There have been a number of good ideas in this thread. I do support universal background checks for all gun transfers (maybe with limited exceptions), and a training course before buying your first gun is an excellent idea.
There are other ideas in here that I also support, but those are the two biggest, IMHO.
The one that I would add is to allow cities and municipalities to regulate how guns are carried in public within their borders. Have a federally defined safe practices for transport that is accepted country wide, but allow cities to restrict or allow other forms of carry.
What makes sense in a rural area doesn’t make sense in an urban environment, and vice versa, so it doesn’t make sense to have them covered by the same laws. What makes sense even in one city may not make sense in another, so they should be able to come up with what they think is best for their residents.
It was an NPR story that I was listening to while driving last night, so I couldn’t give you all the details, but my understanding of what they were saying is that Texas does have fairly harsh penalties for invoking the red flag law under false pretenses.
That still needs to be worked out, as one may have done so in good faith but with poor or misunderstood information, but that would be something for the court to decide.
Having never purchased a firearm, I’m quite fuzzy on the details. Do you know what’s involved with the process that causes it to be so slow? I’m imagining some sort of database check.
Hmm, I probably wasn’t as clear as I should have been -
I added italics this time. So yes, I still agree with you @k9bfriender - there absolutely needs to be leeway for intent in allowing the flag, and absolutely that would be for the court to decide. I am aware (2nd hand of course) of cases in which separated spouses take advantage of similar ‘threats to safety’ to harass said spouses, generally over custody issues. In the case of said 2nd hand example, it finally came down to a restraining order and court case to get the issues slowed at least, and the falsely reporting party finally did end up getting court mandated help, which they certainly needed.
It’s possible that a policy could affect different kinds of injury or death differently, e.g. gun homicide vs gun suicide. One that seems middling overall may still be significant for a subset. So I think it’s important to make the distinction when collecting data to avoid overlooking something.
I’ve posted about this before, but based on my experience in the military and shooting in general, there are 4 features of some semi-automatic rifles (like the AR-15 type) that make them virtually the perfect weapons for mass shootings in large interior spaces like schools or churches:
Semi-auto action (i.e. one trigger pull, one bullet comes out, as opposed to lever or pump action in which another motion is needed to chamber the next bullet). This enables significantly more rapid, accurate fire than other firearm actions.
Carbine-length barrel – around 14-18" barrel length, rather than a hunting weapon which typically is 22-24" or more. This allows relatively low weight and high maneuverability (i.e. can quickly and easily aim the weapon at multiple targets in sequence) while retaining enough accuracy for the kind of short and mid-range targeting likely in a school or church (point blank to ~10 yards or so).
Rifle-caliber ammunition – rifle-caliber ammunition generally has significantly more propellant (i.e. gunpowder) driving the bullet than pistol-caliber ammunition, meaning the bullet travels much faster, creating much more deadly wounds. A short or medium range rifle wound is much more likely to be deadly than a pistol wound (aside from some unusually powerful pistol calibers).
Large magazine sizes – this means that the shooter won’t need to pause and reload nearly as often… with every pause for a reload, that’s another chance for potential targets to either escape or fight back and subdue the shooter.
With this in mind, I believe these features would be reasonable characteristics to approach with legislation. Not to ban them (except, perhaps, #4 – I don’t think civilian magazine sizes need to be larger than 10 or so), but to limit their combination. For example, you can have a carbine-length rifle, but not with rifle-caliber ammo and semi-auto action. Or you can have a semi-auto rifle for large animal hunting, but the barrel must be greater than 24", with a magazine capacity of less than 10 (or maybe less than 7, or whatever). Etc.
This probably wouldn’t reduce the amount of shootings, but it could reduce the body count. And I don’t believe it would affect any legitimate uses of guns, including self-defense for all scenarios but a zombie apocalypse. But quite clearly it’s not anything close to a panacea – for one thing it does nothing to restrict handguns, which are still frequently used in mass shootings (and of course other gun violence).
Nobody’s arguing against background checks, but the problem is in enforcing them. How would anyone know if I sold one of my guns to my brother, regardless of what the laws are on background checks? How is that any different than shadier characters doing the same thing?
That’s the problem as I see it; anything that doesn’t have a database of the guns that are bought and sold, and who the putative owner is is not liable to catch the problematic transactions.
I’m all for tighter background checks at the point of first sale, and I’m even for changing the laws on mental health disclosure so that it can be included in those background checks. But it also needs to be VERY well defined by medical/psychological professionals, NOT politicians, so that people aren’t unduly deprived of their rights because of something that’s been resolved years before.
Why should you be allowed to sell your gun to your brother without reporting it?
Just mentioning car starts the derailment
You can’t sell your car to your brother without reporting it, after all.
Now, if you choose to do so anyways, and your brother gets caught with the gun he’s not supposed to have, you and him should both get in serious trouble.
Cars yet again, as if reading the OP and the Staff note was not possible
It seems to me that there’s a learning from the motor vehicle world that might be relevant here.
In many states – I think every state I’ve lived in – you (as the seller) remain legally responsible for the vehicle until the earlier of the following:
You file a Motor Vehicles Notice of Non-Reponsibility (may/may not be the actual document name), or
The buyer registers the vehicle themselves
It’s a way of notifying the State of a transfer.
Without it, if you sold your gun to your brother, and he went on to commit a crime with that gun (where they traced the gun’s serial number), you’d get a knock on your door.
It keeps some skin in the game where skin in the game might drive beneficial action.
Minor nitpick about this one, but I think pertinent to the general debate. We are way past the point of defining pistol and rifle caliber cartridges clearly, something I think inherent in the point you make at the very end of this one about “unusually powerful pistol calibers”.
Specifically, the most common round in weapons generally classed as assault rifles is 5.56 Nato, which is an intermediate round between what used to be considered traditional pistol and rifle rounds. And each and every year it seems there’s a new super round of some in the works (6.8 blackout most recently) that promises to be even more perfect.
Let’s be clear, I’m not arguing that most categories of rifle ammunition are not substantially more potent, and more lethal and thus more dangerous in a mass shooting event, especially with your well laid out combination of features that makes them the arguably perfect weapon for such disasters.
I think we could better min/max your point by setting a threshold of kinetic energy allowable rather than say ‘rifle-caliber’ - fewer loopholes after all. So you take ye olde F=MA (which again, huge oversimplification on firearms as it leaves out reams of ballistics, but again, basics right now) and set a threshold of net force that would ideally be allowable in conjunction with the other three points.
I wouldn’t, but you don’t seriously think that criminals and people intent on doing all that stuff that everyone wants gun control for are going to care about any of that, do you?
I mean, I’m not a threat. I’m a safe responsible gun owner. But clearly there is a segment of the population who isn’t and who are responsible for the vast majority of gun crime.
They’re the ones who we want to stop, while balancing any mitigation efforts against the impact on the hugely larger population of responsible gun owners. That’s the balancing act that’s extremely hard to figure out.
Your car is also registered with the state and county. They can look up your license plate and see who owns it if it’s in a wreck, or used in a crime, etc…
Guns don’t have that. If my brother goes and shoots someone with a gun I gave him, there’s no way to trace that to me, save unless he tells them himself. That’s the point- there’s no outside verification of where it came from.
The point is the seller can be responsible for what someone else does with the gun after it is sold and out of their control (unless they followed the law when selling it).
Maybe that is a chance some are willing to take but that will also almost certainly add a price increase to purchasing the gun.
Well, chalk that up to a minmax. A registry of guns would have minimal impact on legal gun users, who are allowed to own guns, and are buying them legally.
There is a model, though, where some form of registration ensures relatively simple traceability.
In trying to keep with the outlines of the OP, I think a social policy of enhanced traceability would be very helpful and minimally intrusive.
We would certainly have to deal with the perception of, or the degree to which, registration serves simply as a shopping list for confiscation under the apocalyptic scenarios that some envision.
But I think it tends to shift a certain kind of onus of ownership onto owners – writ large – than may currently be on them.
ETA:
This is where the chain currently ends (bolding mine):
Yeah, I think that the “large” effect needs to be judged not as an absolute thing, but as relative to the negative effects on gun owners. If we could prevent a single gun death by adding an apostrophe to the background check form, that’d be an obvious tweak to make