Because it’s not our fucking problem. If someone commits a felony to obtain a gun, anything he does with it is on him, not the person he stole it from. If someone steals your car and runs over people on the sidewalk, you aren’t going to jail. Why should a gun be any different?
Then we will make it your problem. Secure your weapon, or go to jail. Simple choice.
Secure your car (chain saw, steak knife, etc.) or go to jail. That’s just ridiculous.
When twenty first graders are slaughtered with a steak knife, I would demand no less. This not about the false equivalence between guns and hammers. It is about multiple homicides that can only be committed with high speed killing machines. Such machines should be subject to much stronger restrictions than flatware.
Look, I don’t want to seize guns, or even ban them. I do want to make it much more difficult for the evil and insane to get them, and if that means responsible gun owners have to jump through a lot more hoops to get them, or demonstrate a lot more responsibility protecting them, I have no problem with that. The Tree of Liberty does not need to be watered with the blood of our children.
Perhaps they feel that if they make owning a gun as difficult as humanly possible, fewer people will do it? Similar in intent and effect to the way homosexuals have been treated for centuries–maybe they’ll just, you know, stop?
Yeah, that worked well.
There needs to be the recognition that guns are inherently more dangerous than other objects and need special protection so they don’t fall into the wrong hands. If a thief steals your TV, big deal. But if a thief steals a gun, he can use it to commit violent crimes.
This is similar to how explosives are treated. A construction company can’t store dynamite in a shed and then when it gets stolen, just say “oh well, I hope the police find it. It was too much trouble to keep it securely locked up.”
It’s understood that explosives can be used to cause massive destruction in the wrong hands and must be properly locked up as specified by the Explosive Storage Requirements. There is a required level of theft protection so that it can’t easily fall into the wrong hands.
I understand your point about being a renter and not being able to drill permanent hooks into the wall. I’m sure that they could come up with some sort of muzzle lock or something similar which would be very difficult to remove without damaging the gun.
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Sounds like an infringement to me. Fortunately, the NRA is well funded, so lawyers will get paid to litigate as needed. Hope I’m one of them.
The courts have consistently upheld background checks and waiting periods, so your opinion is outside the historical record.
Based on your arguments here, so do I. 
My point was that a lock box isn’t particularly helpful if a burglar can simply carry it away and crack it at leisure. Your firearms should be in the same place you would want to store $1000 in cash if someone broke into your home. Your circumstances may vary, maybe a really good hiding place; just some way of keeping it from being easily removed. My lock box is bolted into a 200-lb cabinet that it would take someone several minutes with a sledge hammer to steal.
It may not be morally your fault that someone committed a felony to steal your gun, but as a purely practical matter leaving an unsecured firearm in your home simply makes your house a richer target for theft. Again, a locked door on most homes does little more than deter random strangers from wandering into your home. I’m as pro-gun as anyone on this board; if I have to leave my gun at home for some reason, I just don’t want to come back and find it’s been stolen.
I presume it’s because people who don’t own guns see no reason why anyone should, and therefore blame the very existence of guns for gun related crimes.
Or they could just put the whole cabinet on a hand cart and truck it away. Which they might be equipped to do, if they were already planning to steal your big-screen TV.
There are lock boxes made for handguns that can be chained in place via a steel security cable, which would be an option for apartment dwellers. Or for long guns, they could just use a very heavy locked gun cabinet. Most thieves won’t bother with either of those - but a few will.
I’m fine with requiring that owners keep firearms locked up. But I DO want any such law to take into account that complete security isn’t attainable, and not to penalize gun owners who did take reasonable precautions to lock their guns up and had their guns stolen anyway. You shouldn’t have to convert your house into Fort Knox in order to legally own a firearm.
You’re moving the goalposts again. You were talking about making gun owners criminally liable for the actions of someone that steals their weapons. I indicated a willingness to litigate the issue, and now all of a sudden you are only talking about background checks and waiting periods under current law.
Adam Lanza was 20 years old - an adult. His mother was the registered owner of the firearms, but is there any reason to think he did not have full access to the guns himself? Know where the keys were, know the combinations, whatever. Is there any reason to think that his mother would have intentionally kept him from access, because he wasn’t a designated owner?
It’s a tragedy that Lanza was unstable and took guns to kill both his mother and the people at Sandy Hook. But I don’t think that any kind of background check or database or registration would have prevented what happened. His mother legally owned the guns. He lived with her, and I have no reason to think he did not have full access to the guns on his own.
One can hope, not because he wasn’t the owner, but because she knew he was mentally unstable and potentially dangerous. I’ll look for a quote, but I recall a story quoting a former employee of his mom who was warned to “never turn her back on him.” How long that was before the shooting, I don’t know.
I found the quote, and it’s possible I misinterpreted it. Here’s a link. It was a male babysitter, FWIW. But the warning may have not been intended to be so ominous – it’s possible that it was intended more like, “That kid can get into amazing amounts of trouble in a couple seconds. He moves fast. Don’t turn your back on him.” It’s very difficult to say from this context just exactly what the mom’s warning was intended to be. In the context of a couple of days after the shooting, I interpreted it to be, “He’s dangerous. Don’t turn your back on him.”
It would require a total gun culture change to make a difference. When someone purchases a gun, it’s made accessible to all family members, roommates, friends, etc. It would be better if guns were treated like explosives–always kept locked up and only unlocked by an authorized person. But instead, the gun is unsecured and everyone knows where it is.
But there is nothing to prevent Lanza’s mother from telling him how to access the secured guns. And given that she was a prepper, she probably encouraged him to use the guns if necessary. So given his family situation, there was probably nothing to stop him once he had access to guns in the household.
But that doesn’t mean that securing guns would do nothing. In a more rational household, the gun owner wouldn’t make the guns freely available. That way if a child has mental problems, they wouldn’t have access to them. And really, there’s no way to screen for someone who has the potential for harm. Even the most normal, rational people can snap under the right situations–kids even more so. Keeping guns secured always means fewer people will be able to misuse them.
For those that want to use the recent shooting as justification for increased gun control, you might want to do a bit of research into how the shooter got those guns.
According to what I read, they were owned by and registered to his mother who taught him about guns and often took him shooting at a gun range, as a way of teaching him about responsibility. I can’ think of any reasonable gun control law (i.e. the kind that could actually get passed) that could have stopped that.
For you gun owners out there: Calm down, and let the reactionists have their say/rant. Nobody’s going to be taking your guns away from you. The outcry will blow over before congress gets around to doing anything, just like it has after every other mass shooting. Demanding for stricter gun control let people feel like they’re doing something to prevent a tragedy from happening again. If you want to do something to further your cause, denounce the irrational fringe and the folks that portray these deadly weapons as “cool”.
No, you won’t.
Ha.
Feel better?
I feel great.
And guess how I’ll feel two years from now when I bump this thread to ask you how your plan’s going – the one in which criminal laws are passed making the owner of a stolen gun criminally liable somehow if he fails to lock his gun in a safe.
Even better.
I’ll bet there is already a gold star on that date in your DayRunner.