What, specifically, is the point of the $200 tax tamp from the BATFE levied on the purchase of a Class III firearm?
These are already quite epxensive to purchase, with prices that range in the thousands of dollars (The range master at the range I belong to told me that the range paid $10,000 for their H&K MP 5 select fire.) on top of which tax is already added and a background check is completed and charged to the customer.
I don’t understand the purpose of the tax stamp, unless the intention is to one day simply refuse to issue any more stamps resulting in a de facto ban on all fully automatic firearms.
This does not diminish the fact that they are the most efficient and effective tool for the job.
I use my AK-47 and my range’s H&K MP5 select fire for sport shooting.
The Colt Bushmaster AR-15 and its cousin the Ruger Mini 14 (both semi-automatic .223 caliber rifles similiar to the military M-16) are very effective for praire dog elimination. Praire dogs are a serious problem and huge financial burden for cattle and other livestock ranchers, since their burrows can result in serious injury and death (thus thousands of dollars in losses) to ranchers.
The absence of these firearms for both of the above uses would bother me terribly.
One of the problems with this argument is that we have heard it many, many times before from anti-gun groups like HCI and VPC expressed in exactly the same manner: that every change in policy that eliminates even one death is a useful change. Such policy changes appear to have the unstated intent of the ‘death by a thousand slices’ to private firearms ownership, especially considering that what these gun rights opponents consider a ‘reasonable and common sense gun law compromise’. It’s funny how the ‘compromise’ is always one step closer to the elimination of private firearms ownership than wherever we are already.
If well-regulated means that they are able to, without governmental interference, arm themselves and organize, and militia means the whole of the law-abiding population of citizens capable of providing a productive role in said militia, I think it’s absolutely true.
The people in the United States of America are supposed to be the final repository of force, governed by our consent.
That’s a damn good question, catsix. I have no idea. Maybe UncleBeer would know. I’ve looked at the BATFE page and can’t find anything other than it says to pay it. Which begs the question, if you’re gonna drop 10K on an MP5, why would you use it to knock over a 7-11 for 40 bucks? (Methinks this is quite rhetorical…)
True enough. Except that I would leave your modifier “unstated” out of the equation. There are plenty of quotes available from the leaders of gun control groups who have said that this is their ultimate intention - to make it wholly illegal for private citizens to own wide classes of guns, most especially, handguns of any type & all semi-automatic firearms. Look for the utterances of Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Howard Metzenbaum, Representative Pete Stark, Senator Joe Biden, Senator John Chaffee, Representative Bobby Rush, Janet Reno, Pete Shields, Sarah Brady, Josh Sugarman, ACLU Policy #47, Charles Krauthammer, Jack White, Gary Wills . . .
Yeah, it’s something that’s been nagging at me for a while. I know that the BATFE is officially part of the Treasury Department and they really have no authority to make any laws, so I’ve been wondering what purpose that tax actually serves.
They’re federally funded, and I can’t imagine that there are vast, vast numbers of those stamps actually sold, so I’d find it hard to believe that they really need the revenue from the stamps themselves.
The only thing I can think of is that at some point they could just refues to sell any more stamps, thus gaining a ‘ban’ on all fully automatic firearms.
Of course nobody in the BATFE is ever going to state that directly.
The reason that I put that in there is that I find it kind of difficult to wade through myriads of quotes from pro-gun sites and sources to find verifiable ones from ‘independent’ sources that I can actually respond with when someone says ‘Cite?’
I’ve heard the quotes often enough, such as the Feinstein quote ‘If I could’ve gotten 51 votes, “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them in.” I would have done it.’ types.
My only thought on that is that it’s a holdover from the days of yore. When the GCA of 1934, the law which instated that “tax stamp,” was enacted, $200 was a pretty fair chunk of change and probably a pretty significant percentage of the price of one of these firearms. Two hundred 1934 dollars is equivalent to more than twenty-six hundred 2002 dollars. Has the stamp always been priced at $200?
Go here and download the 645k .pdf called Gun Facts 3.3 It is the best and most concise source I have ever seen. Hell, download the version optimized for your printer and give it to your all your friends. The author says this is okay by him as long as you leave his name on it.
catsix, and UncleBeer, I agree with you guys about the intent of gun control groups. I think that for the most part the “public health” angle is used as a wedge to institute a total gun ban.
What struck me last weekend listening to Hemenway was the reasonableness of the analogy between automobile safety treated as a public health issue and gun safety. I agree entirely that any legislation or policies which enacted such safety proposals would have to include protections for private ownership of guns.
I have said a couple times that repealing the 2nd ammendment would be fine with me as long as it was replaced something which more clearly defined a private right to own guns.
It just seems to me that there is a niche available to the NRA or another gun advocacy group for taking up the public health argument and coopting it, so to speak. I believe that many of the arguments made by Hemenway could be turned against his agenda of taking guns away from private citizens.
Especially in his call for more nationally consistent research into gun deaths. I see a great potential for harm if the gun control advocates are the primary ones driving such a research effort. Data is Data, but if you only collect certain types of data you will have a distorted picture. For instance, I think that focusing exclusively on gun deaths would lead to a distorted picture of how guns are used.
At one time in my life I was suicidal, so I’m speaking from experience.
The suicide rate won’t be affected by availability/non-availability of guns. There are actually better ways to suicide that are readily available and painless. People simply choose what means they perceive to be best.
Cars are one great way to commit suicide, btw. Especially if they got a good stereo system!
I have actually heard that other professions have the highest suicide rate. I’d ask for a cite, but I think it would take us too far afield for this thread.
My problem with him is that he is trotting out the exact same arguments used by the gun-banners. The ‘a set of polices that have tiny little benefits can add up to a big benefit’ method of slowly slicing away all gun rights, and conflating the actions of criminals whose life’s work is not following laws with accidents that are already on the decline despite the fact that the number of firearms in private hands continues to rise.
There is no such legislation that ‘enacts safety proposals’ and protects the rights of firearms owners. Mandatory trigger locks sure as hell do not protect my right to defend myself with my firearms, and they’ve proven totally ineffective at reducing accidents considering how easy it is to 1) remove the lock without the key or 2) fire the gun with the lock on it.
Gun rights advocates such as myself have done things like that. We supported Project Exile, we supported NICS, we supported education. Those things actually do something useful, and yet people like Hemenway and all the others who trot out the same death-of-a-thousand slices with their ‘If it saves just one life’ mantra don’t give a damn about what works. They continue to push for policy where it is proven that education and stiff penalties for violent crime are the way to go.
Just read through both pages of this thread and trying to keep all the concepts up in the air. Excuse me if I drop a few.
The initial post was comparing the regulation of guns to the regulation of cars, and although there are some things that apply to both, mostly it’s apples and oranges.
Lots of the regulation of cars comes from the fact that cars are private property in the public domain. They are valuable, and just that fact establishes an argument for a revenue base. Added to that the upkeep of public property necessary for the continued operation of automobiles justifies a use tax, often expressed as a weight tax, adherent to the assumed wear and tear on public highways. So, we register cars so the government can make money.
Guns, on the other hand, don’t require roads to operate and aren’t valuable enough to tax the way we tax autos, plus there’s more cars than guns. If you want to argue a tax because of public hospital facility use by wounded criminals or innocents, well, cars maim and kill people more than guns, so we’d have to create that for cars as well as all the taxes we already have.
The other arguments here really belong in another net, and the people who are only responding to questions with further and more complex answers are just grinding their axes, not debating.
Well, OK, I think some regulation of firearms is prudent, but it doesn’t relate to car ownership. The laws already in force are impotent and ill-conceived, and in order to get sensible firearm regulation a lot of them will have to be scrapped. Would have to be scrapped, cause I don’t thionk the gun-grabbers will loosen their grip in the strings they already pull.
Primarily, I agree with an earlier poster who said education was key. I would go farther, and treat gun use like we do car use. License shooters! Have all people who want to use a gun complete a series of ‘shooter training’ courses that ill make them able to buy and use guns within the parameters of the law until such license is revoked.
I don’t want to defend a book that I have not read. Just so I know, have you read it?
I will say this one thing, though. His book was written some time ago. I suspect that the phrases you hear gun banners using came from him rather than the other way around. Also, for the record, he did not use the “if it saves one life” argument at all. He simply said that proposals do not alone and by themselves have to solve the whole problem to be valuable.
I expected silly suggestions about mandatory gun locks and different types of gun bans. He mentioned gun locks one time and specifically suggested that they may not be appropriate in situations where a gun was intended for self defense. At the same time, many shooting clubs support the use of gun locks on other types of guns, so they are not altogether evil either.
Again, I don’t want to defend his book. And I certainly am not claiming any particular anti gun stance.
Project exile is a program to more toughly enforce laws against the misuse of guns is it not?
The NICS is a National Instant <background> Check System is it not?
I just want to be sure I inderstood you.
I support those programs also. I take my kids out very young to teach them gun safety and marksmanship. I am simply not convinced that there are no other possible programs which would help reduce the number of gun deaths in our country. At least on a gun per person, or perhaps death per bullet sort of measure.
No, I have not. I have read other things by him, specifically the stuff he wrote in New England Journal of Medicine, and his correspondences with John Lott.
He views firearms as a ‘public health epidemic’ and ever increasing restriction as the ‘cure’.
Whether Sarah Brady got her ideas from him, or he got his ideas from Sarah Brady, I will never be in agreement with someone who shares the ideals of Sarah Brady.
He has used the argument that a combination of policies with very small effects would be a good and workable way to obtain a large effect. He’s too shrewd to say ‘If it saves just one life’ word for word, so he says things about the cumulative effect of various policies, or that each policy only solves part of the problem. It’s the same way that the HCI and the VPC and Diane Feinstein and Charles Schumer attempt to go about things. Every so often the propose just one more tiny change, one more little compromise, that’s one baby step further from what we have now as gun laws to a total ban.
He also ignores basic facts, such as the current decline in the number of firearms accidents which is occuring despite the ever increasing number of legally held firearms. He uses numbers of suicides, although research shows that if the suicides were not committed with guns they would still happen. Preventing people from shooting themselves on purpose will not prevent them from dying, it will simply force them to choose another method by which to die. He’s dishonest in order to inflate the numbers, a tactic he shares with VPC and HCI.
Well, he’s an economist and a professor of publich health. He doesn’t indicate anything in his background that hints that he knows the slightest thing about firearms themselves, yet he apparently has taken it upon himself to start offering suggestions for policy that will prevent accidental gun deaths? I’ve yet to see education anywhere on his agenda. His works are touted as critiques of libertarianism alongside the publications of VPC and HCI. He has written a book length FAQ along with Dennis Henigan and Bruce Nicholson calling gun-rights proponents ‘gun worshippers’ and their taken on the Second Amendment ‘propoganda’ and ‘mythology’.
He wrote, in collaboration with Elizabeth Richardson, a very misleading paper entitled “Characteristics of Automatic or Semiautomatic Firearm Ownership in the United States.” The goal of that paper was to link up problem-drinking and the ownership of semiautomatic firearms. The authors used the words ‘semiautomatic’ and ‘automatic’ 30 tmies in 3 pages. They never asked anyone to specify whether their firearms were semiautomatic or automatic, and falsely equated binge-drinking with problem-drinking.
Hemenway states:
The problem with that quotation is that he assumes that a firearm owner who is drinking will automatically become dangerous with that firearm. He hasn’t proven that to be the case. It’s quite obvious to anyone that using a firearm while intoxicated is not a good idea, but is it a problem if I (and I own a ‘rapid-fire’ rifle as well as pistol) go out to the bar and have 6 beers while my firearms are safely locked up in my house? Hemenway thinks it indicates that I’m dangerous.
He’s not a firearms expert. He’s an economist teaching public health, and he has a very clear ‘guns are bad’ agenda.
Project Exile uses the higher bonds and stiffer rules of the federal legal system to punish criminals for those federal crimes they commit by using guns because it can be more effective than using more lenient state laws alone.
NICS is the National Instant Check System. I’m afraid I don’t have a handy link available to describe it to you, but I can tell you how it works from firsthand knowledge.
Anyone who attempts to purchase a firearm from a federally licensed (FFL holding) dealer has to fill out the BATFE form 4473, which includes personal information like name, address, driver’s license number, SS number, and so on. When the purchaser section of the form is completed, the dealer calls a telephone number and gives the driver’s license number and name of the person on the form. The NICS system then confirms the Social Security number and address. After searching the purchaser’s criminal background (state and federal) for any felonies, misdemeanors requiring more than one year in jail, restraining orders, protection from abuse orders, outstanding warrants, DUI convictions, or involuntary stays in mental hospitals, the NICS system either responds with an approval number or a denial. The approval number is placed on the 4473 form and the FFL holder retains a copy of that form, which the BATFE can demand proof that the FFL is keeping those forms at any time.
I am not convinced that there are other possible programs that would help reduce the number of gun deaths in our country that are worth the further sacrifice of rights people like myself are continually asked to make. Accidents are declining. Preventing suicides with firearms does nothing to prevent suicides in general. Murders are most often between those involved in criminal activity already who will not be affected by enacting new legal policy. More policy will only further erode the rights of gun owners, and it will never be enough for those who want to ‘reduce the number of gun deaths’. We’ve seen that in action for the last twenty or thirty years.
