I was not confused by the terminology. I never claimed that the two were synonymous.
I do have a gripe with the whole “gun buyBACK” terminology though. It’s wrong. The government isn’t buying BACK people’s guns. They never owned them in the first place. O’Rourke is proposing gun confiscation with some compensation.
I guess I see where they are coming from. As it is, if you happen to have a couple grams of an illicit substance that does no harm to anyone one but you, then the cops may very well kick down your door and threaten you with violence in confiscating it.
Given that precedent, i can see why gun owners would fear being treated the way that we currently treat non-violent drug users.
Maybe we could agree to not kick down doors for non-violent crimes in general, then the gun owners would have one less thing to be paranoid about.
At first I was like, "come on, what kind of technicality is Ludovic playing at here? Then I noticed the capital A.
Noice.
I support this idea.
I could get behind that. Because cops going to homes where there are guns and they think the owner may not surrender them easily sounds to me like a recipe for a whole lot of shootings. Those cops are going to be on high alert and trigger-happy. Now imagine them having to go door to door through inner city black neighborhoods.
This would be a really bad idea.
Here’s a proposal maybe everyone could get around: There are a lot of guns out there that are just sitting unwanted and unused. Say, a widower whose hunter husband died and now has a basement full of guns she doesn’t want. If you want to get those out of circulation, offer a voluntary purchase of guns at slightly higher than market value, on the condition that the person turning in the guns signs a paper saying that they will not buy a gun again, or maybe for 10 years or something. Maybe offer them an extra 10% for signing. Then those names can be put on the background check list.
Activist groups can then raise money to buy back guns in their community, and they can take forms around that sellers can sign to get their additional government bonus.
That would actually get lots of guns off the street, and it wouldn’t infringe on the rights of anyone. Reducing the stock of used guns would make them more expensive, which would further reduce demand. And the people who don’t turn their guns in would see their value go up, which might even get them on board with the program.
It would also be more effective in neighborhoods where people are poor and could use the money. These neighborhoods also generate a disproportionate number of gun crimes. Also, offer one-time amnesty if the guns are stolen or unregistered or whatever.
Well,yes basically. I don’t remember them going door to door to enforce the Australian mandatory buy back? Or am I misremembering?
I’d have some qualms about the pledge-signing bit. People’s circumstances change. There might be people today who feel very safe in their neighborhood, but over the next 10 years it could decline significantly, and as crime goes up, they may change their mind and decide they no longer feel safe and want a gun to protect themselves. There may be young ladies now that are enjoying a happy marriage, but in the next 10 years it could fall apart and they’re faced with the prospect of an abusive spouse / ex-husband and no way to adequately protect themselves because they signed a pledge when things seemed fine. Ditto for people who start getting stalked, have to testify against organized crime, or just decide they now want to get into the shooting sports hobbies.
I can see the need for some sort of limiting mechanism on any plan to compensate turning in guns for greater than market value, lest savvy gun owners buy guns, “sell” them to the program at a profit, and repeat the cycle endlessly (or at least until the program runs out of money). I’m just not sure what that mechanism should be that limits abuse while guaranteeing people’s rights in the face of an uncertain future.
Personally, I strongly believe that if they were only sold to well qualified buyers in the first place, the supply to the black market would dry up very quickly.
Let people sell their guns if they want to, but don’t make it a law that they can’t have them, just they they cannot take them out of their house unless they have the proper permits.
Guns are too easy to get ahold of by anyone, whether with noble or nefarious intent. If it is made just a tiny bit harder to get a gun, then it is the outlaws who will encounter the difficulties, not the law abiding.
NYC tried this. They got sued for violating the Constitution, and reversed course. Even still, it looks likely that they’re going to get smacked down further by SCOTUS for their shenanigans.
There are lots of gun control proposals in which law abiding citizens will “encounter the difficulties”. If you’ve got some specific ones that you think do a good job of mitigating this issue (law abiding citizens being hassled / harassed / inconvenienced by gun control efforts), I’d be interested in hearing them (although perhaps that’s a subject for a different thread. If I started one, would you make the effort to outline some such proposals there?).
I tried looking for data on this, and couldn’t find it. It seems that it is possible to have a mandatory buy-back without going door to door. In fact, it would almost have to be done without immediate enforcement since there is no gun registry, and therefore no way to know who has a gun. New Zealand is currently having problems with compliance with their mandatory buy-back.
I think the way it would be have to be done in America is to simply announce that certain guns will be illegal on a certain future date, and that possessing them would be a felony. Then offer the buy-back until that date. Then later, if you are caught with the gun you’d be charged with a felony. But if you’re going to do that, be ready to charge lots of nice old people with felonies because they forgot about Grandpa’s old rifle in the barn, or because they refused to turn in their father’s service revolver that hasn’t been fired for twenty years because of sentimental value.
The problem with this is that there would likely be widespread non-compliance, and millions of Americans would become instant felons. That is not a good thing.
Even in Canada, extreme gun laws are not obeyed. The mandatory gun registry imposed on us was ignored by large swaths of the gun-owning public, to the point where it was felt that it was missing millions of guns and totally worthless. It was eventually scrapped.
Before you can have a reasonable, enforceable buy-back program, you need to know where the guns are. Americans won’t even comply with a gun registry - probably because, like Canadian gun owners they saw gun registration as the first necessary step towards confiscation.
But I think this is a hijack of this thread and we should probably get back to Beto’s self-destruction tour.
They made it a bit hard/impossible to get proper permits. They over reached a bit. I agree with their sentiments, for the most part, but their implementation certainly lacked.
Maybe. I have no problem respectfully discussing ways of preventing gun violence, and keeping guns out of the hands of the criminal or irresponsible, while also ensuring that responsible law abiding people are able to keep guns for self defense or recreation. I’m not sure what can be said that hasn’t already been said, and I’m not really made of time these days, but if you started such a thread, I’d do my best to put in my $0.02.
Why would it have to be a felony?
If you want to incentivize people to turn in their guns, I’m not sure a misdemeanor charge would do it. But if you want to make owning a restricted firearm a misdemeanor, that’s fine. I’m not sure you’ll get other gun controllers to go along with that, though.
I have no problem with that. If you use your gun for violence or in an irresponsible manner, then there may be repercussions, but just being caught with a gun in your home, car, or on your person, with no other crimes being committed, should be a ticketable offense. (Along with the confiscation of the illicit item, of course.)
I don’t want to go get your guns, if nothing else, that seems like quite a bit of work, I just want you to keep them under lock and key. And if that means concealing them from law enforcement, then that also means that it is harder for criminals or children or idiots to get ahold of them.
But yeah, walk into a Chili’s with your AR-15 on your back, and you’re gonna lose it, along with paying a reasonably hefty fine.
The point is to get guns off the street. Grandpa’s gun that’s rusting out in the barn isn’t really a concern, but trying to write a law that (pardon the pun) grandfathers it in invites loopholes that could be exploited by bad actors.
So, instead, say it’s illegal to own Gun X. If you own Gun X, you can turn it into the police, and they’ll buy it back. The deal is open ended, and never expires. If you don’t take advantage of the buyback offer, there’s no specific gun enforcement division that will go kicking in doors looking for illegal guns. But if a cop finds a banned gun, it gets confiscated, and you don’t get any money for it. Maybe slap a small fine on top, or (if there’s other charges, like robbery or assault or whatever) there’s an enhanced penalty for using a banned fire arm.
So, some (admittedly small) percentage of the guns will be taken off the streets through voluntary surrender. An increasing percentage will be gradually taken off the streets through the normal enforcement of other criminal laws. And a diminishing percentage will stay hidden in the collections of otherwise law abiding gun owners, until they eventually die out and their collections are inherited by people who will either A) turn them in to comply with the law, or B) get them confiscated because they’re doing other illegal stuff, and the cops find the guns.
It’s a slow plan - it’d take decades to actually eliminate any particular type of gun this way. But it’s a way to do it that doesn’t turn a bunch of otherwise law abiding gun owners into felons overnight.
Most other “gun controllers” would, I think, be fine with this plan, because the point of gun control is to reduce the amount of gun violence in society, not to just be a dick to people who like guns.
If anyone wants to continue the gun control discussion, I’ve created a thread here for that.
Back on O’Rourke’s imploding campaign: CNN - O’Rourke struggles to outline specifics on proposed mandatory gun buyback. It’s pretty cringe-worthy, particularly on such a sympathetic news network.