hands of criminals changes that calculation, in a favorable way.
If someone tries to rape you, shoot them, I am entirely behind that.
The deaths that I see being prevented are largely the accidental ones that happen because someone was perceiving a threat where there was none. If criminals often have guns, then you need to react quickly, often faster than you can evaluate the situation, which can and has led to tragedies. If criminals rarely have guns, then you can take the time to make sure that it’s not your daughter sneaking back in after curfew before you pull the trigger.
I think I have explained my reasoning behind that, and I agree that many, if not most gun owners would continue to feel a threat even if no criminal had a gun, but we are not talking about convincing most gun owners to give up their guns, just the ones at the margins that felt that they needed one to combat the threat of criminals having guns. What percentage that is is a good question, but I know its higher than 0.
Some, not all. We are not trying to solve the whole problem overnight, just trying to start moving in the right direction.
But the number on the street is a very elastic commodity. You make it even slightly more difficult, slightly more expensive to get a gun on the black market, and the number on the street drops.
My proposal is that, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of registering your guns and storing them safely, you can instead get rid of them, but still get value. If your husband dies and leaves you a bunch of guns, you don’t have to figure out how to sell them, you just sell them to the police. If you have a bunch of guns and no secure way to store them, you can sell some of your guns to have the money to safely secure the rest.
And maybe they are actually doing something to prevent gun violence or accidental gun deaths.
Fair enough, I’m not tied to it. But they would still have to report the guns as stolen, and get a police report, in order to get remittance from their insurance, so the issue of reporting to the police is taken care of. (And the insurance company is likely to be more thorough on an investigation into negligence than the police are.)
And I don’t see how there is any realistic method of keeping guns out of criminal’s hands without some sort of registry. If we can’t find where the guns are coming from, then we can’t stop them. DrDeth has proposed that if you sell more than 12 guns a year, then you are a dealer, but how would we know if someone is selling more than 12 guns a year without tracking who is buying and selling them?
Keeping unregistered guns not being used in a crime as a ticketable offense may mollify some of the more paranoid gun owners out there.
So, the NRA has the final say on this, then? I’m not sure if there is any reason for any sort of debate or proposals if we are just going to do what the NRA dictates.
The NRA is going to be against anything that decreases the number of gun purchases. This includes DrDeth’s proposal, as well as anything that interferes with straw sales. Anything that makes people feel more safe in their home, and therefore, less likely to buy a gun in order to protect themselves is going against the NRA as well. Your proposal of making gun owners liable at all about the misuse of their negligently stored firearms, much less strict liability, will get no traction in Fairfax.
Without someone having and maintaining such a list, there is no chance at any sort of reform. As much as you don’t trust the government, I trust the NRA even less. At the very least, expect to start seeing ads for “guns and ammo” magazine start showing up.
Maybe set up a completely separate govt agency whose sole task is to maintain the list, give it plenty of civilian oversight, and extremely harsh penalties for misuse.
Make that illegal with extremely harsh penalties.
And if you find a gun in connection with a crime, how do you trace it back to the owner? That is the primary reason for such a list. Just matching a person to their gun is not the primary purpose.
As I said, CCW’s are a joke, and I would change the way that they are set up. I would do this before allowing a CCW to be used for background check. And even in this case, we are talking about private transactions not involving an FFL. If we also go with DrDeth’s proposal here, then that means that the number of guns that could go to people that have committed a felony since their last CCW background check would be fairly minimal.
Sorry, I am/was confused as to what that was relating to, as you were referring to the FOID card in what I was responding. I thought you were talking about the list of people who have pre-passed a background check, not the gun registration. Still not sure, actually. You absolutely may, and I highly encourage you, to expound and expand as much as you like, but in this instance, I thought you were talking about background checks, not gun registration.
I get that. I’ve seen gun owners rant and rave about hos much they distrust the government, and I agree that their paranoia would cause them to reject such an idea. I just don’t think that the paranoid gun owners outweigh the rest of the population, gun owner and not, that doesn’t believe in the conspiracy theories suggested by the NRA.
Further paranoia could be found in the realization that computers run really fast, and it would only take a bit more time to run every person in the country against all the serial numbers than it would take to just run all the serial numbers as in your scenario.
But you have to ask the govt for the results of the background check in the first place. If the govt was as dishonest and oppressive as the gun owners fear, wouldn’t they just keep a list of the people that they ran a background check on?
I’m certainly no block-chain expert, but I don’t know if that would work out that way. This also completely defeats the point of the registry, in that the entire point is to be able to find out where a gun that was used in a crime came from.
I agree entirely, but how do you track this without some sort of registry?
Twenty-seven states and DC have enacted child access prevention laws.
(This is, of course, a quite biased source, but since it’s bias is towards gun control, I think it’s safe here.)
Yes, thieves do know you have them. They can get that info from the people who sell them, the people who install them, your housekeeper or babysitter, etc…
If what you saying is that it’s Ok to have a couple guns out (unless you have kids) for home defense, but the rest should be secured, then I am Ok with that.
Oh certainly, it *could *be a factor. Just that studies have not shown definitely that it is a significant factor. I concede a few less suicides a year would occur, of course. But it wouldnt reduce the 47000 suicides a year a lot. It might move the 20000 gun suicides quite a bit lower, but I doubt if it would reduce overall suicides by more that 10%, if that. It’s a reason for good red flag laws, not gun control laws.
Oh you dont track it. You make it a regulation. Then let us say Bob the strawman dealer buys 100 guns at discounted retail and sells them to criminals. The police find 40 of them, reports this to ATF. They go back to Bob, show him the forms he filled out when he bought the guns, and ask where those guns went to, since none are in his house (search warrant). Bob sez he sold them. ATF arrests him.
I know the ATF has lists of “strawman” sellers who sell hundreds of guns a year.
This new reg (doesnt even have to be a law, since the law is already there), puts Bob out of business. He will know about it, and now the risk is too high to deal more than a dozen, maybe two dozen a year.
Agreed. I normally stay out of gun debates because people on both sides just talk past each other with no attempt at a real discussion. I think this thread has the potential to be different.
I wouldn’t have thought that was the whole point of a registry, just one of the possible benefits. I’d have thought that most guns left at a crime scene would be stolen, but a quick check suggests that is not the case. I think, though, that for those scenarios, the current eTrace system would be augmented by the proposed change. The current system has the ATF going to the manufacturer with the serial number to find out what dealer it went to. Then the subpoena the dealer for the 4473 to find the initial buyer.
The proposed change calls for owners to follow certain procedures to sell the firearm, so that the ATF should have little difficulty in following the trail from owner to owner.
Maybe not. Maybe a fully accessible and searchable registry would be better. Would criminals, then, just be more likely to remove serial numbers, thereby negating the whole thing and making the entire exercise a pointless effort and waste of money maintaining a database that only adds steps and fees for lawful owners while doing nothing to curb crime or deter criminals?
Not if the gun is registered to an adult in that home. Would be hard to argue the child found the gun on the street.
Another consideration is the number of guns currently owned by criminals and those who would otherwise refuse to register their firearms. These guns will only be removed from circulation as they are dropped at crime scenes or found in possession of unregistered owners. It might be decades before the benefits of a registry are realized, due to the millions that will be available to the unscrupulous.
Heck, before you could reduce the number through any measure less than a Draconian confiscation program, home 3D printing will render the issue moot.
Good point, but easy fix. Redefine “firearm” to include any barrel. Nobody toying with 3D printed receivers or milling out 80% lowers can get anywhere without a barrel. Of course, barrel would have to be strictly designed to exclude random metal tubes, but that shouldn’t be too hard.
(1)Any metal tube, rifled or nonrifled, designed to be used as a barrel for any firearm; or (2)is capable of being readily converted to achieve such purpose; or (3)is otherwise designed or intended function as a tube through which the projectile of any firearm is expelled through; provided that such tube, barrel, or object is not already classified as a silencer, muzzle brake, or flash suppressor.
This definition would include fake silencers, and I’m okay with that. Those things are stupid.
The point is that these people printing 3D guns or building “Ghost Guns” by milling or drilling out an 80% completed lower receivers are still buying the barrels. Limit the purchase of the barrel, and it limits their ability to make untraceable guns, while still allowing them the freedom to “make their own”. And most barrels are already serial numbered. It wouldn’t be hard to force all manufacturers to put serial numbers on their barrels.
I don’t think that 3D printing is going to be a serious issue wrt guns. More probably, besides just the sheer numbers we are talking about, would be similar to the drug issue…i.e., you can illegally ship in a lot of banned things, as the drug cartels could tell you. Including guns. If there is a market, there is a will.
Though, honestly, I think that no matter how draconian you got wrt gun bans, we are talking hundreds of millions of the things. It’s an incredible problem, especially if the population doesn’t go along, and I have serious doubts they would. We have had cops who, say, don’t enforce some of the stupider marijuana laws, and look the other way. I think that would go a lot more about guns, unless you already have the population with the majority opinion that we should ban them and the government is right to go all draconian on them.
It’s less common than making your own receiver, but people make their own barrels too, at least for some definitions of “make”.
Please elaborate-what definitions of “make” are you referring to?
I imagine there’s a pretty wide spectrum, but for one example, this guy here “made” his own AR-15 barrel by machining a barrel blank. He’s got step-by-step instructions and lots of pictures, a parts list, etc.
I never said it was the only factor in suicide rates, that’d be silly of me which I do try to avoid believe it or not. I’m simply stating the hardly arguable fact that it’s a lot easier to go “ah, shit” boom dead than the vast majority of suicide methods, not to mention less scary, more efficient, possibly less traumatic to third parties.
And yes, I do think that magically vanishing US guns would put you even further away in the suicide death toll by simple virtue of tweaking the death toll of impulsive gun suicides. Why wouldn’t it not ?
Because it does nothing to address the reasons WHY people commit suicide, only addresses a method used. Hard to believe that anyone, you included could think such a thing was possible, as it seems a fairly unbelievable idea to me. Turning it around, why would it? Just taking a method away, but not doing anything at all to address the causation, why WOULD it have such a dramatic effect, taking us from the middle of the pack wrt industrialized nations and suicides to the bottom of the list? Americans really strike you as stress free and well adjusted without underlying issues affecting, say, the French people? :dubious: And it’s only, or even mostly guns and gun access that is keeping us from being at the very bottom of the list??
In that case, forget guns and just legalize drugs. The inventive to acquire/import guns in quantity just to use them in a crime once and discard them immediately should fall accordingly.