I'm not participating until last in line if that is required. Also, I'm all for laws that say cops must entire gung ho when it's schools and kids, or get fired. Read too many reports and seen too many online videos where cops are cowardly in the face of gun fire, or just don't care unless it's their own getting shot. For the latter, see this:
I believed this as well until a discussion here a few years back. In some states (Louisiana was the example in that thread) it appears there is no requirement for a private seller who rents a table at a show to run background checks on gun purchases (presumably long arms):
Yes, see right there in the first paragraph where it says that it is really referring to private sellers "including those done at gun shows". That should make it obvious that the same law applies everywhere, including gun shows. Again, there is no gun show loophole, it is a made up term that describes a law that has no specific application to gun shows. Private party transfers do not require a background check (though there are some exceptions based on things like state laws and interstate transfers). Dealer sales require a background check. This is the case at gun shows. This is the case at gun stores. This is the case behind a Wendy's. There is no gun show loophole. There is no requirement for a private seller to run a background check if you come to his house and buy a gun either (depending again on jurisdiction, some states have different laws). There is no requirement for a dad to run a background check on his son before giving him a shotgun. There is nothing magical about a gun show that changes the law.
Treatment and access to mental health treatment has greatly improved. Indeed, we have people that even ensure that the homeless get their medication. The problems are a lot more complicated than access to mental health services. I do a lot of volunteer work for the homeless, and I am amazed at how many options there are out there. We have people that work to ensure that they get their medication, that they are taken to treatment and even will treat drug addiction with methadone (which isn't a cure all). With some of the younger homeless we see more of a willingness to seek and receive treatment. Often times the issue is a history of abuse. Also when I was in Ireland there were a lot of unaccounted for homeless or people that were living on the margins. It just wasn't advertised or discussed much. They did have access to medical care though.
Really? Because you can buy a gun off someone on Craigslist, meet them in a Wal-Mart parking lot and complete the sale. In fact, that's exactly what happened back in 2016 in Dallas when 5 policemen were ambushed and killed by Micah Johnson. And, with the gun laws passed by the Rupublicans last year, it's now even easier to get these weapons. Those laws enabled the Uvalde shooter to legally purchase AR-15 rifles at the age of 18. In theory, if I were to purchase a weapon at a gun show, the vendor is supposed to fill out paperwork, etc. but the reality is that this is not enforced hence the "loophole". There are a number of under the table transactions that occur at these shows which allow anyone to purchase a weapon if they have the cash.
Ok then - all 50 states (federal law) have to do a background check before you can sell a gun. Businesses and gun shows. Private party is exempt if they sell less than 3 per year.
In the 60s you could lock someone up indefinitely for mental illness. Politicians deemed that cruel and unusual punishment so they allowed them to be "free". Well obviously some had no way to take care of their relatives and so the homeless problem compounded. I think it's worth revisiting the discussion of putting families in charge of saying who should and shouldn't be outside the walls - obviously after professional eval. Maybe have levels of confinement though because not all mental illness require the same caution or treatment. For homeless: With men I put them in 3 categories: 1) Substance abuse 2) Mentally ill 3) Just wanna be free - don't want nobody telling me what to do. (I get it but why should I work to fund that) With women I see 3 categories: 1) Substance abuse 2) Mentally ill 3) Physical abuse. This is the saddest IMO because there are usually children involved who had no choice in their predicament. And with or without children - how bad was it that you chose homeless over staying. I just can't imagine.
no, I get that. But the difference IS the normal ability to "screen" the purchaser for a private sale is somewhat reduced if not eliminated in the gun show setting, where potentially dozens if not hundreds of potential purchasers (all unknown to the private seller sitting behind the rented table at the show) might come into contact with the seller. This is a very different situation, at least potentially, from a "private sale" between two individuals and only two individuals. I agree with you 100% the term "gun-show loophole" is a misnomer.
Don't see a need to keep AR guns personally, but if they can't get rid of them they should impose stricter rules around buying them. Raise the age limit, stronger background checks, and a specialized license requirement for them.
The point is there are so many weapons of mass destruction already out there that aren't even in the assault rifle category. I feel like I'm capable of taking out a room full of walking dead zombies. If I went crazy, I could do horrible things, but I don't think I'm going to go crazy. The law doesn't prevent me from selling my weapons to someone else who might go crazy. So either there's a massive change in interpretation to 2A and 14A and or revocation of 2A and the government actively destroys all guns, which is very difficult because every current law abiding citizen will wait for the raids on the suspected criminals before giving up their guns (myself included). This means a massive reinterpretation of 5A and 14A due process too. Because I think the other measures proposed (like waiting periods and background checks) help on the edges, but not the core. So it's either a massive change towards 2A, 5A, and 14A or the major change possible is detaining people who show signs of crazy more easily, so just going against 5A and 14A. Like if you're a disturbed 18 year old boy who is drawing violent drawings - you can't buy guns. In fact, you might have to be committed to the looney bin for a while just to make sure you're okay. Not committed to abuse you, but to help. And then there's the massive change proposed by extreme conservatives and become a war state, like Israel where paramilitary are everywhere, or the 3rd world extremes where private security and electrified barbwired fences are everywhere. I actually think we're heading this way over the next few decades. Everything else just is impotent and barely would help. So in my mind it's either drastically change gun rights, drastically change due process/freedom rights, or drastically change open society ideals and become 3rd world with the rich being protected.
There is something you can do to reduce these mass murderers without banning guns. 1. Require everyone who wants to purchase a gun to have a gun license that includes a mental health screen and background check, as well as references providing a signed affidavit they know the buyer to be of sound mind. 2. Make every gun manufactured registered with a code just like cars get a VIN, and then track ownership of guns just like cars. If someone transfers a gun without transferring ownership, and that gun is used in a crime, you know who sold the gun illegally.
There isn't anything you can do about what's out there. Just stop making more. Eventually most will end up in a collector's or sane fanatic's hands. One thing you can never do is go take them from people that legally bought and own them. That's crazy talk. People will not go down without a fight. We don't need to see 50 million mini-Wacos. I think you also need to reinstate more mental institutions. Some say it's a gun problem. Some say it's a mental problem. I think it's both. It's a huge problem that took centuries to get here and will take decades if not centuries to fix. But we have to start somewhere. Both side talk but nothing is ever done. If we continue to nothing about either then nothing will never change for the better.
That would help some. There's the ghost gun problems. There's also massive theft and burglary with a lot of filed off VINs. Good gun owners get their stuff jacked. Good gun owners also make mistakes and leave their guns to be easily jacked (I know cops this has happened to - freakin stupid).
You aren't going to eliminate the black market but what you can do is dry it up and reduce availability and increase the price of guns there - which will server as a deterrent.
Yes on Ghost gun issues but just because it is not a complete solution doesn't mean we shouldn't do it....we need to start making progress. And make Ghost gun laws EXTREMELY painful with massive sentences..... DD
That's good to hear but we still see many who aren't getting proper treatment. I brought this point up a few times but it's no coincidence that many of the people who have randomly attacked elderly Asians in recent years are people with mental health issues.
Yes. That is why it isn't a gun show loophole. It is a normal private party sale. It doesn't matter if it happens at a gun show or not, it has nothing to do with gun shows beyond sometimes private parties sell guns at gun shows because that is a location they know people are looking to buy guns. A licensed vendor is supposed to do a background check. A private party is not. That isn't a gun show loophole any more than a gun store owner selling something off the books is a gun store loophole. You can oppose private party transfers without a background check. Many states require that private party transfers be done through an FFL with a background check (California does).
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/there-is-no-magic-fix-for-school-shootings/ There Is No Magic Fix for School Shootings By THE EDITORS May 27, 2022 6:30 AM While discussing the atrocity in Uvalde from the White House on Tuesday evening, President Biden indulged himself in a cynical rhetorical game. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” he asked. “Why do we keep letting this happen?” This framing was disgraceful and counterproductive — implying as it did that all Americans secretly know how to fix this problem, but that only some of them wish to do so. Worse still, it was profoundly self-deceptive. Repeatedly, the president cast himself as a brave truth-teller who is willing to “stand up” against inertia. And yet, when one examines his actions more closely, one sees little but anger and smoke. Very little of what Democrats have proposed as “common sense” measures has anything to do with what happened in Uvalde. Nothing that the president is pushing for would touch the 450 million firearms that are already in private hands. In the states, his party’s leaders have begun to shy away from the draconian measures they insist America needs (even Beto O’Rourke, for all his inappropriate bluster, has backtracked on taking away so-called “assault weapons”). And, despite all the talk about the “gun lobby” and those intransigent, obstructionist Republicans, the Democrats’ failure to move a single gun-control bill since Biden took office has been the result not of the filibuster or of the magical NRA, but of its lacking even 50 votes to do so in the Senate. Perhaps — just perhaps — this is more complicated than it seems. Perhaps the consistent behavior of elected politicians over many years in a democracy reflects the fact that American voters are not actually clamoring for these measures. Certainly, it is more complicated than pointing to a particular sort of gun and shouting “ban!” As has now become customary in such attacks, the shooter in Uvalde used an AR-15, which he bought legally on his 18th birthday. It is true that, over the last decade, this particular model of rifle has become the weapon of choice for many deranged mass shooters, even as it has remained statistically insignificant within the broader landscape of crime. (Each year, more Americans are killed by hands and feet than by all rifles put together.) It is not true, by contrast, that to remove it from the shelves of America’s gun stores would do anything useful at all. The worst mass shooting on a college campus in all of U.S. history — the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech — was carried out with a couple of handguns. The attack at Columbine High School in 1999 occurred while the Biden-written “assault weapons ban” was in place. Even today, handguns are more commonly used in massacres than are rifles. Abhorrent as it is to contemplate such things, it is difficult to imagine that the shooter in Uvalde would have been less able to wreak havoc in a classroom full of unarmed people had he been in possession of a pistol, a revolver, or a shotgun. What should we do? There is, of course, no easy answer to this question. In the 23 years since Columbine, the chance of an American child being killed on a K–12 campus has been around one in a million — a fact that has made contingency planning almost impossible. But there are a few avenues that seem promising as first steps toward addressing the mess. We would encourage the careful consideration of “red flag” laws by states (but not at the federal level). Conversations held after mass shootings typically tend to focus on background checks, but, given that mass shooters almost always pass those checks, this represents a chronic misallocation of effort. Far too often, mass murderers convey obvious warning signs to those around them, even though they have neither the established criminal records nor diagnosed mental-health problems that would show up when trying to buy a gun from a stranger. We are sympathetic to fears that “red flag” provisions could be abused, but we would note that states such as Florida have shown that it is possible to balance effective interventions with the rigorous due-process protections to which all Americans are entitled. Second, we would recommend that states bring their age-of-majority rules into harmony. There is no obvious reason why non-enlisted Americans should be able to buy a handgun at age 21 but to buy long guns at age 18, and if there is solid evidence that raising the age of the latter will help prevent mass murders, states should seriously consider doing so (as Florida did in 2018), or at least imposing more requirements — such as waiting periods and affirmative parental consent — in order for those under age 21 to purchase and carry firearms. Several perpetrators of recent massacres were 18-year-old males who purchased rifles at a store. Conservatives correctly complain that none of the proposals that gun-control activists tend to offer seem tailored to the problem they are hoping to address. This one would be, and it would pass constitutional muster. Finally, we ought to make it tougher for madmen to gain access to our schools. Many of America’s private schools are hardened against attack, and it would not break the bank to bring public schools into line. At present, this country’s 90,000 or so public-school districts are sitting on an astonishing $113 billion of federal Covid-19 relief money, which, per the Wall Street Journal, they are desperately “struggling to spend.” Should it wish to, Congress could repurpose just 10 percent of that money for school security and instantly hand every public school in the United States $120,000 with which to make improvements. Beyond that, we must reiterate that the Second Amendment protects a foundational individual right and that, however heartbreaking the behavior of their heinous criminals might be, free countries do not wantonly limit foundational individual rights that are, in well over 99 percent of cases, exercised by law-abiding citizens. The right to bear arms is not only woven into our federal Constitution; it is woven into 45 of the 50 state constitutions, and it enjoys enormous support across the country. This did not happen by accident, but because history has shown that the private ownership of arms is inextricable from the maintenance of ordered liberty. It still is.
Yes there is no magical fix to stopping all mass shootings. We could ban all firearms today and there still be mass shootings. This again goes to the idea that because we can't stop everything we shouldn't do anything. If that was the case then let's life drunk driving laws because I'm very certain there will be plenty of people driving drunk this weekend. Also I will continue to repeat. Freedom doesn't exist without responsiblity. So many keep on talking about "freedom" and "rights" but a society that we live in constant fear isn't free. The Constitution isn't a suicide pact but recognizes that individual rights exist within a larger social framework.
