In the still-active thread on what ‘common sense’ gun control is, I noticed an interesting trend. The reponses all seemed to be centered around restricting people who legitimately possess firearms and not against people who abuse them.
For example, none of the gun-control proponents mentioned anything along the lines of ‘make it worse if you use a gun in a crime’, and certainly didn’t end it with ‘and enforce existing laws when someone is caught breaking them’. Instead, we were treated to various licensing and registration schemes which don’t seem to address the basic problem and which would obviously be a burden on legitimate gun owners.
‘Register all guns’ was a rather big point for most, yet I think it would be just common sense to take a look at how well existing gun registries work before making them universal. Do any of the proponents of gun control have any statistics for how many crimes are solved using Maryland’s ballistic fingerprinting database, Chicago’s gun registry, New York’s pistol (and NYC’s all gun) registry, or gun registries in other countries like New Zealand?
The fact that ‘ban machine guns’ seemed to be the first item on the list is also rather interesting. ‘Common sense’ would seem to say that you’d only tighten restrictions on MGs if existing legally owned ones were being used in crimes, yet the only instance of a legally owned machine gun from 1934 on being used for a crime involved a police officer, who would still legally be able to possess a machine gun under most people’s plans. While certain individuals did go on about how allowing people to own machine guns would result in massive bloodshed, said person doesn’t seem to be using common sense as the record of legally owned machine guns under the NFA shows.
And with all of the rhetoric about gun control being for “public safety”, common sense tells us that they should be able to point to places seeing lowered crime when proposals similar to theirs are put into place. Can any of the ‘common sense’ proponents satisfy this piece of common sense?
I think it’s a case of erring on the side of caution; people who abuse guns are often identifiable as different from law-abiding citizens only after they do something terrible, by which time much damage has been done.
I won’t attempt to address whether it’s right or wrong to reason this way, but do I think that’s (at least part of) the logic behind it.
That’s a bit like asking why people who don’t drive at excessive speeeds are required to follow the speed limit.
For one thing, many crimes are committed by people who were previously “law-abiding,” or who at least haven’t been convicted of any crime. Murder is especially likely to be committed by a brand-new criminal. Any gun control that doesn’t take account of that significant fact is missing a large part of the problem.
For another thing, many guns used by criminals in the commission of crimes are acquired or stolen from “law-abiding” gun owners. Saddling those owners with registration requirements helps assure that the guns that do fall into the wrong hands can be tracked and identified when used in crimes.
And for a final thing, the legal requirements of reasonable gun control would apply equally to law-abiding citizens and the bad guys. If a bad guy is caught breaking the gun control laws, the bad guy can now be prosecuted and possibly imprisoned based solely on the gun violation. Now there’s a happy ending, right?
Oh, and could you send a memo to your friends, telling them that their fixation on only one legally-held machine guns being used in crime since 1934 is spurious and misleading? Machine guns are used in crimes. If they had been legal, all those crimes would have been committed with legal machine guns, and we’d be just as outraged. Federal and state gun control laws have made it relatively difficult to acquire fully automatic weapons, so not many crimes are committed with them, quite unlike the days of gangland Chicago when Thompsons were a weapon of choice. The strict controls on machine guns help ensure that they they do not fall into the hands of the wrong people and hence are not used in crime. Quite a success story, really.
Minty, none of those arguements are particularly moving to those of us who are not in favor of having ourselves saddled with extra registration and what-not.
You are not treating the disease here. You are not changing anything that matters to criminals. You are simply making it more difficult for everyone to own a firearm. I don’t see the point of this.
Instead, why not make it known that it is a really bad idea to commit a crime with a gun? Raise the penalty for aggrivated assult, burglery, etc.
As many people have pointed out before, it does not matter to criminals that the firearm they are about to use in the bank robbery is not registered. What difference could that make to them? If they have stolen the gun from someone who had dutifully registered it according to the law, so much the better! It’s not registered to them! That doesn’t help track the criminal in these cases.
As for those criminals who were previousy law-abiding citizens: they will probably care about the penalties handed to those who use firearms unlawfully. It might make them think twice before shooting that cheatin’ bitch. How does registration help in these cases?
A sweeping statement. Care to explain how? Or even why it is desireable to know who owned a gun prior to it’s use in the commission of a crime?
Or a sad one and we create a whole new class of criminal. Those otherwise law-abiding gun owners who refuse to register their weapons to comply with a law that will do little or nothing as we found out in the thread linked above.
Part of the problem is the sheer number of people, like yourself apparently, who want the problem to be fixed without having to actually do or change anything. That is not, by definition, reasonable, especially when you can only describe the effect on yourself as “what-not”.
And this is not already the case? Criminals aren’t generally deterred by the magnitude of the punishment. They really think they won’t get caught, so it won’t matter what would happen if they were. [/sweeping statement]
How does the existing threat of life imprisonment or execution “make them think twice?” It obviously doesn’t. If someone flies into a rage, they’ll use whatever’s handy. But if the weapon at hand is a knife or a baseball bat, “the bitch” is more likely to survive. And so is the attacker, once he calms down and realizes he isn’t on the hook for murder and kills himself with it, too. That doesn’t even get into the higher number of suicides from having the necessary equipment right at hand.
But education, training, and licensing, with the constant reminders about the power and danger of the weapon, may help deter some of these deaths. The argument that it would be a bit inconvenient and therefore shouldn’t be done is, in your words, “not particularly moving”.
You sure about that? A pamphlet I own which cites FBI Uniform Crime Statistics 1976-1998, shows a graph indicating that nearly 95% of homicides (in those same years) are gang related (gang meaning "an organized band of criminals). Also notable, is a statment in the same pamphlet, and attributed to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics - 1994, that “Over 66% of murderers have long histories of violence against not only their enemies and other acquaintences, but also against their relatives.”
Aha. Heavy regulation of machine guns has reduced their use in crime, yet, criminals are, by your own words, out there using machine guns to commit crime.
This is quite succesful at proving legality won’t determine supply.
And, by the way, your “success” story means that only those who can spend $5000 on a machine gun can buy one. If all guns had the same problem, would that be another “success” story?
I am not a criminologist, but I don’t think that can possibly be correct. This page from the Department of Justice shows that 11% of all murder victims are killed by “intimates,” defined as spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends, and girlfriends. (33% of the perpetrators are unidentified, incidentally, and only 14% are strangers.)
I see that 95% or so of “gang-related” homicides involve guns. Is that maybe something that you’re getting mixed up? Note also that the top chart on that page shows “Gang” as the category of murder, trailing the others by a substantial margin.
As for the figure that 66% of murderers have histories of vioence . . . that still means that 34% do not. To my mind, that makes muderers “especially likely” to be brand-new criminals, as compared to other gun crimes like armed robbery. But your number also provides strong support for the notion that a history of violence, including domestic violence, should be a disqualification for gun ownership.
Yup. My fault here. I’ve not read the chart correctly. Thanks for the assist.
I don’t think you’ll get any disagreement with this statement. But in fact, there are already restrictions in place that bar those convicted of domestic abuse from purchasing firearms. And in some states, ammunition as well.
Damn hamster lost my other post. In a nutshell, the answer to UncleBeer’s question about the efficacy of registration is that it would allow law enforcement to quickly match a gun to its registered owner, or a suspect to his registered gun, or to the guns of other members of his household, etc. Even if a gun were stolen before the crime, it would still lead back to the registered owner, where the theft would become another important clue to solving the subsequent crime. Does that answer the question?
Of course, including the restraining order that prevented Mr. Emerson from possessing a firearm in last fall’s Fifth Circuit case. Emerson, by that way, is listed on the Supreme Court’s docket as being on the justices’ conference agenda for today. That means we should have a decision on whether they’ll take the case coming up before long.
It’s ridiculous to portray regisitration–simply filling out a brief form–as somehow burdensome to the law abiding. Just look at all the regulations we’re willing to put up with with our cars.
But making criminals jump through hoops will weed some of them out. Sure, some criminals will be able to find unregistered guns for sale (or steal them) but others won’t be able to or won’t bother.
Registration would reduce ‘straw man’ purchases.
If a gun you stole, or bought hot, was registered, that’s evidence you comitted a crime.
I’m sure a certain percentage of guns used in crimes were originally acquired without neccessarily the intent to use them in crimes. If you bought your gun the easy, legal way, you’ll be deterred from using it in a crime later on if it’s registered in your name.
Obviously the reason state-by-state registration schemes are ineffective is that guns can be brought from other states.
Sure some criminals are totally irrational, but others are only semi-irrational. My guess is that the likelihood of getting caught has a greater deterrant effect than the length of the sentence.
I agree that we often go overboard in spending tens of billions of dollars to save a mere handful of lives, but if registration deterred only 1% of shooting deaths, that would be several hundred lives, and the costs and inconvenience would be insignificant.
So to answer the OP, how can we enforce the laws and punish criminals if we deny the police the information neccessary to do so?
It’s ridiculous to portray gun owners as people who aren’t willing to fill out some paperwork in order to save Millions of Cute Children.
Back in the days before self defense was a crime, NYC required all guns to be registered. People were concerned that the list may be used some day to identify people for confiscation, but were assured that registration was simply a way to improve cime fighting ability.
These lists, of course, were later used for confiscation.
It’s not a matter of going through the hassle of filling out a few pieces of paper. In fact, with NICS and all, it could be (and quite possibly illegally already is) an automatic form of registration.
Our objections are to the inherent power the government gets from registration lists, not because we’re too calous to waste 30 seconds of our time to save Cute Children.
I don’t know about this. If the consensus is that criminals don’t care about the length of the sentence or other punishment why do we think that they will care that the gun they just shot someone with might be tracked either to them or to the person they stole it from?
Maybe we should bring back public flogging. Make them think about the pain and embarassment at the same time…just an idea.
Like sqweels said–deterrent effect for many people lies chiefly in the threat of getting caught, not the punishment available. A two-year sentence isn’t going to deter many more people than a one-year sentence, but a (say) 50% increase in the likelihood of getting caught would be a very significant deterrent.
Look at the extreme example of ‘gun-control’: Great Britian, where personal ownership of firearms is now outlawed.
According to http://www.stats.org/statswork/britgun.htm , Britain is NOT a safer place to be, after firearms were confiscated. That alone should be a good enough argument to the anti-gun crowd, but logic seems to evade them.
‘Gun-Control’ legislation is pure ‘feel-good’ politics at its worse. Much like the war on drugs, people have some bizarre notion that crime is caused by the lack of laws.
I am sure that some gang-banger no doubt thinks to himself ‘Gee, I will rob this liquor store THIS time, but lo! If those politicians enact some tough legislation, forget it!’. Garbage.
One day, they will ban crime, then we will all be safe, I suppose.
And yet Great Britain is still a FAR safer place to be than America, in terms of violent crime committed by guns, despite a fairly high overall crime rate. Another gun control success story, really.
All laws, I suppose, are by definition enacted on the law-abiding only.
It really doesn’t matter to me if murder and rape are outlawed or not, I will not commit either. But the fact that they are doesn’t seem to stop those bent on killing or raping.
The problem is, (IMHO), that laws have gotten away from those barebones laws which are neccessary to the functioning of society (ie, Don’t kill, don’t steal, trade fairly, etc) to the dizzying array of ‘for your own good’ laws we have today. I am sure that I am breaking some law, unknowingly, just sitting here.
Personally, I object to any sort of wasteful legislation (whether it be about guns or not). Registration has, so far, been shown to be ineffective in stopping crime in any sort of significant manner.
Conversely, we see projects that greatly improve the crime rates in places such as Richmond, Virginia, that DON’T require sweeping reforms in gun ownership.
To recap: We have one side supporting a solution that, so far, has NOT worked, and is guaranteed to be a hassle to people who have not done anything to warrant such a hassle… on the other side, we have people supporting a solution that DOES work (and wonderfully, I might add), and DOESN’T require massive reforms.
So why aren’t all the “Common Sense Gun Control” people flocking to that latter solution?
Anyway…
Any evidence that the same solutions would work equally well in an American society? Or should we play the “Pick your favorite country!” game again?
