If there were background checks and a registry, then the people who sold your father the guns might have been caught.
Also, no one legitimate would have dealt with him. Also he might have gone to jail for trying.
Suicide there has been trending up at the same time we’ve seen the spike in gun sales you mention.
The violence rate won’t skyrocket, because of their cultural values, which, just like gun ownership, are very important in explaining violence. Based on my last link, it looks like virtually all the new weapons are long guns, which are less implicated in violence. And there is at least a 14 day waiting period to get a permit, so impulsive uses are reduced. While I consider it a positive that Hawaii bans large capacity magazines, the concealed carry limits are more important.
Searching google news (tinyurl.com/cpyyzy5), it seems that recent attempts to significantly change their guns laws have failed. So this, from my second link in this post, dated March 21, 2013, still applies:
They allow gun ownership, but discourage it. I think that’s wise.
Registration certainly led to confiscation in my country.
Anyone who’s been adjudicated by LO or been commited/on meds,
Does “on meds” include Prozac? Ritalin? Xanax? Ambien? Beta blockers for stage fright?
I hadn’t heard of New York’s new SAFE Act until this thread but I took a look an I’d nominate it for the stupidest new law of 2013, just for the mental health reporting provisions. Any doctor, psychologist, or clinical social worker can fill out a simple web form on anyone (doesn’t even have to be a patient), it gets reviewed by some county mental health official, who can then send it to law enforcement with an order to revoke the subject’s gun license and go to their house to confiscate their guns. It even gives the mental health provider immunity from lawsuit as long as they used “reasonable professional judgement.”
I think if you were trying to write a law that would prevent a future Adam Lanza, Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho, or James Holmes from getting the help they needed before they went on their rampages you could not do a better job. Any mentally troubled person with an interest in firearms in New York State will stay as far away from mental health providers as they can.
I predict that within a few years there will be a mass shooting in New York that will be directly caused by this provision of the SAFE Act. I don’t get up there much, but if I go I think I will avoid crowds.
So what sort of process do you suggest for restraining orders? Or a you suggesting a separate process for the stripping of 2nd amendment rights after a restraining order?
Why do you think its the holy grail of gun control?
Does it matter at all if licensing and registration would significantly reduce gun violence?
We have a few “constitutional carry” states in the past few years and while they have not had negative effects associated with constitutional carry, we don’t see a significant positive impact on gun crime when we make carry laws more permissive.
I agree on the drug laws. Much of the gun violence is drug related or gang violence.
How the heck did they get such restrictive gun laws to begin with?
I think we may disagree on how much gun violence there is. There are over 10K gun homocides every year and about 70K gun injuries every year. I think its worth trying to get those numbers down.
Yes, I agree that criminals will not register their guns. the beauty of a licensing and registration regime is that it does not require the cooperation of criminals to be effective.
No matter how restrictive California is, the LA gangs can get their hands on guns from Las Vegas but if the whole nation is subject to licensing and registration, then the flow of guns into criminal hands will be severely reduced.
Of course there is still a stockpile of guns in criminal hands but the vast majority of guns used in crimes are purchased from (or through) an FFL within 1 year of the crime. IOW, criminals don’t really have the foresight or patience to sit on a gun for years and years and years before they use it in crime. As we confiscate guns used inc rime, the stockpile diminishes and is not replenished by guns that fall through the rather large cracks we have in our system.
Everywhere is different but they have crime there too. Don’t you watch Hawaii 5-0?
Criminals want guns as much there as they do anywhere else. Heller is putting a whole lot more guns into the system, I suspect we will see less leakage into criminal hands with a licensing and registration system in a closed environment than we see in places like California.
With licensing and registration, who would have sold him a gun? Sure there are other ways to get guns but right now, the vast majority of criminals buy their guns.
The article also mentions that almost half the suicides are the result of hanging or suffocation. There is no mention of guns. Why would you draw that connection?
It also coincides well with the recession.
Wait, what is that? Long guns (like assault weapons) are less implicated in violence? BTW I’m not sure that virtually all the new weapons are long guns.
So you think people are committing suicide with long guns?
Doesn’t your link also say that as Hawaii saw this explosion of law abiding gun ownership, they also saw a reduction in gun crime?
If a state wanted to discourage abortions, do you think they should be able to set up similar impediments to abortion? Make them wait on line for 9 hours to fill out paperwork, come back three times to one location and 2 times to another?
They are taking baby steps. So I suppose that’s reasonable for now but the article also points out that they have hundreds of felons applying for licenses in person at a police station without being arrested. Why is that?
I’m not suggesting anything, just commenting that the current system sucks.
Because information is powerful. Once it is known every gun that every single person has, it becomes much easier to ban them, confiscate them, or publicly release the information to target them.
The potential benefit must be weighed against the potential harm. I’m not 100% opposed to it, but gun rights advocates are winning. There is no reason to concede anything unless there is significant and greater reciprocation. And I’m still not convinced that L&R would significantly reduce gun violence.
You don’t see the inverse correlation to highly ranked Brady states and crime? More guns, less crime?
I’m not exactly sure, but I believe Illinois is a home rule state, so localities can pass their own individual gun laws. Not only do we have a fractured federal system across multiple states, within Illinois each jurisdiction can pass their own rules. Now that they lost at the federal appeal level, the burden is on the state legislature, which is definitivley pro-gun. Last session I believe they fell about 5 votes short of a veto proof majority making Illinois shall issue. So yes, the gun laws in Illinois will change, and not to DC style.
I agree with the numbers. I agree it’s worth trying to get those down. It’s a question of magnitude really. We could get them down by totally draconian means, or do nothing, or something in between. I’m leaning closer to the nothing side.
You realize that illegal guns can enter though other means, not just across state lines, right? We have something like, 10-15M people in the country illegally, or undocumented? It’s not like guns wont get here if there is a demand for it. They are easily concealable, and not difficult to manufacture.
Possibly. Culturally, and geographically Hawaii is just not a good example. And Hawaii is still making it incredibly burdensome to acquire a firearm, and they don’t allow carry. I hope they get sued and lose badly.
I think I’d like to see more evidence of the abusive use of restraining orders by girlfriends to strip guns from otherwise peaceful law abiding gentlemen. My impression is that restraining orders are for the most part justified.
If I wanted to ban and confiscate guns, I would be able to do that (more or less) just with what we already have have. When an FFL closes shop, they have to hand over their record to the federal government. They have to maintain those records for inspection while they remain in business. If I go to each FFL and ask for their records, I now have a near comprehensive list of guns sold in the United States. If I’m going to go door to door confiscating guns (does anybody seriously think this is ever going to happen?), I already have all the information that I need. Sure its not all conveniently located in one place and sure some FFLs might go all Rambo on us but by and large I can get my hands on almost every gun in the system if I was a tyrant with the unquestioning loyalty of the military and police.
Our laws that protect government information from public disclosure tend to work very well. Remember when everyone wanted to see what Romney’s 2009 tax returns looked like. It was probably worth a million dollars to someone somewhere. And despite hundreds of government employees having access to that information, it was never disclosed. If we pass simialr laws with respect to gun registry information that we pass regarding tax information, I feel pretty confident that it won’t be a problem.
Gun nuts are winning right now but if the next Newtown happens and the gun grabbers managed to not be retarded and they pass licensing and registration but on their terms. Terms that allow states like California to keep their retarded rules.
I don’t think I can prove with 100% certainty that L&R will significantly reduce gun violence but every study from DoJ in the subject indicates that it would severely restrict the flow of guns into criminal hands.
I see that, but as far as I can tell, making concealed carry laws less restrictive (actually unrestricted) is not a significant improvement over having a licensing procedure. I think having CCW is an improvement over states without any CCW but I don’t think making it unrestricted makes a noticable difference but I am open to being educated.
How does a pro-gun state keep electing anti-gun governors? Just curious.
I lean towards the “as long as its not too much of a pain in the ass” side. I am willing to tolerate licensing procedures that are no more onerous than a driver’s license (although the cost should be as close to zero as possible). I am willing to tolerate registration requirements that do not require me to fill out significantly more paperwork than I currently fill out on the 4463[?].
LOL, that’ll be quite a turnabout. Mexico seems to be getting all their guns from us. The porosity of the southern border is not nearly as open as the border between California and Nevada. If I’m going to smuggle something from Mexico to the USA, I would probably smuggle drugs, not guns. I’m not saying it won’t happen but it won’t increase anywhere near enough to make up for the reduction of guns being sold to criminals internally. After all I assume criminals will still be able to get their hands on guns by stealing them too. We just need a confiscation rate higher than the flow rate of guns into criminal hands.
I agree its a different situation but gun grabbers are often arguing that the mere presence of guns in society is a bad thing. There is evidence that as the rate of gun ownership in Hawaii has increased, the rate of gun crimes has decreased. I don’t know if SCOTUS is ready to take on more gun cases. They denied cert in the Kochalsky[?] case and there is no indication that they would take up a similar case from another circuit.
I think our best chance at national carry rights is with federal preemption.
opossum-I don’t consider ADHD and stage fright mental illnesses, so to answer your question: Prozac and Xanax.
I think most of my questions have already been answered except one: What happens to guns currently unregistered? Does your proposal include registration of all old “antique” and collector type guns too or simply all new guns from the date of the law? I may favor this grand bargain, but only if all guns existing before the law is implemented are registered and people have to retake whatever licensing test to use them.
Due process is not about a balancing test. If there were one instance of this happening it would be too many, and the process is not adequate.
I’m not that concerned about outright confiscation. Being from CA, you can understand why banning, then confiscating particular models of firearms is particularly sensitive. The SKS of a number of people I know were victims of that. This wouldn’t have been possible without the registry that we have here.
So you would support suppressing the printing of CCW holders like what happened recently in NY? What should be the penalty? I don’t know if I support that. Acquiring CCW application information in CA has led to a number of lawsuits because through denials it was able to be shown that the permits were not being treated similarly. There are security breaches of very protected information on a semi-regular basis. I’m skeptical whether that information would be able to be kept secret. Why chance it?
Newtown made people crazy temporarily, but I’m not seeing much difference between now and after Virgina Tech, or after the other random crazy shit that went down. I don’t see a need to handicap ourselves now, thinking that it’s just a matter of time before someone does it for us. That may be overplaying the hand, but I’d just as soon not capitulate just yet.
So what you are basically saying, is that L&R can only work in a closed environment. Because we have L&R in a number of large jurisdictions already in the US. There should be some evidence that it works. It’s not persuasive at all to say it would work, if we could only do it more! And if what you are saying is accurate, then the majority of guns used in crime in CA should be able to be traced to other states with more permissive laws, like NV or AZ. I don’t think this is the case.
I’m not saying going from CCW to constitutional carry would have a difference in violent crime, but going from no carry to CCW should.
No idea, but they keep getting arrested and going to prison. What’s up with that?
Ideally, national shall issue with preemption, strict scrutiny for firearms laws, and carrying a firearm as a protected class. IOW, discriminate against someone for carrying, civil liability with no immunity for government. I’d go for L&R in exchange for that.
Licensing would probably not be necessary for anyone who already has a CCW.
All guns that fire modern cartridge ammunition would have to be registered. Failure to register would make the gun very hard to transfer to someone else and we could probably devise some way to register firearms online.
Thats not due process. Due process does not provide a guarantee against abuse.
I understand perfectly what happened with the SKS. People complied with the law and then got punished for it. It was a travesty but I don’t think anything like that can happen outside of places like California and certainly couldn’t happen at a national level.
I would suggest HIPAA type penalties, I know some people want this information to be classified so we could classify it as confidential. There would be a civil cause of action for any dissemination of this information. The dissemination of that list of gun licenses was extremely irresponsible and those guys should have lost their asses in lawsuits.
Like I said, lot of that information already exists when you fill out your 4463 and it is submitted to NICS. If the threshold is going to be absolute certainty that noone ever COULD disseminate the information then we can never get there, if the threshhold is that the penalties are so prohibitive that no rational person would ever risk it, then I think we can get there.
I think there is a difference in kind between what we saw after Virginia Tech and what we saw after Newtown. Virginia Tech was just some crazy guy doing crazy things. Newtown was so bad that I couldn’t watch TV for month.
By the time they can force this sort of thing down your throat, they will be able to get much more drastic measures passed. But more importantly, I think its the right thing to do.
But I understand that this would not be acceptable to a lot of gun owners. They have been able to pretty reliably count on the idiocy of the gun grabbers to overreach but slowly and surely over the years gun regulation has generally gone in one direction. This would give up something that I think is inevitable (because it just makes so much sense) in exchange for repealing large parts of the NFA (I would not want to be the one taking the gun rights side of a case to SCOTUS to try and overturn NFA).
Oh I agree with that. Wolves stay away if they know there are sheepdogs in the flock.
Probably has something to do with their gun grabbing.
I don’t know what you mean by protected class. All the rest of the stuff is already in there, PLUS you get to repeal large parts of the NFA.
An AW ban passed at a national level just 20 years ago. I don’t share your faith. And that is exactly what it is, faith.
You mentioned nothing about levels of scrutiny, which I think is vital in fending off crappy legislation down the line. Protected class would be the same situation where it is unlawful to discriminate based on race, gender, age, etc. One of those things should be firearms possession. Once that status is achieved, a whole slew of protections kicks in that has well established case law. I mean, it’s never going to happen, but I figure if we’re going on magical what ifs, I can play too 
The AWB was quite a bit different than what they had in California.
Fath is belief without any evidence. My belief that a confiscation could not happen at the national level is not the result of faith.
You seem to want to create extra constitutional protections for gun owners. Gun owners have no more special status under the constitution than owners of a printing press. I dont see why they should.
Would you have said the same thing the day before CA confiscated the SKS? I’m not sure why you are so confident that it could not happen, but believing that it could not happen at any time in the future based on the current political climate seems shortsighted.
You are right, they do not enjoy any additional special status. But if we’re talking about a grand bargain, then anything is on the table, right? This isn’t to say that it couldn’t be so at some point.
Yes the SKS confiscations surprised me. It seemed unconstitutional and driven by the political calculus of someone who was running for statewide office. I guess I’m confident about confiscation because by the time this nation transforms enough that we can get nationwide confiscation, this licensing and registration business will not be the thing that stands in the way of confiscation.
They enjoy special status to the extent that the second amendment confers special status to them. Just like the first amendment confers special status to a printing press.
I don’t expect everyone to think the OP is a great idea and I realize that this is a much better deal for the gun grabbers than the gun nuts right now but I prefer to have logical sensible laws made by people who know about guns that hope that the irrational people never get a chance to impose the laws they would like.
This is a bit of cart before the horse. I agree that if the political climate existed that would allow nationwide confiscation, then L&R is already lost. But this is not to say that we are there already and the converse of this also holds - L&R is an incremental step that is less invasive than outright confiscation. It emboldens gun control advocates to push for more.
You admit that the SKS in CA was surprising. Could you not be surprised in the future, one where you’ve already conceded L&R? Consider the .50 caliber rifle, also banned in CA, with other versions banned in Connecticut, and other burdens in Maryland and Chicago. This firearm is a perennial target to be banned. Now, I don’t think in one fell swoop all firearms will be banned or confiscated. It is plain to see however, that there are efforts at the margins to ban guns, whatever guns are possible to be banned.
Again, why you have confidence that it would only go to L&R, and no further, is beyond me. Gun control advocates have been playing at incrementalism for decades. Well, gun rights advocates are now doing the same, and are winning. No need to give on anything at this point. Unless there is some fundamental guarantee like I alluded to at the constitutional level, no grand bargain will ever be had, I hope.
I think it would show how much more rational and reasonable the gun nuts are than the gun grabbers.
I agree that irrational gun grabbers will always be irrational gun grabbers. You seem to be saying that L&R would facilitate gun bans. It would make them easy to implement.
Well, considering what Feinstein tried to pull (with support from POTUS) with the AWB, and considering her past statements about confiscating all guns nationwide,
I can totally understand your reluctance. You can’t unring that bell. Once the information has been collected and centralized, we don’t have total control over what is done with that information but we do have control over who makes those decisions and at the national level, I don’t think we get a majority, never mind a filibuster proof majority, in the senate to confiscate anyone’s guns.
Like I said, I understand that the gun nuts are giving up more than the gun grabbers. The only thing I can think of that would address your concern is if we allowed states to enact less restrictive gun laws than the federal standard. It would spoil the uniformity of gun laws across the country but it would be a recognition of the state right under the second amendment. But I really like the uniformity aspect of this idea.
So a person who suffers an anxiety disorder or depression and only looks forward to deer season every year has to choose between treating their illness and enjoying their hobby? What do you think they will pick? And why is a bunch of armed untreated depressed people a good outcome?
I don’t own guns and I’m not under any kind of mental health care or medications but I think an appeal to common sense is appropriate here.
Does anyone think it’s a good idea to discourage mentally unhealthy gun owners from getting mental health treatment?
Since it hasn’t been mentioned yet, let me give you an australian perspective.
In 1996 after the Port Arthur Massacre when 33 people were shot dead, comprehensive national firearm laws were introduced.
All semiautomatic and pump action rifles and shotguns were deemed illegal after the prime minister John Howard rammed laws through parliament in an unprecedented usurping of state powers and disregard of debate and due process.
Owners of these weapons were given about 12 months to hand them in to be destroyed under threat of prison sentences and given minisule compensation for their financial loss.
Guns deemed “military rifles” were also banned leading to the destruction of old lee enfield WW1 army rifles that had been in families for generations.
Australia never had a “gun culture” prior to 1996 gun homicides were around 30 a year and in the years since the ban it has remained largely static if not risen slightly.
Since these laws have been put in place, shooting has become a much more popular sport, despite onerous licensing requirements, every gun that was handed in has been replaced a couple of times over.
Many of the guns that were handed in were not semi-automatics, indeed, the total number of SKS/SKK type chinese assault rifles imported into the country in the preceding 20 years alone outnumbers the TOTAL number of guns handed in.
Many many people buried their guns and with good reason. Australia has fundamentally in the past 15 years from an easy going nation to a total nanny state that is progressing steadily towards a police state.
Our federal police has been greatly expanded, sedition laws put in place along with antiterrorism and property confiscation legislation. Violent crime has increased including offences with firearms such as armed robbery.
The circumstances around the massacre that triggered this are highly suspect, a man with an IQ of 70 managed to shoot 34 people with 33 kills with most victims being shot once or twice mirroring a military processional. Evidence was omitted and destroyed and there was a lot of conflicting evidence suggesting he was not the shooter.
I won’t go too much into this because it is all available on google.
All I can say to Americans is do not give an inch. It is sad because I think sensible firearms laws could help reduce the death toll from violent crimes but governments want your guns and they want them for one reason, that there is no answer to a gun, except for a gun and they want them all.
It makes me sick to watch this
