I understand, and I agree. This sort of arrangement would have to be at the Federal level and disallow any State efforts to enact their own bans.
I’m on the list of permit holders too but I do not feel that CCW is covered by the second amendment so I am ok with the restrictions. What I am NOT ok with is having my name published in the local newspaper monthly as a permitted carrier. Yet another thing I have to deal with. In addition, and I hate to sound like a broken record here, but no one has offered one iota of data showing any crime reduction benefits to gun/owner registration.
Which gives local officials the “out” that they need to deny folks their rights for whatever reason they feel. In my state, each of the 99 county sheriffs get to determine who in their county gets to have a CCW. Some have regulated programs and training, pass the class get your permit. Others wont allow anyone to carry. Others still, require “special” training classes to be completed prior to issuing permits. These classes are held once a year and are open to the first ten applicants.
SenorBeef or ExTank can cover this better than I. In short, “well regulated” meant something else in those days AND the Supreme Court has recently ruled that gun rights are not dependent upon militia membership.
Gun regulations should be nationally uniform, IMHO, since they’re a big part of the Bill of Rights by virtue of the fact that they’re mentioned specifically at all.
Studies are thin on the ground, admittedly, but I’d love to see a solid study of the causes of the significantly lower gun crime rate among registered CCW holders. I’d also propose that lists of registrants are privileged under a system of universal federal registration–ideally it would be a thing where the only access would be law enforcement with a specific request (that is, no blanket fishing expeditions to try to end-run the rules on not using the lists to abuse legit gun owners)
This is all bullshit, I’m envisioning something like the DMV where you go in, you pays your nominal fee (like, maybe $25) and you see a bored professional firearms instructor who notes that you can safe, strip, and maintain your firearm or a test one, and that you can put all your rounds on the paper from a reasonable distance (I’m thinking maybe a 25m target, five rounds anywhere in the black on a human-silhouette target for rifles–easy peasy. The idea is that you’d have to be blind or have some kind of palsy to fail this.)
I think there’s reasonable historical disagreement–and to be clear, I don’t think “well-regulated” can be construed as anything that impedes a fully capable citizen’s ability to own any type of individual infantry firearm. Actually, there’s a reasonable point of gun regulation debate–should there be consideration that we might wish to prevent gun ownership by people who are physically incapable of aiming a firearm with any degree of accuracy? I’d be inclined towards “yes”, personally, but to me “I’m sorry, you’re blind, you can’t buy a firearm” is not an unreasonable restriction. (True story–a guy in my hometown, who’s a blind vietnam vet, happily brandished his brand-new Taurus Judge (in .410!) at my dad the other month–“I figure, next time I hear someone messing around my fences I’ll just point it in their general direction and let 'er rip!” My dad’s response, deadpan, was “I’m sorry, but I’m no longer delivering groceries here, you’ll have to send someone to pick them up for you.”)
The tricky issue here is that everyone wants to liken the situation for cars. We register cars and issue licenses, and it works pretty well, so why not guns?
Well, the main point is that there’s not a significant minority of society that favors the outlaw of cars, backed by a significant portion of the legislature, and well-funded, politically organized groups whose sole purpose is the elimination (or severe restriction) of car ownership and driving priviledges.
With guns, they will act out any infringement they possibly think they can get support for, regardless of the utility of the law. The AWB is a great example of that - they know that the guns that would fall under the “assault weapons” ban aren’t used for any significant fraction of crime, but that didn’t matter - if they could get the support for it, they’ll take anything they can get. And they managed to get the support for this by exploiting the public’s ignorance about what was happening.
So while I admit that there are reasonable people in the middle ground who would probably have some point of compromise where they’d be happy, there’s a whole lot of people with power who wouldn’t, who view disarmament as the only viable end, and in the meantime are just trying to slowly and methodically chip away at gun rights any way they can. They won’t stop. There’s no middle ground with them. Every concession ceded to them just builds precedent for the next one. This is how they operate - this is how they intend to reach their end goal.
And for that matter, while it’s called “compromise”, it almost never is. What do gun owners get back when they “compromise” away certain rights? They don’t - they’re only giving things up. Think of it this way - imagine total freedom of gun ownership as a value of 100, what we started at in this country, and a total ban at the value of 0. Let’s say that those who want something to total freedom (100) compromises with the people who want a total ban (0) and they meet in the middle and now we’re at 50. But the 0 side isn’t happy with that, so we want another round of compromises - now we’re starting from the position of gun rights advocates wanting to keep the current position of 50, but the other side still wants their 0. So we meet in the middle again, and now we’re at 25. We’ve gone from 100 to 25 in this example through “compromise” even though nothing was actually given back - where’s the compromise in that?
Registration has historically been a step that preceeds a gun ban (or heavy restriction) in all places where it has happened. It’s a logical part of an eventual gun ban, and so while it seems innocuous enough on the surface, it’s one step closer to what other countries have done. Licensing is even more dangerous - while I definitely want gun owners to be competant, if we create a process by which the state can approve or deny the excercise of rights, then the political whims of those in power can determine who can and can’t get guns. There’s something similar to this in states like California where they grant concealed carry licenses - but generally only to people who make contributions to the campaigns of police chiefs, friends and family of politicians, etc.
You don’t see this situation crop up in car licensing because pretty much everyone in society wants to let competant drivers use the roads - it makes everything run more smoothly. There isn’t a dedicated anti-driving contingent that wants to modify the licensing process to gradually disenfranchise more and more people. But with licensed gun ownership, there would be.
If I thought that registration would be the end of it - that we’d reach some happy medium and leave guns alone from that point on - I’d rethink my position on it. But the reality is that the people in power who would be pushing this scheme are not looking for a middle ground to settle into. They will never stop.
As I explained above and elsewhere, this is a long-term goal of mine–I have found that I can convert almost all of the angry anti-gun folks I previously knew in my real life by offering certain things like licensing and registration in exchange for removing all of the old bans–in my experience the majority of anti-gun movement wants some reassurance that not all of us gun owners are those crazy militia guys or murderers. This is why a lot of them don’t understand the opposition to waiting periods–in their mind, there isn’t a reason to need a gun RIGHT NOW except for a crime of passion.
In reality, what’s needed is a longer-term culture change–the anti-gun folks need to know deep down that our legal guns aren’t going to feed illegal gun uses (hence my propositions on storage requirements and liability for unreported thefts and gun transfers), they need to know that we are being safe with our legal guns (hence a proposed licensing schema that tests the bare basics of ownership), and they need to know that we’re not going to pull out our gun when we’re merely angry (which is already covered as best as possible by the extant instant background checks–anything more than that is almost by definition intrusive). I think it’s possible, within my lifetime certainly, to convince the larger majority that under those conditions legal firearms ownership is no threat whatsoever to public order.
Basically, I’m trying to figure out a way so that in thirty years, there’s no need for a gun debate at all because it’s apparent to the large majority that firearms from pistols to shotguns to the occasional select-fire military battle rifle are adequately regulated and acceptably safe in the hands of legal owners. The more reasonable we as gun owners appear, the more willing to accept reasonable compromises (and that includes putting our collective foot down on “if there is a registry, it’ll be a federal crime in and of itself to use that registry to confiscate or harass” and “if there is to be licensing, it will be shall-issue, cheap, and widely available at convenient hours” and then not budge), the more likely it is that the next generation’s Feinsteins will never get elected.
I have probably not been clear enough, but I want to re-iterate–none of these compromises go in at all without some serious legal provisions to prevent abuse of legal firearms owners.
On paper? Making sure that when we let Joe Bloggs buy a full military issue select-fire M-14 rifle that we know he has one and what its serial number is, so when he’s a complete idiot and leaves it out on his porch and doesn’t report it stolen and then an orphanage gets killed with it, Joe can be charged as an accessory to the murders. Joe here represents a minuscule fraction of gun owners but a major proportion of gun owners who make the news, and the goal here is culture change–I want the DoJ to be able to authoritatively say “there are X million gun owners with Y million registered firearms, and of those, less than 0.01% have been used in a crime” in order to decrease the number of people who believe firearms are inherently an enabler of criminal activity.
Alternately, making sure that when Fred Fuckwit puts his wife in the hospital because his sausage was undercooked or whatever, the police can confidently say “okay, he owns four legally purchased firearms, so we need to make sure we relieve him of all of them once he’s convicted”.
Realistically? This is a compromise directed at the segment of the anti-gun lobby that is concerned with the potential for legal firearms to have their ownership transferred by whatever means into the hands of people not legally allowed to own firearms. The existence of a registry of firearms, accessible only to law enforcement agencies with reasonable grounds–I’d go so far as to say the only legal way to access said registry is with the serial number or ballistic data of a gun used in a crime (and like fingerprints, if the ballistics aren’t on file, they aren’t on file.) or with the name of a suspect for whom an arrest warrant has been issued.
Goddamned acid reflux is acting up. If I’m more dyspeptic than usual, you know why.
While I have no serious disagreement with the idea, I’m quibbling the highlighted section. What if the instructor hands me a Glock to strip? I don’t own a Glock, and have never stripped a Glock. Am I going to get “failed?” Do you have to have this instructor’s approval/licensing before you can own a firearm? If so, how are you going to know how to safe/strip/load/fire the test gun if you don’t own a gun, and can’t own a gun until you get this nominal license?
I doubt you intended to Catch-22 your system, but I see potential for it.
In the recent Heller decision, the Supreme Court recognized the meaning of well-regulated as was in use, and meant, at the time of the drafting of the Bill of Rights, to wit: “…to bring order,method, or uniformity to.” Since they were talking about a well-regulated militia, a paramilitary force, comprised of citizen soldiers supplying their own arms, this stands to reason. An effective military force would be orderly, methodical, and uniform.
Sidenote: to the perennial assholes who stick their fingers in their ears and go “LALALAIWONTREADYOUR CITES,” don’t worry; I’m NOT going to cite a publicly available Supreme Court decision YET AGAIN for you to ignore. I’m lookin’ at youDan.
:dubious:
I don’t doubt your good intentions.
I seriously doubt the feasability of your vision.
SenorBeef is right; there’s a core of what I call “5-per-centers” who want all private ownership of firearms banned. They have “hangers-on” who simply want all handguns and “assault weapons” banned, being happy to leave us with single-shot hunting rifles and shotguns; this gives them a certain “legitimacy” when they deny they want all firearms banned, and a wedge between ardent supporters and “Fudds.”
And they always come back, year-after-year, with junk-science studies (“43 times!”) and the latest round of “common sense gun control” in yet another appeal to “compromise.”
You can talk until you’re blue in the face; you can reason, pontificate, and provide unbiased cites from reputable researchers going back decades. You can show crime stats from the government showing record high levels of gun ownership and crime rates the lowest its been since the mid-1960s.
And it won’t matter a damn. You’re just another loony gun nut to them; you’re just sitting in the dark, stroking your substitute phallis, dreaming of the day you get to kill someone, because you’re not man enough to actually fuck another human being with your own dick.
No amount of talk, logic, or reason is going to sway these people from their vision that the only people who need a gun are the military; even cops won’t need guns in their utopian vision because there are no other guns in the world, so criminals won’t have them either.
Missed window, accidentally totally mucked up the last paragraph:
Realistically? This is a compromise directed at the segment of the anti-gun lobby that is concerned with the potential for legal firearms to have their ownership transferred by whatever means into the hands of people not legally allowed to own firearms. The existence of a registry of firearms, accessible only to law enforcement agencies with reasonable grounds–I’d go so far as to say the only legal way to access said registry is with the serial number or ballistic data of a gun used in a crime (and like fingerprints, if the ballistics aren’t on file, they aren’t on file.) or with the name of a suspect for whom an arrest warrant has been issued–has potential for being a viable method of convincing people to drop their support of anti-gun causes, since they’ll have some assurances they don’t currently have about the thing about guns that they fear (in this case, the unchecked transfer by whatever means of firearms from legal owners to criminals or those of criminal intent).
Nice system. I’m 100% behind it, in theory. I’ve espoused similar thoughts myself several times here on the SDMB.
Now, what happens when Feinstein/Schumer/Pelosi/Ried et. al. armtwist/get enough votes to change the iron-clad laws you envision to use your registry to enact their agenda?
Believe you me, I had Austrian food and lager for lunch, I am right there with you.
There are specifics that can be dealt with, but briefly:
You can either use your own firearm or one of a “standard” type provided (that is, the “standard” arm is known with published changes in advance (i.e., “Effective 6/2010, rifle/shotgun licensing will test on a Mossberg 500 28-inch barrel pump-action, model number #XXX” and copies of it are available at training centers)–the main reason I even bring up a “standard” type is for the benefit of those who might wish a firearms license but not have the means or desire to purchase a firearm at the time they wish to be licensed (for example, a person who wishes to go big-game hunting but plans to utilize a rifle provided by their guide service on location). I would suggest that there be a “learner’s permit” analogue that essentially certified that a person was learning how to operate a gun and permitted them to purchase and store a single gun but not shoot it unless in the company of a licensed gun owner.
Firearms training would work somewhat more leniently than driving training is currently handled now. I don’t see any need for the “instructor” to have any certification other than a bog-standard firearms license themself. I also don’t see any specific requirement for a “learner’s permit” as mentioned above if the prospective licensee is taking a course of instruction on a closed range and is not possessing or transporting any firearms.
Frankly my ideal would be similar to the way that PA currently does motorcycle licensing–you can either get a learner’s permit, get instructed however, and then take your skills test (like a car) or you can schedule with a state-sponsored class which includes a provided firearm for training purposes, and after five or so hours of instruction you receive your rifle license and can go buy your own. Best of all, the latter program is free in-state and reasonably priced for non-PA-residents (I think it’s $150?)
Yeah, that’s the big issue. To use your terms, though, I have to my own satisfaction determined that there is a level of non-intrusive regulation that will successfully drive a wedge between the “5-per-centers” and the “hangers-on”–in my experience, the latter group only needs some reassurances that we gun owners care about their concerns and will take steps to address them.
It boils down to what people see for themselves for the most part. I’m even convincing my mother in law slowly and surely that firearms are not Satan–and this is a woman who is so anti-weapon that she would throw away the little plastic swords that came with my wife’s Ninja Turtles when the wife was a kid.
In my opinion, it’s not even on the table until we see a new breed of Democrats who think Feinstein and Pelosi can go piss up a rope as best as they’re able.
I’m one of those new breed (actually, given how my politics have been lately, I’ve been calling myself an Obama Republican by analogy with Reagan Democrats, but that’s neither here nor there). We’re out there, and there are more of us every time I go talking at rallies and in the line for the voting booth.
There I have to disagree with you slightly. There are a fair number of us who want to see some pretty severe (to some) restrictions put on cars and few of my more Green friends will admit, in some circumstances involving alcohol and the free exchange of ideas, that a ban wouldn’t be a bad idea. But the movement is in its infancy – say about where the anti-smoking campaigns (a better comparison of where I, at least, hope we go) were around 1960. Loosely organized at best and still working out what our goals and objectives are - but we are out there and we aren’t kidding about it (a less car-reliant United States) being one of our dreams.
Could those goals escalate to a ban? Not from me; I hate even the smell of a prohibition. But give it another couple of wars over oil or some whack-jobs using cars for attacks on a 9/11 scale and I wouldn’t rule it out from the intentions of some of my more extreme friends.
And before you say something like this will NEVER get the support of politicians or deep-pocket funding, remember – tobacco said the same thing 50 years ago.
The firearms training course requirements here in Australia focus on safe handling of firearms, not (comparatively) pointless stuff like being able to field-strip and re-assamble a Colt M1911A1 whilst blindfolded. And the reality is that most semi-automatic pistols function in pretty much the same way (slide release on the left about halfway along above the trigger, magazine release on the left hand side of the grip just behind the trigger guard, safety at the back), nearly all bolt action rifles function in the same way, as do double-barrelled shotguns, and so on.
There’s no reason, in other words, to require gun owners to be “type rated” for each model of gun they want, IMHO.
This argumnet stifles any sort of law. Should you allow blacks and whites to marry? Well sure, but they may change the law in the future to require white people to marry blacks. Should we require drivers’s licences? Maybe they will create a test that discriminates against redheads. Should we prohibit illegal aliens from working? Maybe they will stop all of us from working unless we are Republicans.
In the end, we elect Representatives to do our will. If they don’t we elect someone else. Pelosi and Fienstein are not omnipotent bogymen, they are just politicians you disagree with. I disagree with lots of politicians as well.
A law gets passed. If enough people think it works, then it stays on the books and similar laws may be passed in the future. If enough people don’t think it works then it is repealed or modified. It’s the best system I know of, and it’s the one you risked your life to defend.
The sad thing is most people don’t think critically enough to see through the smoke screen of what this poll is asking! I wager the NRA is asking such a loaded question to get people up in arms (no pun) and rally GoP support once they have their attention with these scare tactics.
Wouldn’t it be funny if their poll said the majority of people support the UN taking away our rights? I wish we could organize such a ruse…like a huge Monty Python skit! “They say they actually support this insane suggestion!”
I hadn’t meant to imply any type rating beyond “rifle/shotgun”, “pistol/revolver”, and “select-fire”–and that rating would exist primarily in recognition of the different storage requirements and such for each very broad class of weapon
Huh? A helicopter is not an airplane. An AK47 assault rifle would clearly be banned by the AWB. Though it would make no difference since it had already be banned since 1934. BUT it would be banned because an assault rifle can be fully automatic or select fire. The other bullshit would also ban it.
All fully automatic wepons have been very highly controled since 1934. That you are 8 pages deep in a thread about gun contol and don’t already know this is quite telling.
If I recall the wording of the law correctly (no time to look it up now), it says something to the effect of “If the rifle is semi-automatic and accepts detachable magazine and features any # [I forget the number] then it shall be classified as an assault weapon”. I’m reasonably sure that there’s some language in there that specifically refers to weapons that are only semi-automatic and hence wouldn’t actually apply to a select-fire weapon.
I wish we could organize such a ruse…like a huge Monty Python skit! “They say they actually support this insane suggestion!”