What is 'Common Sense' or 'Reasonable' Gun Control?

Great Debates
1

Often in gun control debates, proponents of gun control laws will state that they are in favor of ‘common sense’ or ‘reasonable’ gun control laws, yet generally don’t state what they mean by this. So I’m wondering, in simple terms, what sort of restrictions do proponents of ‘common sense’ gun control generally favor? I’ve heard everything from ‘shall-issue concealed carry is good, but we need to ban assault weapons’ (from a poster on this board) to ‘ban most gun ownership, including all handguns and recently most black powder rifles, including the ones used in the AR’ (mayor Daly’s current position).

Given the vast differences in the positions held by proponents of ‘common sense’ gun control, can any of you point out some sort of common definition of what most of you mean, or perhaps clarify some underlying philosophy that governs what is covered under it?

(This is more of a GQ, but the subject matter will rapidly move it to GD territory anyway).

2

Mandatory background checks on each and every transfer of ownership, plus stiff penalties for noncompliance. That includes retail sales, private sales, inheritance, birthday presents, and every other transfer of ownership you can conceive of.

Comprehensive registration system so that law enforcement can immediately match a gun to its owner. And spare me the “slippery slope to confiscation” argument–that’s not at all what I propose.

If technologically feasible (which it will be one day, if not already), requirement that all new guns leave a unique mark on the cartridge and the shell when fired, said mark to be registered along with the gun and owner in the database described above.

Restrictions comparable to those currently in place on fully automatic weapons (a/k/a machine guns) for all weapons that are capable of being converted to full auto.

I’ll let you know if I think of any others.

3

IMHO: The confiscation issue is the whole problem. I would be in favor of complete registration, identification, tracing and every manner of responsibility. All of these regulations could be surrounded in layers of guarantees against confiscation.

And eventually that data would result in confiscation. I just don’t trust the government to follow the law.

4

IIRC, the rifling groves in the barrel of a gun form a unique pattern that can match a bullet to the gun that fired it. Or at least it does on tv.
Common sense gun laws?
Don’t sell guns to criminals or the menally handicaped.

Don’t sell guns to children.

Don’t sell military style assault weapons. A civilian has no business owning an M-60, a SAW, or a .50 cal Barette sniper rifle.

Don’t sell guns to people when they are angry.

Don’t sell guns to people who have demonstrated an inability to handle them safely.

5

But if you follow the line of not trusting the government to follow the law, will that apply to all aspects of law and government or just the gun issue? In most cases you have to trust the government because that is what this country is built on. There will be mistakes that individuals within the government make, but to just not trust it as a whole leads to paranoia. We have had many gun laws on the books. Some have been somewhat effective, some have been mere window dressing, and some have been harmfull but as far as I can see the great bugaboo of gun confiscation just hasn’t happened yet. Does anybody see it happening any time soon?

6

“Does anybody see it (confiscation) happening any time soon?”

Well, yes. If Gore had won, the government would be moving that direction.

Remember Waco? The excuse for that particular mass murder was child abuse/illegal guns. Since the government action killed most of the children they went with the gun issue.

Likewise the murder of Vicky Walker.

disclaimers apply…

7

**

There ain’t no such thing, baby. :smiley:

Seriously, what minty green said sounds like a pretty good definition to me. But let’s face reality - the organizations that support these measures aren’t ever gonna say “ok, we’ve achieved reasonable gun control, so let’s stop pushing for tighter restrictions.”

So perhaps a more realistic definition of “reasonable gun control” is a little bit more than whatever we have now.

minty, my apologies for raising a slippery slope argument.

8

See, this is the problem. I’m sitting over here at my computer just cringing at the “common-sense” proposals.

To me, “common-sense reasonable” gun laws happen to be whatever is currently one step more than what is currently on the books. Once those laws get passed, it will start all over again with the next step of “common-sense” proposals.

Common-sense gun laws to me would be very simple:

If you use a gun in a violent crime then you go to jail for a very long time.

Very few of the proposals so far in this thread make any sense to me.
For example:
Mandatory background checks on each and every transfer of ownership

I have no real problem with background checks, but I do have a problem when the background check system get turned into a registration scheme. Criminals are going to get guns. They just are.

They steal cars, they buy drugs, they are pretty good at living outside the law. I see ZERO benefit for the government to have a list of all the law abiding gun owners. It does absolutely nothing good for me.

**Comprehensive registration system so that law enforcement can immediately match a gun to its owner. **

I started on this one, but I’ll just wrap it up here. If every law abiding citizen registered their gun, law enforcement would be nowhere near matching guns to their owners. There will always be unregistered guns out there, stolen registered guns and guns without serial numbers.

If we institute a registering scheme, and then find that many guns criminals use are aquired by stealing them from law abiding citizens, will the next “common-sense” gun law be to collect all the registered guns and store them at a police station?

requirement that all new guns leave a unique mark on the cartridge and the shell when fired

This is a BS proposal that is only being pushed because if it passed then we would have a de facto registration policy for new firearms. This proposal is crap because the mark changes over time and could be easily changed immediately with a stiff metal brush and a new firing pin. [note: I’m not insuating that minty green is proposing this with the knowledge that the sytem won’t work, but rather the people who initiated the idea. To people like minty green, I’m sure this sytem sounds very reasonable]
Restrictions comparable…snip…for all weapons that are capable of being converted to full auto

How about tickets for all cars that capable of speeding? Or maybe penalties similiar to drunk driving for all cars that are capable of being driven drunk?

After rejecting the notion that he supports gun confiscation, with a single proposal minty green takes aim at confiscatinig every non-revolver, shotgun and bolt action fire-arm.

Gee…I wonder why gun rights advocates fear registration and confiscation???

**Don’t sell military style assault weapons. A civilian has no business owning an M-60, a SAW, or a .50 cal Barette sniper rifle.
**

What’s a military style assault weapon? Can anyone define this term?

Why shouldn’t a civilian own any of the above mentioned weapons? The .50 cal sniper rifle is legal in all 50 states (AFAIK) and I have trouble remembering the last time someone was killed by one. Banning guns just because they are “scary” is poor justification. If you want to take a gun out of general circulation, then I would like to see some good hard reasons.

Does anybody see it happening any time soon?

Not soon, but I also think the demographics are changing. Back in the day most everybody served in the military and knew how to handle a firearm. Today, very few people are serving in the military. Today, kids are getting pounded with the notion that guns are bad and are not growing up hunting and shooting.

As time goes on, the people who find firearms an issue worth voting on will dwindle. That is when the danger of confiscation will become real.

The right to own firearms is a part of the right to self-defense. Regardless of how people vote to try and remove this right, the right will always exist. It is not subject to a popular vote or the will of the people any more than a majority of the people could justify removing the right to free speech.

9

I already feel bad about a quasi-hijack, but I would like to add some fuel to the fire.

I met a normal, articulate, single lady who carries an assault rifle when she goes camping. She like to camp and states that when she us not armed, weird guys in rusty pickups show up, asking if she’s alone, looking around her site. But when she has a huge rifle on her person, she doesn’t get bothered by weirdos.

Guns are about self-protection. A standard critisizm is that (hand) guns are only meant to kill people. Well, some people should be killed.

10

I was under the impression that modern ballistics forensics can pretty much match a fired bullet to a given specific gun, if the weapon’s available.

I don’t see registration schemes as doing much to actually reduce crime in any meaningful way–it’ll do a pretty good job of creating a nice black market, though, and the BATF will enjoy more funding as they would get more like the DEA (which is sure doing a great job of knocking out the black market for drugs, right? Right? Anyone?). I’m not so sure that’s a step in the right direction. Basically what registration will do, at the best, is give law enforcement one avenue to check, and will make crimes of passion/stupidity a tiny bit faster to resolve–and such crimes aren’t exactly the ones that usually need extra help. Gun crimes consisting of Drunken Moron shooting Drunken Idiot after a drunken argument generally don’t (I suspect) produce too much of a mystery for detectives.

In DrasticWorld, there would be licensing, though–it would act very much like drivers’ licenses today. You wouldn’t need one to own and operate on your own property, so if you want one for home defense, that’s fine. The license will be for carry purposes outside your property, and will demonstrate adequate completion of safety courses.

Riflery courses, strictly supervised, from air rifles in grade school to firearms later as a regular unit in phys-ed class–demystify the damn things for people from the get-go, as well as drilling safe handling into them, gun safety being the most “common sense” form of gun control I can think of.

I have no illusions that DrasticWorld and the actual real one will ever converge. In the real one, I don’t fear a slippery slope so much as an ever-growing, ever-complicating mass of regulations and bureaucracy that doesn’t produce a benefit beyond providing some steady employment for government workers.

11

Is this registration system on a ‘shall issue’ basis, where the citizen’s duty is discharged once he’s filled a form, or is it like the NJ and NY system where the ‘registration’ takes months and is subject to the whim of the local police force? Also, how does it handle two people with the same gun, for example a husband and wife who both use the same pistol on occasion?

I’m not sure what ‘that are capable’ means here. Certainly, this would apply to pretty much all semiautomatic weapons (which can have their existing action modified to full auto by a skilled machinist, even if they’re not ‘garage modifiable’). By the straight wording, it would apply to any gun other than black-powder guns or single-shot guns as they could be made full auto (by the BATF definition of machine gun) by building an electric device which would operate the action and fire multiple shots at the flip of a switch, though I doubt that that is what you mean.

So, to get this straight, what you’re really proposing is a ban on the manufacture of semiautomatic weapons for nonLEO/nonmilitary use (manufacture of new machine guns for non-L/M use has been illegal since 1986), ‘at their discretion’ approval from the local chief LEO (police chief and/or sherrif), and payment of a $200 tax? Since many states forbid any private MG possession, is that included in ‘comprable restrictions’, or are you only talking about the federal restrictions?

12

My main issue with gun owners is that many of them don’t think they should have to keep their guns in a way that my children, or theirs for that matter, have no access to them. I don’t want to have to worry every time my child plays with your child that your child is going to show off daddy’s gun. I want to know that you are required to keep your gun locked up. I want to know that if a child is harmed by your gun that you are going to suffer legal consequences.

Teaching children responsibility is a mute point. Children do not possess adult judgement. I want laws to compel adults to keep guns responsibly, since many don’t seem willing to do it on their own.

13

** I want to know that you are required to keep your gun locked up.**

What specific laws would you propose to address this situation? Would your proposal remove the ability of a homeowner to use their firearms for self-defense?

**I want to know that if a child is harmed by your gun that you are going to suffer legal consequences.
**

Would you want the consequences to be harsher than if a child was injured at another person’s house because they had an unsafe deck? How about if they were injured by someone else’s fireworks?

14

czarcasm wrote “…not trusting the government to follow the law, will that apply to all aspects of law and government or just the gun issue?”

I wanted to think a bit on this one. Yep, it applies to the whole, sneaky bunch of them. There’s a constant stream of crooks and tyrants flowing through government. Maybe the vast majority are trustworthy, but a few percent are blatant thieves and cannot be trusted. One second they’re voting in favor of campaign finance reform and the next second they’re devising ways around the same law they supported.

Gun control is a more obvious power grab than the norm. It comes down to whether you trust the government to have all the guns, or does the government trust us to have some self-protection?

15

Aside to the pro-gun crowd - please start another thread for any argument with the basic idea behind ‘common sense’ gun control. I really just want to address what is being proposed, and not whether the propositions are good or bad.

This pattern is changed by normal wear and tear, so while it can match a bullet or cartridge to a particular gun, the factory pattern won’t match the gun after some normal usage, much less after customization like replacing the barrel or firing pin.

What are ‘criminals’ here? Is that ‘anyone with a felony conviction’, or ‘anyone with any criminal conviction, including 30 year old misdemeanors’? Who are the ‘mentally handicapped’, is it people who have been involuntarily committed or declared not guilty by mental defect, anyone who has ever been to a shrink, or some other standard?

What’s the age cutoff for children, 16, 18, 21, or something else? Also, does this include parents buying guns for their own children?

Is this a form or functional restriction? For example, an AR-15 looks like an M-16 but doesn’t function the same (it’s semi-automatic, not fully automatic), but is one of the two targets of ‘assault weapon’ laws. How are ‘sniper rifles’ determined, and what would differentiate a .30 cal sniper rifle from a .30 cal hunting rifle, and where is the caliber cutoff on them?

Also, does this include any weapon used by the military, such as the Mossberg 500 and Remington 870 shotguns used by MPs and also popular hunting guns? Would the ‘in use’ part go away after the gun is not used by the military?

Are you proposing that anyone selling a gun must be telepathic, or is there an objective standard to be used?

What are the standards for this?

16

I think it is very reasonable to require a clear chain of ownership of a handgun from the time it is manufactured to the time it is scrapped. Each sale, either from a dealer or a private individual needs to be recorded. All buyers get the standard background check, and so forth. I would do this by requiring that all handgun sales be administered and certified by a licenced handgun dealer.

Will guns get into the hands of criminals? Of course they will, I just want to make it harder than it seems to be today. Am I incorrect in thinking that a private individual can sell a handgun to just about anybody (including a felon) without breaking the law?

17

Does the ‘handgun dealer’ also enter into inheritances, or ‘same household’ transfers in your scheme?

sigh You’re wildly incorrect, especially in your home state. It’s illegal in the US to sell a handgun to a known felon or other prohibited person (or someone you should reasonably know is a felon or PP) or to someone who resides in a different state other than a Federal Firearms License (dealer license) holder. State laws are generally more restrictive. In your state, for example, it’s illegal to sell a handgun to anyone who doesn’t have a state license to possess the handgun with that particular serial number (and possibly requires going through a dealer, I forget).

It’s been illegal to buy/sell a handgun outside of your own state or to a felon since the 1968 GCA, so this isn’t exactly recent news.

18

**

Ya know, a tinfoil hat will keep them away just as well. Are rusty pickups the ground-based version of black helicopters?

Mr. Heston?

19

jsleek:

Which is the sort of nonsense that has caused me to give up on gun-control threads.

The FBI and BATF originally tried to arrest Koresh on February 28, 1993. You seemingly attribute this to Gore. If you think a new administration is capable of moving the bureaucracy into action that quickly, I submit that you know nothing about your government.

I’ll tell you a secret: these cases were about something very basic and simple - sovereignty. At Waco and at Ruby Ridge, persons had basically told the government, “we don’t recognize your right to enforce the laws here.” IIRC, that was backed up in both places by either live bullets, or the threat thereof.

Pardon me if I get realpoliticky on you, but a government can’t afford to ignore violations of its sovereignty if it wants to continue exercising same. If some people can get away with effectively seceding, others will follow, and soon you don’t know where the laws of the nation apply and where they don’t.

You can argue whether there was a better way for the government to enforce its sovereignty over the compounds at Waco and at Ruby Ridge, but to argue that it had no business doing so, you have to argue in favor of the radical strain of libertarianism that says each of us should be allowed to declare our quarter-acre lots to be free and independent states. IMNSHO, that’s a whole 'nother debate.
Freedom:

OK, but the good it does for the rest of us is that law enforcement can find out where guns used in crimes were last legally owned. Like you say, some of those guns will have been stolen from random individuals. But if some of them also come from ‘straw purchasers’ who legally buy them from the gun shops, then routinely resell them to felons who can’t buy the guns themselves, this gives the law a way of finding out.

Pro-gun posters on this board routinely imply that the bad guys get hold of their guns by stealing them. I’m sure it happens on occasion, but if you’re going to suggest that’s the primary means, a cite is required.

I almost never see a newspaper story about a break-in at a gun store, or at a pawnshop that trades in guns: their security is usually pretty serious. And it’s hard to envision burglaries as the typical means of outfitting criminals with the sorts of guns they prefer. Few 7-11s are held up by criminals with deer rifles.

If one developed cars with a steel prow designed to ram another car and split it in two, you might be able to draw a good analogy between banning certain particularly dangerous guns, and banning certain particularly dangerous cars.

Actually, the Federal government has already effectively banned many particularly dangerous cars via its safety standards. Yet the slippery slope toward a ban of all cars is nowhere in evidence, although a small minority continue to call for exactly that outcome.

Question: do gun rights advocates contend that all semi-automatic rifles are equally easily convertible to fully automatic, or are some much easier/more difficult to convert than others? Are some such converted rifles going to be able to sustain substantially higher rates of fire than others? It’s hard for me to believe that there are no useful distinctions to be made here.

It’s fun to throw smoke on an issue like this by stating that all (or almost all) semi-automatics can be converted to fully automatic, but the fact by itself means nothing, except as a means of bullshitting away suggestions such as minty’s as an attempt to confiscate practically all guns, rather than suggesting appropriate refinements to his language.

jsleek apparently can; ask him:

You and I must see different movie trailers when we go to the movies. I don’t watch many shoot-em-ups, but from the previews, clearly there are always lots of movies out where things are settled with guns (and larger-scale weaponry). They seem to sell well, too. Who’d’ve thought you’d be an art-house patron? :wink:

No, seriously: can you support the notion that there’s an overall anti-gun media bias - especially affecting younger people who are still making up their minds on the issue?

20

We often hear the phrase proposing “licensing and registration”, well I would draw the line between the two. Licensing implies that gun ownership is not a right but a revokable privledge that must be earned. Registration simply means that a piece of information must be provided.

But that would be a good thing. A black market in unregistered guns would be vulnerable to law-enforcement action in way that legal unregistered gun sales are not. I’d rather crooks get jailed for buying or selling unregistered guns than for shooting people.

Gun advocates often say, “go after the criminals and leave the law-abiding citizens alone”. Well how do you expect law enforcement to tell the difference before a killing takes place? Simple, if your gun is unregistered, you’re a criminal.

The ‘path of least resisitance’ would be to purchase your gun legally rather than try to find a black-market source. I’m sure a lot of killers bought their guns without neccessarily intending to use it in a crime at the time. If you registered your gun and later found yourself in a situation where you were tempted to use it in a crime, you’d think twice. That goes double and then some with ‘ballistic fingerprinting’ technology.

Shouldn’t people who are active in the gun-control movement be the ones to define ‘common sense’ restrictions rather than paranoid, cynical gun nuts putting words in their mouths?

And how is it that, once registration is implemented, there will be no one left to vote against confiscation?