But that can’t be-straw purchases are illegal, as we keep getting told in threads like these over and over and over again by gun enthusiasts . Surely, the mere passage of laws(without benefit of proper enforcement) is enough to stop straw purchases, right? :rolleyes:
Which means you’ve reacted to it for no reason at all four times so far in this thread alone, for no reason whatsoever
Who is it you’re trying to convince?
The NRA has a very concrete strategy that they freely admit in their magazines and other member literature. That is to completely oppose ALL new gun control measures no matter how reasonable they sound individually. They aren’t crazy or paranoid and there is a reason for it. Progressives and strong anti-gun rights groups also admit that they know they can’t get sweeping gun control measures through at once but they can use a strategy of incremental change and compromising on compromises over time so that they can sneak in strong gun control measures incrementally. You have to admit, that creeping change method has been successful for many other controversial causes so the NRA is correct in the tactical sense if they really are invested in preserving gun rights.
The NRA is the second biggest lobbying group in the U.S. behind AARP. They have a big building in Virginia full of lawyers and lobbyists that know what they are doing at least in terms of their stated mission. It isn’t run by a bunch of government hating rednecks riding around in pickup trucks and talking about conspiracy theories over CB radio.
That explanation also happens to be why Paul Walker supports the NRA at least in public. They have a lot of money and influential lobbyists. There are also a whole lot of Democratic voters that could be tempted to switch at least some of their votes if the Democratic Party starts sending out a strong anti-gun rights message. Gun control has proven time after time to be a landmine to groups and individual politicians that embrace it even a little too much for mainstream American sensibilities.
The IRS rules are also a little unclear and open to abuse, but at the same time, they aren’t often abused by the IRS, there is a court system in place to handle it when they are abused, and a little unclear allows them to take investigative action when the real crime has more to do with money laundering than running a hobby business.
IRS letters have clarified things over time, and its possible there will be similar rulings under some sort of system to clarify. But projecting all possible scenarios forward to meet both the enforcement needs and the rights of individuals is impossible at this point.
It doesn’t go nearly as far as it should. It perturbs me deeply how many people have died in the last few years and yet more stringent gun control measures are still politically untenable. Between this and Donald Trump’s political ascendancy, I’m beginning to have grave doubts about the moral character of the average american citizen.
My comments are less about gun control per se, and more about politics in general.
This. Liberals will not admit what they truly seek: to ban all guns.
This entire charade–speeches and all–exists to mask what they truly want. AND the only thing that would truly reduce gun violence.
More than that, there’s an inverse relationship between gun control laws and gun violence in this country. California, which has some of the strictest laws in the country has 8.5 times as many gun murders per capita than NH, 9 times as many as Vermont, and 4.25 times as many as Maine which all have significantly laxer gun laws.
There’s quite a bit of space between “ban all guns” and “make it significantly harder for even law-abiding people to buy and own multiple guns.”
The latter would indeed be required to see substantial change, but there’s no need to overstate it. And I’m not at all sure that most liberals even support making it harder for law-abiding people to buy multiple guns. AFAIK, the polling does not bear that out.
Cite? Not that incremental changes have happened, but that they happened because people snuck things in? That’s NRA rhetoric right there, not fact.
The strategy you describe is indeed crazy. It’s based on paranoia. It’s really just a restatement of the slippery slope fallacy. In actuality, the people could choose to stop their support once they think gun control has started to go too far.
Sure it’s an effective tactic, but it’s effective because it preys on the paranoia of others, not because there’s any danger of gun control blooming out of control.
As for the thread topic, for fuck’s sake! He’s using an executive action. Obama is extremely limited in what he can do. What he’s doing is declaring how he will enforce existing law.
Of course it’s not going to be all that much. He has to do very little and hope the courts won’t try and stop him. And of course he has to make a big production of it, because there is the possibility that he will be stopped, so he at least needs it made known that he tried–and he tried something that even many gun owners think is reasonable.
It’s both the right thing to do and a good political strategy for the Democrats.
I’m curious, where does one keep a brush that broad.
I am a liberal, and I am against most Gun Control laws.
*Because they dont work. *
Right, “ban all guns” just like they’ve been banned in all the rest of the civilized world! :rolleyes: The reality is that the US is the lone outlier among all modern democracies in its outrageous gun proliferation and permissiveness. What Obama outlined is the tiniest of nudges toward some semblance of rational gun policy resembling that of the rest of the civilized world. His emotion in doing do seems like it’s an act of conscience of a decent man in the waning days of his presidency who can only do what little he can against the madness of guns in America.
I am not actually against the changes he made in practice. However, I don’t like executive orders of that nature in general based on Constitutional principle but I will leave that up to the courts to decide. I did like that Obama stated clearly, that as a Constitutional scholar and former law professor, he recognized the 2nd amendment and its supreme validity. Many if not most non-Americans (and way to many Americans for that matter) don’t truly understand the federal constitutional republic that forms the foundation of the United States. The Constitution is supreme above all else including the President and Congress so it isn’t a simple matter to just pass laws or executive orders that violate the 2nd amendment. It could be repealed in theory but that is extremely difficult and would take a very long time if it is possible at all.
Just as an aside, Constitutional amendments are not necessarily the only remedy to deal with the 2nd Amendment. Some very smart constitutional scholars believe that the Heller interpretation was a gross distortion of what was intended as a collective right for national defense in the 18th century, and not the right of random yokels to brandish AR-15s on public sidewalks or shoot their teachers or employers with them.
There is a better way to go about this: you can establish a “buyer’s license” for fire arms. Not mandatory, so not having one means you can still buy going through the current back ground system.
Getting this license would be based on a thorough background check (solving the supposed problem of failed background checks due to time crunch), and valid for, say, a year. As a holder, it would give you the ability to have guns mailed straight to your house (no need for transfer at an FFL) much like a C&R license allows for C&R guns. When buying at a store, you don’t have to go through the (actually not very instant) background check, and you save $10 in transaction costs.
If you are a person-to-person seller of a gun, selling to such a license holder provides an absolute defense from any legal consequences if the buyer ends up doing bad things with this gun. As a seller, you could still sell to an unlicensed buyer - but no such protection.
This does not limit the rights of gun owners, actually makes the lives of responsible gun owners easier, and pretty soon nearly all p-to-p sales (the so-called “gunshow loophole”) will be to licensed buyers because it’s a superior choice for the seller.
Of course, it’s not much of a first step to confiscating all guns, so it probably won’t be very attractive to certain control advocates.
This used to be the case in the early 90s but the Clinton administration actively curtailed the number of FFL holders. So called kitchen table dealers were driven out by increased costs and unfavorable rulings.
I would get an FFL if it were easy. I could maintain records and as a result would be able to take delivery directly? Sign me up. And I don’t actually sell guns, that would thwart my hoarding!
Some very smart constitutional scholars also believe that the “right to privacy,” identified in Griswold was grossly distorted when it was used as the basis for the right to abortion identified in Roe.
Can you explain how we should weigh the information that some smart constitutional scholars have adopted a particular position?
What does have to do with anything? It is what the Supreme Court ruled so that is the end of interpreting what it means until an equivalent case overturns it. Like I said, most non-Americans have a really hard time comprehending how the U.S. federal constitutional republic works. You can’t just wish or argue away binding Supreme Court decisions.
If the people collectively don’t like the 2nd amendment, it has to be repealed before anyone can ignore it. THE END. No one can reinterpret to mean anything other than it already does without a great case at hand that the Supreme Court agrees with. Claiming anything other than that is idiotic. You might as well claim that freedom of speech isn’t really important, slavery can be made legal again and Prohibition is allowable if you just squint hard enough and read it the right way and want to badly enough. It simply doesn’t work that way.
In your defense, I think you are Canadian but most younger Americans don’t do any better on this topic than you just did. It is shameful that people don’t even understand the most basic fundamentals of our system of government. I learned this stuff in Civics classes when I was 14. Apparently, that isn’t a strong point anymore.
You have obviously misunderstood me. I am well aware of the principle of stare decisis and I assure you it doesn’t just apply to the US. How do you think the law works in other constitutional democracies? I did not say or imply that the Heller decision was anything other than binding, which of course it is.
What I did say was that many believe the Heller decision was stupid. I also point out that Supreme Court decisions are not necessarily forever. Did the civics class you took when you were 14 fail to teach you that the Supreme Court is made up of fallible human beings with their own beliefs and biases who sometimes make decisions that are later seen as wrong and consequently overturned? Would you care to guess how many times this has happened? By my count of this incomplete list, the US Supreme Court has overruled its own previous decisions at least 123 times.
A classic example is Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) which upheld Georgia’s anti-sodomy law forbidding anal or oral sex. It was overturned a mere 17 years later in Lawrence v. Texas, with Justice Anthony Kennedy ruling that “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent. Bowers v. Hardwick should be and now is overruled.”
Likewise, Pace v. Alabama ruled in 1883 to uphold laws against inter-racial marriages, and this piece of bigoted stupidity was overturned by Loving v. Virginia in 1967. In a stunning example of going backwards, however, the Supreme Court first supported campaign finance laws as serving a compelling public interest, in Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce (1990), then overruled it exactly 20 years later in the famously controversial Citizens United ruling with its scathing dissent. And there are at least 120 other examples of the Supreme Court reversing itself.
So, no, it’s not “idiotic” to suggest that the Court may have erred in the Heller ruling and that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that a subsequent case, before a differently composed Court, may make a different interpretation of the intent of the Second Amendment – an eventuality that is actually not all that uncommon in the history of the Court. Nor does such a supposition indicate that I don’t understand how a constitutional republic works. The Court may indeed assert, as it has done so many times before, that such a reversal is sufficiently important that it must be made notwithstanding the doctrine of stare decisis.