It’s easy to legislate. How, exactly, do you enforce it? In your citation, they noted that the strawman sales and unlicensed dealers were already illegal.
If I (and my buyer) are allowed to own guns anonymously, you cannot stop me from selling it or make me follow any laws for selling it. If I abide by those laws, it is because I choose to do so.
Private sales are not illegal in most states, and the ATF does not define “dealer” so no, it is not illegal on the face of it. The ATF would have to be right there and show the strawman bought it intending to immediately sell it to a unauthorized purchaser.
The ATF has a lot of issues with proving strawman deals.
Easy. You arrest a criminal, he has a gun. The gun was bought by Bob Strawman. The criminal may or may not roll over on Bob. If he does, that’s fine, if not, then you keep track. You go to Bob, he says he sold it in a private sale. After a bit you find that Bob has had 20 guns he bought fall into the hands of criminals. Now Bob is a “dealer” and all those sales are illegal, and Bob is locked up. Dealers cant sell guns without paperwork and background checks.
The issue is that the ATF has never defined “dealer” . It is perfectly legal to buy a gun and resell it as a private party. It is only illegal if you buy that gun with the intent of selling it to a unauthorized buyer. Intent is very hard to prove. Numbers are very easy to prove. Bob bought a gun with the intent of selling it to Joe Scumball.= hard to prove. Bob bought 20 guns and sold them to Joe and Sally and Snake and Jose, and … very easy to prove.
Not in this thread you didn’t. With a very broad reading of “suggested”, you did respond above with things similar, you didn’t suggest yourself.
Lord knows, I’m not a zealot. I’m a radical centrist. The true answer lies in the middle. There is virtually no one saying “take all guns away”, and 5-10% of the US population saying “No laws against guns at all!”; that leaves 90-95% of us saying “let’s have some reasonable laws on gun control.”
And please don’t come back with “this survey says 10% agree with removing all guns”. My point is that a VAST majority of people want reasonable laws, and nothing gets done because the argument becomes all or nothing.
Post 28: I am open to making private sale go thru background checks on two conditions- they make a fixed and reasonable cost, say $25- and they exclude transfers to close relatives or thru death.
However, i consider my responses as suggestions. You may not if you so please.
Yes, and so i agree, let us pass a few reasonable laws that will keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
So, the gun is registered to Bob. This is a start.
So, you have to catch 20 criminals with guns who ALL bought from Bob, investigate all 20 of them, just to determine that Bob is a dealer… until he tells you the sales were over a 2 year period, and then he’s just an unlucky gun owner. And this is the “easy” bit.
As I said before, I’m completely good with required background checks, but it doesn’t close any loophole.
Bob doesnt have to “tell” us anything, we have the records of exactly when he bought the guns. I meant 20 guns he bought in one year and we found in one year in the hands of a criminal.
Some strawmen buy and sell hundreds of guns a year. Finding more that 12 isnt gonna be hard. And in any case, if every private sale has to have a background check, he will have a violation for every gun found in the hands of a crook.
And I am not wedded to the 12 number, it is just a good, round number. We could make it six even. My friend who collects old WW2 and WW1 military guns does trade a fair number a year with other legit collectors, so we dont want to make the # zero.
However, my Collector friend would have to do a background check, in my proposal.
I’m about as pro-gun as it is possible to be without wanting the government to provide free firearms to the indigent, but I’d be Ok with require a background check for all transfers. It would need to be done in a way to protect privacy, and I’m not comfortable with a registry (those have been used as confiscation lists in the US).
But it could work similar to the way it works for licensed dealers now. Each person who wants to transfer a gun would need to record the transfer in a “bound book” and if that gun ever shows up in a crime scene police would trace the ownership chain by coming to that person who could then show “I sold it to DrDeth of Sometown on 01/23/2034, BATF background check token #####” BATF records would show that was a valid token for DrDeth on that time (purchasers would generate the tokens on the BATF website that was then valid for some shortish timer period). Sellers being able to show they used a valid token that corresponded to ID they were shown are no longer considered responsible for that gun.
However I am not convinced of the urgency of the problem. Violence, gun and otherwise, has been falling since the 90’s with defensive (as opposed to hunting) gun ownership and concealed carry on the rise. Yes, this is still a violent country with more non-gun murders than the countries we always get compared to in these threads have total murders. We do need to work to make this a safer place but don’t think that draconian measures are needed. Keep at what’s been working the past 30 years.
Things I believe would help that haven’t been mentioned so far:
End the war on drugs. A large number of murders are various recreational pharmaceutical distributors competing for territory, and innocents around them (such groups not being noted for either fire discipline or marksmanship).
Make it so minority groups feel safer calling the police. (the whole Black Lives Matter thing, tho it isn’t just a Black problem). If they feel they can trust the system to protect them there is less need for an “honor culture” where people must project an ability to deal violence to protect themselves. (I expect this opinion will be called out as racist, but the fact that murders are not evenly distributed among American sub-cultures is significant.)
The need here is to confiscate basically 1-2 guns a month sold by a single person within the last 12 months, and you think this effectively closes the loophole.
I’d like to point out that the key point in your enforcement chain is a record of who is responsible for the gun, Bob. But, gun proponents want to eliminate those records. If Bob sold a gun privately to Joe, we don’t want Joe’s name to be recorded anywhere, no actual record of Bob selling a particular gun to Joe anywhere that government officials could access. So, we catch Bob, who sells hundreds of guns to criminals, only when enough of his guns get confiscated in a fixed period of time to prove he’s a “dealer”, and didn’t keep the right paperwork.
We could catch Bob after one gun is confiscated if records were required, but we deliberately want secrecy in firearm transfer.
Except that I said I was totally in favor of requiring background checks for most private sales.
And yes, the gun dealer is the first link and the crook is the last link and Bob is in the middle. So?
Yeah, this might not shut down some guy who buys and sells only a few guns a year, but the strawman who sells hundreds will be spotted quite quickly.
Even if there was paper that Bob sold the gun to Joe- exactly where would that get us? I mean if there is no law against that, all Bob has to do is file a report, how does that shut Bob down?
We have to requite background checks on most private transfers, and stop strawman sellers.
I agree. It only is “urgent” as there were a couple mass shootings. Mass shootings seem to trigger calls for stricter gun laws, altho most proposed laws would do nothing to stop most of the shooters. But the things i have suggested wouldnt stop the legitimate gun owner from his hobby. Maybe they might reduce violent crime by a few % points- I’ll take that.
YES! The war on drugs is stupid, wasteful and creates more violent crime. Those super violent drug cartels in Mexico are the direct result, as well as the fact that more or less Mexican government is corrupt.
I like this idea but I have no idea how to go about it.
I think we have a potential definition problem. To me, background check means nothing more than, at the time of sale, a check is made. There is no lasting record of who sold what to whom.
If there is a lasting record, then you would know right away that Bob sold hundreds of guns, if he had the background checks made. If he didn’t do the checks, you could catch him once a single gun, of whatever vintage, is confiscated. Record keeping, effectively registration, makes enforcement orders of magnitude easier.
That exception in your “most” part is a loophole waiting to be exploited.
What is the reason for it? If gun transfers and background checks are free, then why skip them?
Why not 100% of the time, if ownership of a gun is transfered, then a background check is done, along with a registration in the new name?
What percentage of black market guns are recovered and traced back? Bob may be selling a hundred a year, but only 5 are recovered and traced back.
Why not simply make it illegal to sell 1 gun without proper paperwork? No private sale loophole.
That’s kinda the whole point. There should be a law against that.
It would tell us how many guns Bob is selling. Sure, a couple few private sales, as long as they file the paperwork and at least claim due diligence in having checked the buyer’s ID.
If Joe is a criminal, then Bob should not sell him a gun. If he does, then that should be what shuts Bob down.
It depends on the background check being made. There is certainly a record that Bob sold a gun to Joe, and Bob has to keep a record of the check coming back OK… Some states require more info. I dont know if I would require the gun serial number as part of that. I am leaning towards no.
But still, you have Joe gets arrested, a gun is found there is a record that Bob sold a gun to Joe and there is a a record that Bob bought that gun from Legit Gunstore inc. Not a hard trail to follow.
And yes, you would know right off that Bob sold hundreds of guns to many people ,yes. Good point.
if free? Maybe. But then a father gives his son a .22 for that boys 18th birthday. He doesnt do a background check, doesnt think one is needed, after all he didnt sell the gun. Later both becaome criminals because that that.
Why do you think a father needs to do a background check before giving his son a gun as a present?
Like I said I would be in favor of most private party sales having a background check. But yeah, so you catch Bob not doing a check. he said “Oops, my bad I forgot” or maybe “I thought I did do a check, are you sure that info didnt just get lost?” Both of which a jury well may believe. Instead you have nailed Bob selling a dozen guns used in violent felonies.
Your “recommendations” are seriously lacking and are missing the whole problem of gun proliferation, which is obviously a problem that you want to avoid addressing:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/26/us/boulder-colorado-shooting-friday/index.html
@wolfpup, for what it’s worth, we’ve been focusing on gun safety laws, and being very careful tip-toeing (Ok, some of us) around the mental health issues. That’s because we’ve already had complaints that mental health issues are being mentioned to avoid talking about gun control issues.
This guy was IMHO (and I’m not a mental health professional, so that’s all it can be) a perfect example of when a red-flag law should have been applied. The reports shared from his family of them knowing he was ‘playing’ with the handgun, and had a long history of violent response as well as paranoid delusion.
Since so far we have no evidence of any motivation or target other than these elements, it would be easy to automatically chalk this shooting up to mental health, but as others have said, it cheapens the debate, and we want a great debate after all. But I will repeat, his family are the ones indicating it was 100% mental health, rather than any ideological or political motivation.
If we want to drop down that rabbit hole, fine, but I’d want someone with at least some mental health experience or good cites to lead off.
Ok, so what do you suggest?
Let us skip any talk of getting rid of the 2nd Ad, etc.
Just to be clear, I’ve made two main points in this thread so far.
That the idea that the gun violence problem is a “mental health problem” is absurd, because first of all individuals that pose a risk by virtue of mental health can neither be reliably identified nor reliably treated, and secondly, because by the very nature of human beings, anyone under sufficiently stressful conditions (or those induced by substance abuse) can become a mental health statistic.
As a generalization of the first point, the idea that background checks of the kind being hypothesized in the US are going to solve the problem of gun violence is unrealistic and doomed to fail, partly because of the issue above, and partly because the standards are far too lax. My reference point is how such standards are applied in civilized countries that do have a handle on gun violence.
So ISTM that the whole “mental health” and “background check” propositions are really just deflections by gun advocates to avoid meaningful reform that would, in fact, necessarily restrict access to guns, something that they absolutely want to avoid.
Yes, I agree, it would seem so, based on our limited info.
And I am in favor of them as long as they pass the ACLUs scrutiny. I think we can agree the ACLU isnt some wing of the NRA.