Here’s a brief look at how well registration is going in Canada, which would only make up 2% of the firearms in the US.
To be fair, the problems addressed in that article included licensing of gun owners (which I am not proposing), not just gun registration, which I am proposing.
All guns enter society legally. Gun manufacturer’s sell to licensed dealers. Of course there may be some imported illegally, or even homemeade, but thet are the exception and not the rule.
But criminals don’t go through the proper channels to get their guns. They steal them, or buy them second or third hand. Look in your local newspaper or “Trading Post” type magazine. There are tons of guns for sale, and most of these transactions will have no documenting paperwork.
I myself own a Sig 226 I bought from a friend. There is no way anyone but he and I know I own this gun.
So please explain how registering guns will lead to fewer guns being available to criminals.
Again, this may look good on paper, but it is unworkable.
Exactly. That’s why we need gun registration laws, and penalties for those who conduct illegal weapons transactions. Responsible gun ownership should be the law, not just good advice.
Over time, the pool of unregistered weapons wil get smaller and smaller through attrition. Nobody said it would solve the problem overnight.
Apples and oranges friend. Cars are registered as they use public roadways. Enforcement exists in extremely limited numbers to insure all cars on the road are properly registered. Who would do so for the 270,000,000 or so easily concealable guns in the US? Not to mention the millions of guns that don’t even have serial numbers.
So your theory is the guy who would use a gun in a crime is going to be deterred by a penalty for buying a gun illegally? :dubious: There are already laws for responsible gun ownership and sales. Unfortunately the guy who shoots the guy behind the counter at the local “Stop 'n Go” during a robbery is not concerned about them. The crime of armed robbery itself is illegal. Assault is illegal. Assault with a deadly weapon is illegal. Why do these laws not stop criminals, but your registry will?
Theft is a popular way for criminals to get guns. Do you think a gun being registered will deter a criminal from stealing it?
And where will the unregistered guns go? What is the mechanism for the attrition of unregistered weapons? Will a national registry prompt criminals to turn them in? Only the law abiding criminals… :rolleyes:
Nope. The guy who bought a gun legally, but sells it illegally is guilty of a weapons registration offense. He would run the risk of prosecution if the weapon he sold is used in a crime. Fewer guns make the transition from legal ownership to illegal ownership. There is your deterrent.
Registration will reduce the number of illegal weapons available to those who need them, thereby reducing crime.
Personally, I think a part of responsible gun ownership is insuring your weapons are stored safely enough to prevent theft. I would like to see gun owners charged with a weapon registration offense if their weapon is stolen and used in a crime. Anything less is irresponsible gun ownership.
They break, they are lost, they are confiscated in crimes; the same way guns are removed from circulation today. You don’t seriously believe every gun ever made is still out there, do you?
Finish this meaningless talking point and I will respond to it.
Simple. When a gun is used in a crime, find the registered owner and charge them with a weapon registration crime. This will deter illegal sales, and reduce the weapons available to criminals.
Permanent serial number technology is available, and would be mandatory for all new weapons under my legislation. I said it would take time. Just because the impact is not immediate is no reason to not take any action. I say we start now.
See the full quote [url=http://www.guncite.com/burger.html]here.* Former Chief Justice Burger was writing an op-ed for Parade magazine, and not speaking/ruling from the bench. His article forms no part of any legally binding opinion. In any case, there’s nothing in the quote/article you cited that suggests that “individual rights” and “reasonable restrictions” are mutually exclusive.
In the late 80’s/earl 90’s the NRA was infested with the fringe element of the gun rights movement, the folks who believe that you, me, anyone has the unrestricted right to anything we can financially afford.
The NRA has since moderated it’s position considerably; the real debate (for those who care to partake in actual debate, and not scream in each other’s face) is where the “reasonable” line is drawn.
I’ll repeat myself; there are millions of guns out there. Many without serial numbers pre1968 or so. The attrition you speak of will take hundreds of years, all the while building an enormous bureaucracy to manage a database of records varying from state to state, with millions of changes annually. Your plan does nothing to deter illegal sales, it only broadens what an illegal sale is. Criminals have no problem obtaining guns illegally today, if your law was enacted tomorrow, nothing would change.
All firearms since 1968 have had serial numbers on their receivers. Those have been tracked by form 4473 from manufacturer, to dealer to owner for 30+ years. Other than to require all personal transfers register their sale with the Feds, your plan is doing nothing new. But it is that personal sale, the intrastate commerce part of the plan that is the big hang-up.
It’s far more effective than your plan.
No qualifiers here? No “reasonable” standard? I can sneak into **ExTank’**s house with a knife, force him at knifepoint to open his safe and give me his guns, and he’s guilty of crime if I rob a liquor store using those guns? Talk about blaming the victim…
Looting what? You seen pictures of the places after the bombs? :dubious:
OK, a more serious answer: No. There wasn’t. Nor after the 95 Kobe earthquake where one of the major cities was leveled and more than 5,000 people died. Or the typhoon which hit this last weekend and thousands of refugees (they’re foreigners, so they’re refugees) and
Back to the question in the OP, the unrest makes me rethink a lot of things about American society, but the answer for me isn’t upping the arms race between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. A far more effective stategy is to have an effective national guard.
Prohibition of alcohol didn’t work…illegal sale of cocaine, heroin and crystal meth didn’t stop production and importation of same…and registering guns will only lead to smuggling weaponry from outside the US.
As it has been said: It may work on paper but not in real life situations.
So now registration is synonynous with prohibition? Nobody said you can’t have guns. Nobody said you can’t buy guns. That isn’t anything like Prohibition.
Japan’s weapon control laws are incredibly restrictive. Here is an overview of the system and a critique about why similar methods would never be allowed in the US. It’s not just pistols; under the weapon control laws, even swords and certain kinds of knives are not permitted. Japanese citizens live under a virtual police state. It’s mostly benevolent, but the controls are there even when they are unobtrusive. Japan is not a nation of sweetness and light. Do a search on prison conditions in Japan or on the rights of accused criminals and you’ll find that out pretty quickly.
Japanese citizens have very few civil rights. The protections the government was forced to write into the constitution during the Allied Occupation were mostly abrogated soon after Japan was allowed its sovereignty. Wiretaps are expressly forbidden due to the abuses of the wartime thought police, yet the fact that they are in fact used is an open secret. Confessions are not supposed to be the only evidence used against the accused in a criminal case, there must be some actual evidence of wrongdoing independent of a confession. Yet Japanese lawyers estimate that about 60% or more of their clients would not be in prison if the constitutional prohibition was actually followed. They have no right to assembly. A small natural disaster was used as an excuse to gut this constitutionally protected right in the early 1950s, shortly after the Occupation forces left. In theory, Japan has a free press. In practice, reporters who don’t belong to the unofficial “news clubs” don’t get any stories. If you’re in, you are hand-fed information. If you print something the official sources don’t want printed, you’re out of the club.
You don’t even have to do anything wrong to be pulled in for questioning here. The police can hold you for up to three days without notifying anyone that they have you, and you don’t have to be charged with a crime. They can ask a judge --who basically rubber-stamps the petition-- for an extra 20 days, and they still don’t have to charge you with anything.
Questioning conditions would often be condemned under the Geneva Conventions for a nation at war. Brainwashing techniques like sleep deprivation, withholding food and water, marathon questioning sessions, stress positions, and beatings are often used to extract a confession. You don’t have the right to consult a lawyer whenever you want, it is solely at the police’s discretion. If you’re a foreigner, you can probably forget about having an interpreter on hand. The confession won’t be in your language, and even if it was, you’d be an idiot to trust the translation. Some people sign confessions because they are afraid they will not survive questioning unless they do.
If you think living in a virtual police state is a good thing, keep praising Japan’s system.
Fear Itself, the reason people who oppose gun control don’t want any restrictions is that things as seemingly innocuous as registration are often later used for confiscation. This was seen most recently in Australia in the late 90s. Wikipedia has a couple of decent articles on gun control issues in various countries, including the registration-confiscation issue in Australia.
There are very good reasons for the American historical distrust of government. After all, if we had been good little citizens of the Crown and handed over our arms when mandated by our lawful government, there wouldn’t have been a United States in the first place.
Don’t we need a [hijack] to off this far?
Oh, I see, pointing out a difference between Japan and America requires that I completely and 100% percent support everything about the Japanese system. Nice strawman, I’ll have to try that sometime myself.
Similar things happened in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Registration was required, and after a while, the cities closed the registration books refusing to allow any new handguns to be registered at all. It resulted in the de facto bans that we see now.
Opposition to registration schemes is not paranoid lunacy, it’s based upon precedent.
Since I have not offered a plan, I fail to see how it is any more or less effective.
Please explain how more effective your idea will be from the current federal laws. Your idea will not prevent any crimes, only offer a marginally better set of information to help solve them. You depend on attrition to take care of the excess of unregistered firearms, but you must realize guns last a long, long time. A quick look through any gun mag will find you several companies selling WW1 Mauser rifles that are still new in the box and have been stored since 1920 or more.
You will need an entire branch of the government to be created to track these registered weapons as well, just like the various Departments of Transportation (DOT) that exist state to state tracking cars. These DOT’s do not talk together effectively now, yet your bureaucratic nightmare of a gun registration police force would?