It’s accepted that a felony conviction is sufficient to suspend someone’s rights because in English law a felony was originally something that you could be executed for (or maimed, hence “life and limb”), on the theory that one had committed an act heinous enough to be considered an “outlaw”: someone who had rebelled against the government and the law. The current practice of incarceration being a merciful alternative. Loss of civil rights can be the penalty for a felony, but that doesn’t mean that anything whatsoever could be declared a felony.
By design, loss of civil rights only happens after stringent standards have been met, which can’t be summarily set aside by legislation. For starters, there are things the government is flatly forbidden to do, such as declaring someone guilty by fiat (bill of attainder), or passing a law and then punishing someone retroactively ( ex post facto). Then there’s the Bill of Rights, a judiciary insulated from political meddling, and the requirement that only a jury of citizens can declare that someone is guilty of a crime.
He tried to defuse a situation that had already been defused by trying to makw guy respect his authoritah! Acted like a tough guy, killed fellow worshiper apparently having a bad day, and hopefully will have to do time.
Former FFL holder here. Those forms are kept on file by the gun dealer himself. They aren’t submitted to the BATFE or other federal government agency. Tracing a gun by serial number involves starting at the manufacturer who will state to which wholesaler they sold the gun. The wholesaler can then say which dealer bought the gun from them. The dealer can then be contacted about the gun so he can check his records for who he sold it to. There is no central registry, at least at the federal level. The PA State Police does maintain a database of handgun purchases, but that has not been without controversy. The court put themselves through some circus freak level contortions to to justify the PSP’s position that the database is, somehow, not a registry.
Yes, so there is a registry of guns sold at each gun dealer, correct? And you honestly think that the government does not have access to those registries (or forms if you will) if they wanted to get them?
Of course they have access to them. That is exactly why I had to keep them on file. My point is that there is no central database. Accessing those dealer records means following that chain that starts at the manufacturer. Not all dealers have computerized their records, either. So when they find the dealer, it may involve literally going through dusty boxes of records page by page.
Correct, no central database. I was responding to the poster who said that registration leads to confiscation. That information is already captured, so it is easy to get in the event of “confiscation”