Correction to last post: While 2011 US gun deaths were the highest since at least 1998, the apparent current peak was lower than during the high homicide period which ended in the early 1990’s.
I think you are going to feel a lot better after SCOTUS rules on the right to bear arms and as many other things as possible. There was a time when gun owners thought the courts were their enemy and wanted to avoid litigation. Things have swung so far towards regualtion that the courts are going to be our friends for a while.
Its kind of levelled off over the last several years. I think there might actually be something to the leaded gas theory. I think this drop was a onetime reversion to the norm. Any further reduction in crime is going to require effort.
Why would you compare gun ownership to gun murders rather than total murders. You’re just saying that if a gun is available, then murderers tend to use guns.
Line up the top ten most gun owning states against the top ten most murderous states, heck line up all the states by gun ownership and murder rate and I don’t think you will see a correlation.
Sure there is. Go to an FFL, plunk down your 30ish bucks, and do a transfer complete with background check.
It is a good idea in the abstract, but gets messy when you actually try to iron out the details. That’s why you regularly see polls where the majority of respondents support universal background checks, but no actual bill can get the support needed to pass. Enforcement of background checks at dealers gives the greatest benefit (all guns go through a dealer at least once) with the least amount of hassle (we know where all of the dealers are because they have to have a license. They can be set up with the proper resources to conduct checks as a cost of doing business. They can be audited for compliance by the BATFE. Sales from a licensed dealer are easy to legally define as a transfer.). Trying to push background checks to sales outside of licensed dealers has diminishing returns while imposing ever greater burdens on ordinary, law-abiding citizens. Trying to define what actually constitutes a legal transfer either becomes too loose and unenforceable or too tight, resulting in weird situations that make well-meaning people into felons. Some actual examples of weird corner cases from universal background check bills drafted within the last 2 years:
- If I am on a friend’s property and he lets me try out his new gun for a few shots, all is well. But if I let him try out my new gun on his property without running down to an FFL to perform a background check, we’re instantly both felons.
- If I go away on a business trip for up to 6 days, leaving my firearms behind unloaded, disabled, and locked up then all is well, but if the trip is 7 days or more, I have to pay a fee to transfer all such firearms to my roommate, and again to transfer them all back to me when I return, or we’re both felons.
- Give my daughter a 22 rifle for Christmas without a background check? Safe. Give one to my step-daughter? Felon.
- Got your guns unloaded, disabled, and locked in a safe on that moving van headed to your new home? Better pay a transfer fee for each firearm in there to transfer them to the movers, and again to transfer them back upon arrival, or you’re a felon.
Background checks at licensed dealers are the low-hanging fruit where we get the most benefit with the least amount of hassle for law-abiding citizens. It’s where common sense (real common sense, not the hand-wavy “please don’t read the fine print” common sense) says we should draw the line. Requiring private sale background checks makes criminals out of ordinary, well-meaning citizens, and only makes purchasing guns by prohibited persons more illegal, and only in a way that is no more enforceable than the laws we already have preventing them from buying guns.
Why focus simply on deaths? Even still, this may be informative:
I think it’s a stretch to compare the whole of gun crime to the largest terrorist attack in the nation. If you really think that’s a useful comparison, you’ll have to flesh out the similarities beyond the body count.
If you’re concerned about safety, then advocate against the law that makes all other gun sales illegal. Let the market develop a safer weapon without threat of banning everything else. I don’t trust a person that claims to want safety but exempts police from those same ‘safe weapons’. Offer a choice instead of the familiar fallback of a gun ban. This is why gun rights advocates should never ever compromise. The other side is dishonest.
Well, SCOTUS has denied cert in Drake, so there is no current carry case that has petitioned. I am beginning to get skeptical that there will be a favorable ruling at the SCOTUS level any time soon.
Don’t be too quick to dismiss the experience in CA. We are fucking lunatics with gun laws.
I would not provide a record of sale if I didn’t have to.
Keep in mind, my comment was also about the lack of prosecution of the many NICS denials. Federal prosecutorial time is limited. If you think going after these low level offenses instead of other work they could be doing, that’s up to you. I personally think in an environment with scarce resources there are other things more important.
While examples in recent proposals have a lot of flaws, it’s not like this is new territory to cover. Again, using CA as an example, all sales (except some dealer to dealer and CC&R) in CA are subject to a background check. We’ve been doing it this way for a long time and it is workable, it’s just more inconvenient.
We have rules around how guns can be loaned, transferred, stored, etc. that address all of the issues that were ambiguous or overlooked in some of the more recent proposals. I would never sell, nor attempt to buy a gun in CA without going through an FFL. Gun rights supporters have to be vigilant in following all laws, while at the same time advocating for change.
It is very inconvenient though. If I want to buy from a seller, we have to identify an FFL to do the transaction through. If we are geographically distant, this means finding a place to meet. But since CA has a 10 day waiting period, the two parties first have to meet at the FFL, complete all the paperwork, the NICS, etc. Then 10 days later, the buyer has to return to that same FFL to retrieve the gun. Imagine if you are driving 100 miles to meet the person. Now you have to do that twice. And it has to be 10 days, but less than 30. If you wait longer than 30, you have to start the process all over again. This puts a burden on the buyer.
In addition, FFLs are required to facilitate PPTs and the cost they are allowed to charge is fixed for intrastate transactions. I think it’s $25 for the NICS check, and $10 for the storage of the firearm. They make no money on this transaction, but their business is being used for this purpose. They are required to store the item during this time as well. All of this takes time away from their business and they are not compensated for it. Most FFLs are cool about this, but there are those that will actively discourage using them because they want to sell you their products. This can be done in a number of ways.
Of course, out of state sales are required to go through an FFL too - I think this is the case in all 50 states. The charge for doing this is not fixed so FFLs will generally charge quite a bit more to handle these. Usually by the time you get done paying the transfer fees, it’s not worth it to do the PPT anyways since you can just buy a new firearm direct. That’s if it’s available of course.
In any case, all of these hoops and BS are for generally law abiding folks anyways. People who are prohibited and wouldn’t be able to go through these steps, or those that want to commit crimes, they will get their firearms from other means and with all the rigmarole we are no better off.
No, there are some overlaps.
“Most gun owning states” is a hard statistic to be certain of in the absence of mandatory registration laws, but the following list comes from a 2001 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey:
- Wyoming - 59.7%
- Alaska - 57.8%
- Montana - 57.7%
- South Dakota - 56.6%
- West Virginia - 55.4%
- Mississippi - 55.3%
- Idaho - 55.3%
- Arkansas - 55.3%
- Alabama - 51.7%
- North Dakota - 50.7%
(That’s the percentage of the adult population who claim gun ownership.) Other sources of statistics show a slightly different ordering of states–Kentucky, e.g., often appears instead of North Dakota–but the basic list is roughly the same.
Now, the most murderous states, per the FBI:
- Louisiana
- Mississippi
- Alabama
- Michigan
- South Carolina
- Missouri
- Maryland
- Delaware
- Tennessee
- Arkansas
There’s some overlap between those: three of the most murderous states are on the list of most gun-owning, and a slightly longer list shows even more overlap (e.g., Louisiana and Tennessee are in the top-15 for ownership; South Carolina is #18.)
Yes, there are also some significant differences: the wide-open spaces of the west have lots of guns and not so many murders. In more-densely populated places, though, lots of guns usually translates to lots of deaths.
You’ll also notice a pretty strong regional correlation: six of the ten most murderous states are in the Old Confederacy (with Missouri an “almost”).
It seems that it isn’t universal background checks themselves that are so problematic, it is the laws requiring a formal “transfer” in cases that are clearly ridiculous, as Bone has illustrated. But for the sake of discussion, I’ll take background checks for private sales off the table. I’ll also take off the table a universal registration system. Not, mind you, because I actually fear confiscation, but because it seems to be an article of faith that we can leave out of this discussion.
What if, instead, we simply required every transaction to include a permanent record, to be maintained not by government but by the seller, to be made available to law enforcement on request? My thought is that at some point every (new) gun sold should be a legal sale by an FFL to a qualified buyer. It is in later sales/gifts/transfers that the gun becomes “lost” and turns up in a criminal’s hands. So FFL => sells to Buyer A. Then Buyer A => sells to Buyer B, without benefit of FFL or background check, perhaps to his brother in law. A legal sale. Then later B => sells to C, another legal sale but to an unknown party. Under our present system, seller has little or no incentive beyond his social conscience to ensure that C isn’t either a criminal or a straw purchaser for a criminal. And perhaps the sale price is a strong motivation not to take too much trouble to assure himself. So right here, a legal gun goes illegal.
Say that each seller was required to maintain a record of the transaction, including whatever proffers of identification the buyer provided. So FFL keeps his record of the background check on A. Then A keeps a copy of a bill of sale (pen and ink, “sold Glock 9mm to B-I-L for $X on DATE…” with a copy of BIL’s driver’s license. And B keeps hard copy of whatever he got from C…. et cetera.
At some point this gun is found at a crime scene, and traced by serial number to original selling FFL. He provides info on A, who cops visit. A shows B’s info, cops visit B. B has nothing but “John Smith, anyplace, somecity” written on notebook paper in pencil. Cops cannot find John Smith anywhere. There should be some penalty, civil and/or criminal, imposed on B. The last person in the chain who had possession of the gun but transferred it to an untraceable entity should be, ahh, negatively incentivized.
So if I’m an upright citizen, and I really don’t want to allow any gun of mine to fall into criminal hands – and most especially I don’t want to fall into a problem myself – I’ll exercise some greater or lesser due diligence. If I’m A, and B is really my BIL, I’ll keep his DL on file and be comfortable. And if I’m B, and don’t know C, I may ask him to provide a DL and examine it carefully before consummating the deal. Or I may even suggest we both go down to our nearest FFL, I’ll pay the fee, we get a background check. If C begs off, I’ll know I saved myself a world of future grief.
And if the gun goes missing on my watch, lost or stolen, I would go straight to law enforcement. “Listen, I’m E, I had this gun, now I can’t find it. I got it from Mr D and (although I wasn’t required to do so, being buyer not seller) I saved info on D (in an abundance of caution which turns out to be lucky) so I swear it was stolen!!” I’d expect this excuse to be workable, barring some discoverable relationship between me as last recorded owner and whoever cops believe commits any future crime with the gun. And, unlike now, I would have a very real incentive to report any stolen gun.
What say? Does this offer any help for keeping guns out of inappropriate hands without universal required background checks or national registration/licensing of gun owners?
What does this have to do with requiring background checks for all sales? None of those involves a gun sale in any way. Giving a gun to your grandchild or stepchild is not a sale. Letting a buddy try out your new piece is not a sale. Exchanging the gun for money is a sale. It’s not hard to tell the difference.
One of these times, I’d like to do a thorough study of violent crime statistics to find the actual rate coefficients. Number of murders per capita, without accounting for population density, is just as meaningless a figure as total number of murders, without accounting for population. Nobody’s surprised that Texas has more murders than Massachusetts, but likewise nobody should be surprised that Massachusetts has more murders per capita than Wyoming.
‘Reasonable restrictions’ ended up as confiscation here.
Firearms last a long time. Sometimes one firearm can change owners many times. Sometimes someone in the chain of custody will die or records will be lost. This seems like a very convoluted system and I can’t see the benefit or why we would construct it this way.
And…what about home made guns? No FFL required and no serial number to track.
It isn’t hard exactly, but the exchange of money generally isn’t the criteria used. It’s possession. Because your gun can be given to another without change of money, and the laws that criminalize felons and other from owning firearms is about possession. We’re not concerned whether prohibited persons bought or found a weapon, it’s if they have it.
Once that is the criteria, the other things that Sanity mentioned become issues to be resolved.
Wyoming has a firearms death rate that is six times higher than Massachusetts. See:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000
Most US gun deaths are suicide, but this is especially true in Wyoming. Looking at homicide alone, Wyoming has 33 percent more homicides per capita than Massachusetts:
I don’t recall presenting evidence regarding that specific question, but it’s plausible. Aren’t gunshots more likely to be fatal than the most common alternative means?
More important than whether I see it is that the peer reviewers at the American Journal of Public Health see it:
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301409
Full access to the above article requires good university library credentials, or you can read a summary here:
When you look at total gun deaths, the trend line is even clearer;
http://www.motherjones.com/files/ownership-death630.png
Agreed. This is why even the most responsible gun owners are taking a grave risk unless their wills require destruction of their firearms.
What risk is that exactly? That their property will be distributed through their executor in accordance with the laws of their state? This has been the case since forever - is there an actual problem you are alluding to or is this grave risk not yet materialized?
I agree, my suggestion is a convoluted system. I’d prefer national registration of handguns and licensing of gun owners. I really have neither fear nor expectation that confiscation would ever happen nationwide. California? Yeah, but that’s California. There are lots of good reasons to live in CA and lots of good reasons to live elsewhere. 
But national confiscation of guns is a non-starter. And licensing would be a simple way to answer the question “Do I know I’m not selling my gun to a criminal or lunatic?” in private sales. Buyer has a license, he’s a legal buyer. No FFL needed.
But the hysteria against both registration and licensing means neither will be adopted. So the problem of bad guys getting good guns continues. My proposal, while not perfect, would be at least a powerful tool. Sometimes. With limits.
And before the epithets fly, I’ll note I presently own 4 handguns and 6 long guns, and have had firearms since I was a child. I’m not a gun grabber, just a reasonable person looking for a reasonable improvement to the present situation.
We live is a world where people do make threats. And we live in a world where, when a consumer product safety feature is proven effective, and reasonably priced, a chance exists that it will be legally mandated. Your no-threat criteria would have prevented almost any imaginable consumer product safety feature from ever being marketed, sold, and improved based on experience.
I know of no law that makes all other gun sales illegal. Perhaps you are thinking of this handgun-only law in one state out of fifty, New Jersey:
http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2002/Bills/PL02/130_.HTM
Even if this allegedly horrid Jersey threat materializes, and you move to New Jersey, you could, if granted a handgun permit, keep your old handguns. And you could still buy non-smart long guns from a New Jersey dealer. I understand this feels like a threat. Many Pennsylvania motorcyclists feel similarly threatened that there could, one day, be a helmet law here. But it still would be immoral for them to block dealers from selling the helmets, the way gun culturists block sales of safer guns.
In a previous post, someone on your side pointed out to me that the one and only smart gun model being marketed (new in the world this year) is of a caliber unsuitable for police use. I accept that your side is right there. There is no smart-safety-technology police handgun available. But if you read the New Jersey law, you’ll see it does anticipate NJ police being mandated to carry smart guns when the right products come to exist. This will require companies being free to market the products to consumers, gaining experience to make them better, just as automakers developed safety improvements that have saved countless lives.
You’re saying that almost any imaginable consumer product safety feature has been the result of mandating it and banning any sales of a comparable product without such a feature? That’s bullshit. Gun safety itself has increased without such a mandate.
Yes, I was referring to handguns in NJ - I was not specific enough. It feels like a threat because it is a threat. Do you contend it is not? Under the NJ law all other handgun sales are banned. And I don’t care a single bit about what you think is moral or not. I think it is immoral to prevent people the means to defend themselves.
So force citizens to use an inferior product not suitable for self defense so they can be guinea pigs until the technology develops such that it would be suitable, if ever. Is that it? Any need that a police officer has for a self defense weapon is shared by the general public. Even still, it’s not only the caliber that makes it unsuitable. It’s unreliable. At a minimum, a law that requires this tech and bans all other handguns should apply to everyone. The reason they do not is because police wont support it. Gee, I wonder why.
It’s comical that you use the term ‘require’ and ‘free’ in the same sentence. If a product was truly safer and reliable, consumers would flock to it in droves. The reason this law was passed was only with the thinnest veneer towards safety, and everything about banning guns.
No. Safety features come from normal product innovation that gun culture Luddites can slow but not stop.
No, what is happening is that US gun hobbyists are using boycotts and threats to keep others from checking out the 1.0 version of this new-for-2014 German product.
Because of opposition to safety improvement, US gun makers can’t innovate without risking boycotts of their older products. Given that the US is the largest gun market, and commercial disparagement prevents both development and marketing of safer guns in the US, this will indeed slow down innovation. But foreign firms will take up the slack. And when the safer guns are perfected, and come down in price, US gun manufacturing firms will not have the experience or product. From a US competitiveness standpoint, it’s an own goal that will eventually send lots of good jobs overseas.
Now, Germans deserve good export jobs too! As a result of the American panic over this, they will have them.
You are repeating a right wing meme going around the internet, and FoxNews, that should garner at least three out of the four possible pinocchios should one of the fact check sites jump on it. Since they don’t seem to have done so yet, I’m going to address it in a bit of detail.
Under the New Jersey law, the NJ attorney general makes a separate determination for the general public, and law enforcement, that suitable safer guns are available for sale, and then lists those guns as the only ones to be sold in the state (along with the exempted long guns, antiques, and guns for sporting uses such as Olympic events). The determination that “the provisions of this section to handguns to be sold, transferred, assigned and delivered for official use to State and local law enforcement” now take effect has the same authority and penalties as the determination for the general public. Yes, it is a separate judgment. That’s because police have specific firearms needs. It has long been the case, in New Jersey, that the list of guns legally sold to police, and the general public list, are different lists. But for each sector, general public and police, the law applies.
The main difference is that, when it comes to the police list, the Attorney General has to get his or her judgment there confirmed by a seven member commission. Six of members would be appointed by the governor, and the seventh is the Superintendent of the State Police, who also will probably do what the governor wants. So, in effect, two politicians have to approve in the case of the police, only one in the case of the general public. Since the governor appoints the attorney general in NJ, everyone is likely to be on the same page, making the extra review minimal. By contrast, the general public get a more serious second chance in the courts. Gun culture folks would probably sue the attorney general regarding whether the criteria to kick in the law have really taken effect. The police can’t, in practicality, do that. Certainly, the State Police cannot sue. Because of that, it is reasonable that the police requirement gets an extra review.
So, the law does apply to everyone, even though provisions differ slightly. Three pinocchios.
Are you actually ignorant of current gun safety features? Guns have progressively gotten more safe over time and will continue to do so without government intervention.
No - what is happening is the legislature in NJ is using the power of the state government to infringe on its residents ability to purchase adequate tools for self defense.
If lawmakers didn’t create laws banning sales of non-smart guns, then consumers would actually be able to decide if the tradeoff in reliability, cost, and functionality is worth the alleged benefit. Instead, NJ has decided to try and ban the overwhelming majority of handgun sales.
And as a side note, the most popular police handgun in the US is the Austrian made Glock.
What are you talking about? It sounds like you are suggesting that it is a right wing meme that laws should apply to everyone equally. And while I think you’re trying to sound cute by parroting the term pinocchios as if you have a level of credibility or are some type of fact checker, the whole idea is laughably pathetic.
(my bold)
I say the law doesn’t apply to police as it does to other residents. You highlight all the ways that it is different (in the same sentence no less) and somehow you think that supports your argument? One law for the police, another for everyone else. It makes no difference that both groups are discussed in the same law - they are treated differently. Pinocchios my ass.
The police have no different need for handguns than the general public does when it comes to self defense. What needs do you think police have that make the smart gun not suitable that doesn’t apply to the rest of the residents of NJ?
And no response to this I see: