Hmmm.. Well, that is quite a counter argument. I may have to reconsider my position on gun registration.
Gary_Oak, our main rule here is “don’t be a jerk.” You’ve broken that rule in a bunch of ways in this post: you called people nutters and fuckheads, you said you hope they get robbed, and you said you’d laugh at them if they did. You can’t do that here. You are allowed to insult people in The BBQ Pit, but nowhere else on the site. I’m giving you a warning not to do this again.
Gary - also, that reasoning has been somewhat prevalent among the pro-gun lobby and its supporters, and it’s one main reason that a lot of us who want stricter gun control are frankly disturbed by many of the supposedly ‘responsible’ gun owners. Frankly, anyone who rejoices in innocent people being robbed, possibly violently, is someone I don’t want to have access to large amounts of firearms.
I’m ex-Army. I enjoy shooting guns. I don’t personally own any at the moment, but I do enjoy going to the range and firing. And I absolutely think there needs to be tighter control, registration, licensing, renewing of registration on an annual or bi-annual basis, etc.
One of the big things registration would solve is the ability for people in many states to simply sell their weapons for cash to anyone, completely legally, therefore bypassing any background checks, etc. Some states don’t allow this, but many do. The NRA has said they want stricter mental health regulation, but they don’t support legislation that would allow this to occur. If it is perfectly legal for you to sell your gun to anyone on the street, all some nutter (who may even have been committed for mental illness at some point and would fail a background check under stricter mental health reporting for this purpose) could simply go on Craigslist and buy whatever he wants.
Requiring registration would not deter hardened criminals from buying guns on the black market, but it would drastically reduce the availability of guns to people who shouldn’t own them…forcing them to really go whole hog underground, (thus opening more chances to be caught in illegal action prior to a rampage. See, if they HAVE to break the law to get even a single weapon, it’s harder to get a lot. Sure, they’ll be able to, but it’s still a lot harder than answering a CL ad or going to WalMart.
If the gun is registered, and treated similarly to cars, you’d need to do a proper title transfer when selling your firearm, which would then require the buyer to pass the same requirements (background check, licensure, etc) as they would if buying from a store. Thus, it reduces the ease at which crazies can get guns. Will it eliminate it? Of course not. It’s the same way licensure and traffic laws and vehicle safety laws don’t eliminate vehicular deaths…but they absolutely REDUCE the amount of vehicular deaths, and the same would very likely be true with guns. Making it illegal to own magazines that hold higher than 10 rounds would also reduce the availability of such items, and thus make it harder to obtain for those who do want to use these weapons for mass killing. And, there’s absolutely no reasonable argument I’ve ever seen why the average citizen needs an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine. Registration should also thus require inspection of your equipment, to ensure you have not illegally modified it. This makes for a minor inconvenience for law-abiding gun owners, and a pain in the rear end, if implemented properly, for those who shouldn’t be allowed to have them.
This, I think, is a key point. While the advisability of registration is up for legitimate debate, I think there are two arguments we should set aside:
- Registration wouldn’t do any good (also known, roughly speaking, as the “Only outlaws will have guns” argument). In this thread we’ve seen many ways in which registration could do good, and no compelling arguments that it’d be useless.
- Registration is on the slippery slope toward confiscation (also known, roughly speaking, as the “jackbooted thugs” argument). We’ve seen both that registration can occur without confiscation, and that confiscation can occur without registration; we’ve further seen that, while individual politicians have mentioned pie-in-the-sky fantasies of eliminating gun ownership, there’s no serious political will to make that happen, and tremendous political will against its occurrence. Attempts at showing examples of registration leading to confiscation in the US have fallen flat.
Legitimate arguments might look at possible discrimination via registration, might look at whether registration isa backdoor method for outlawing ownership, might look at whether it’s impractical, might look at whether it’d encourage privacy violations, etc. But at this point, I think that the “only outlaws” argument and the “jackbooted thugs” argument should be taken out back and shot.