For the sake of discussion, let's try and post reasonable gun control laws that (at least at face value) both sides would agree to. I'll start: If anyone ILLEGALLY provides a gun to someone and that gun is then used in a crime (regardless of how many times it has changed hands), the provider of the gun will face the same punishment as the perpetrator. Clearly there may be more to it than this, but on the surface, isn't this something both sides could agree to?
I would like mandatory safety courses for gun ownership. It would reduce the accidental deaths, teach a greater respect for the guns, and result in far fewer gun deaths. It may not prevent all of the mass shootings, but it might help reduce some. The mass shootings are big in the media but nowhere near the leading cause of gun deaths in this nation. I would also like to make some restructuring of existing gun laws. I'm not even sure about how to do all of them. So the 10 day waiting period makes perfect sense for someone in danger of committing suicide or killing someone out of anger. But if I already own 4 guns and saw a perfect 5th gun for my collection waiting 10 days wouldn't keep me from using one of the 4 I already own for suicide or murder. So it doesn't really serve a purpose in that instance. Though I'm not sure how to change it. In the end I like the 10 day wait period and would wait the extra 10 days just so the first time buyer also has to wait. It would be nice if anyone passing a gun control law also had to take the safety course so they would at least understand a bit more about the area they are trying to regulate.
no, I don't think so. One might "illegally" give a gun to someone and be breaking a trivial and needless law. In NYS, for example, one cannot loan ("transfer") a rifle to someone without going to transfer-of-possession paperwork. https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/universal-background-checks-in-new-york/ This is a law that is routinely ignored. People loan firearms for hunting all the time. So one might ignore that transfer/background check requirement, loan a hunting rifle to a friend, who then unintentionally shoots someone in a hunting accident. The hunting accident results in a criminal charge but was clearly accidental. Why should the owner of the rifle face the same punishment as the "perpetrator"? At most I would hold the person who "illegally" transferred/loaned the rifle accountable for that part of the firearms law.
If Joe Manchin won't even vote to pass the Joe Manchin Bill in the Senate than I have no hopes for anything to happen in regards to gun laws. The American electorate or the ruling minority has already made the decision that gun deaths at a rate that is endemic is perfectly acceptable. If Sandy Hook isn't enough to at least do something surface level than nothing will move these people. We need to just call it what it is... a Republican Death Cult.
Geez, no. I'll preamble by saying I'm not a reasonable gun control person, I want to abolish the second amendment. But, in your suggestion, if I give a handgun to the 12 year old next door (which would be illegal), then his dad found out and confiscated the gun from him and turned it into police, the police then sell it as surplus to a bulk buyer who resells to a local shop, and then the shop sells it to a legal gun owner but that owner's house was robbed and the gun taken from him, and the thief then robbed a liquor store with it and killed the cashier, I would then be charged with murder? Sure, giving a pistol to a kid who isn't even my family is stupid and grossly negligent, I could be considered to have recklessly endangered the lives of others by doing that, but that gun has passed through so many hands, and has been effectively laundered through government agencies and legal owners, and then been subject to subsequent crimes that I don't see how you can say I realistically had anything to do with the ultimate crime. If illegally providing someone with a gun is already illegal, just prosecute that crime. If the potential penalties are inadequate, make them bigger. Though I'll say (again, because I seem to say it a lot) people won't be deterred by the severity of the punishment but by the certainty of being caught. So, if we want to curb illegal transfer of guns, I think the better solution is a registry that tracks ownership like a car title (we can make it blockchain to be hip to the new tech). That increases the chance of being caught at illegal provisioning without having to increase penalties.
Annual gun licensing checks for a start. Revoke gun licenses for those who are diagnosed mentally ill, or being treated for any type depression or mental illness. Revoke gun licenses for those who are negligent in safeguarding their guns and let them end up in the hands of their children. Make it a felony for anyone caught with a gun that is unlicensed. That could be a start, and responsible gun owners shouldn't have a problem with doing that. You could also add in drunk driving, domestic abuse, gang affiliation, hate group affiliation, child abuse, assault, drug charges, and other reasons to revoke a license. That should at least help eliminate some of the more violent and law breaking types who put others or themselves at risk. Use the money collected to fund law enforcement and gun safety programs.
The simple answer is that the person loaning out the hunting rifle should obey the laws. But, as I wrote, "clearly there may be more to it than this" and would involve more than the simple sentence I wrote.
You're going to an extreme example. As I wrote "clearly there may be more to it than this", so things would need to be clarified. In your example the clarification could be "once the police take possession of a gun, original ownership for that gun reverts to the police".
will assume that over means obeyed. The NY S.A.F.E. Act put this requirement into place (and many others), and this requirement is not practically possible to comply with. There are (a) not enough gun dealers in the state to do the background checks and (b) among the few gun dealers that are still in business, only a FRACTION of them are willing to do the background checks--and in those cases hike the fee up sometimes to $50 per background check. The law was put into place with absolutely no research into how it would be implemented--or if it could be implemented at all. This was also the case with several other of the restrictions put into law by the S.A.F.E. Act. So many sections of the law are simply disregarded by gun owners, and also disregarded by law enforcement who have gone on record as saying they will not enforce parts of the law. This latter group includes many county sheriffs as well as the New York State Police. sure
was going to add these links about law enforcement not enforcing certain aspects of the law: State police won’t enforce SAFE Act’s seven-bullet rule https://dailygazette.com/2014/03/29/0329_safeact/ NY sheriffs: We won't enforce gun laws, magazine limits https://www.police1.com/chiefs-sher...ce-gun-laws-magazine-limits-jb3Zi9gr8h0oNWVD/
Sure, it's extreme. You go to the extreme to test the wisdom of the idea. Maybe you can make exceptions to head off anticipated misapplications of the law, but then there will be all the unanticipated applications. I don't think this idea is a winner. In the end, you're asking to hold people accountable for the actions of other people they cannot control. I think that's an injustice, which I tried to illustrate by some example. Yeah, it might suck that people are negligent in the way they pass around guns, but I don't think this is a solution.
But, one can go to extremes on essentially every law to find an end case(s) where the law would cause a problem(s).
No half measures here bruh. Gotta be for getting rid of all guns or against it. The half measures aren't any more politically tenable then the full measure.
People can easily get guns in the hood Especially in New York or Chicago remember Juice was right Just wokesters never saw this movie
this piece makes a point similar to what I said above about the NY S.A.F.E. Act https://reason.com/2022/05/17/why-background-checks-do-not-stymie-mass-shooters/ Why Background Checks Do Not Stymie Mass Shooters by Jacob Sullum 5.17.2022 2:15 PM A background check did not faze the man charged with murdering 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store on Saturday. The reason for that is straightforward: The shooter passed the background check that was completed when he bought the rifle used in the attack from a federally licensed dealer in Endicott, New York, because he did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record. That is typically true of mass shooters. According to a recent National Institute of Justice (NIJ) report on public mass shootings from 1966 through 2019, 77 percent of the perpetrators bought guns legally. In some cases, teenagers or young adults obtained guns from their families. Just 13 percent of mass shooters obtained firearms through illegal transactions. In other words, background checks would have been no obstacle in 87 percent of the cases. The Biden administration nevertheless "renewed its calls" to "expand national background checks in the wake of the attack in Buffalo," The New York Times reports, "as it has done time and again after mass shootings." Speaking to reporters today during President Joe Biden's trip to Buffalo, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, "We're going to continue to call on Congress to expand background checks." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) likewise urged "passage of federal legislation to expand gun background checks, which she said was a 'huge priority' for Democrats." The expansion that Jean-Pierre and Pelosi have in mind would notionally require background checks for all firearm transfers, meaning that anyone trying to sell a gun would have to complete the transaction through a federally licensed dealer. I say "notionally" because massive noncompliance with similar requirements at the state level suggests that a federal law would be widely flouted and impossible to enforce. A would-be mass murderer with a disqualifying record therefore would not have much trouble finding someone willing to part with one of the country's 450 million or so firearms without bothering to seek out a licensed dealer so a background check could be conducted. And judging from the NIJ's data, only a small minority of perpetrators would need to evade background checks to begin with. New York is one of the states that require "universal background checks." Even with perfect compliance, such laws cannot possibly make a difference for the vast majority of mass shooters, as illustrated by the Buffalo attack and many other notorious cases. Nor do those laws seem to have an impact on gun homicides in general, a much larger category of crime. A 2019 study found that California's 1991 expansion of background checks "was not associated with a net change in the firearm homicide rate over the ensuing 10 years." A New York Times story about the NIJ study illustrates the sort of magical thinking that is required to believe that expanding background-check requirements is an effective way to prevent mass shootings. After explaining why background checks do not stymie the perpetrators of such crimes, the Times paraphrases a gun control activist who "said the only way to stop mass killings was to enact strengthened universal federal background checks, to compensate for the wide variation in state and local laws." The problem is not a lack of uniformity; it is the inherent limitations of background-check requirements. Speaking of magical thinking, Democrats predictably latched onto the Buffalo massacre as a pretext to once again demand a renewed and expanded federal "assault weapon" ban. Never mind that New York has such a law, which demonstrably did not prevent or mitigatethis mass shooting. Given the arbitrary distinctions drawn by such bans, they cannot reasonably be expected to have any meaningful effect on such crimes. According to the NIJ report, 77 percent of the mass shooters used handguns. A quarter of the perpetrators used what the NIJ describes as "assault rifles," a category that is defined based on functionally unimportant characteristics. While a rifle with "military-style" features such as a folding stock, a pistol grip, or a threaded barrel counts as an "assault weapon" in New York, for example, removing those features makes the gun legal, even though it still fires the same ammunition at the same rate with the same muzzle velocity. Even if every gun that politicians classify as an "assault weapon" disappeared tomorrow, mass shooters would have plenty of equally lethal alternatives.
With technological advances, the differences between types of firearms have changed over the decades. The varying laws in different states and dealing with different types of guns are too complicated. This is a similar criticism I have for drug laws in this country. We need better standardization.
I think there are ways to make a background check system like that required in New York less "useless." For example, if New York State was really serious about having people conduct background checks on their friends, acquaintances, colleagues, etc., to whom they might temporarily loan or transfer a firearm, some sort of FREE online or telephone-based system could be implemented. Scenario: you want to loan and/or sell a firearm to Joe Blow. You go to your computer; log on to the background check system's website; and enter in Joe Blow's information on a secure page. Hit "submit" and the background check system gives you an approval (or disapproval) within 30 seconds, along with a number that you record and/or some sort of report that you are required to print out or save to your computer/smartphone. This basically would replicate what a licensed gun dealer does for customers in a gun shop. That would be a system that would be (a) easy to use for most gun owners, (b) not financially problematic every time a gun owner wishes to loan or sell a gun, and (c) accessible and convenient to virtually EVERYONE in a way that a requirement to go to a gun shop during business hours for a background check is not.
